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Why I left.

06 Saturday Jan 2018

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I’ve been meaning to write this blog for a while; it seems important to note the reason why I finally left; especially because I wrote a blog about few years ago talking about why I stayed.

Domestic abuse and violence is something that we rarely talk about. It’s kept hidden by both the perpetrator and also the victim, as well as family members and friends who know about it. It’s a shameful secret that feels in no one’s interests to uncover. The abuser will go to extraordinary lengths to hide it and the abused is so scared of the consequences in terms of further abuse, of telling people that they often become complicit in covering up and excusing their abuse. That’s what I did; I explained away the bruises through a variety of accidents that even to the most naive listener must have seemed less and less plausible; tripping down the stairs; walking into a door; shutting my leg in a car door you name the accident, I’d probably used it as an excuse to explain away the broken nose, the cuts and the times I winced in pain from hidden injuries.

And no one ever really questioned it. Like no one ever questioned the way I no longer could come and go as I pleased or the way I never had any cash. My abuser had an excuse for everything; I couldn’t be trusted with money, I’d lost my purse, I would disappear for hours with the car if I went out alone. He even picked my clothes out for me on a daily basis. I had to wear whatever he wanted me to, even if it was filthy or inappropriate for the day ahead. I wore it or I was punished. And punishment could take many forms.

If I was lucky it would just be a punch to the side of the head. There were times when I was kicked down the stairs to our flat, beaten with the hoover pipe in the stomach whilst pregnant. Others when he would act as if everything was OK, but I knew it wasn’t. The tension in the air would be palpable. He would just be waiting for the time when I least expected it, to pounce; to dish out whatever form of punishment he felt I deserved that day. It might be as simple as withholding the cash for sanitary products so that I was forced to roll up wads of tissue into makeshift sanitary towels. Anything really to make me feel so humiliated and grateful when he showed a tiny sliver of humanity to me when he eventually gave me the money to buy some tampons.

Other times the punishment might be to lock me out of the house half naked when there was snow outside; getting enjoyment from my begging to be let in.

Sometimes I didn’t need to actually do anything to have a storm of torture unleashed on me. I could have done everything asked of me and think that everything was fine. I’d trod on eggshells all day and managed to not break any of them, but someone would piss him off in the pub and so I’d have to pay the price for some perceived slight. Sometimes I would know it was coming, so I’d run myself ragged trying to stop what in reality was inevitable; I’d bend over backwards to be perfect, to do the right thing that would shift his mindset and stop the hell that I could feel was intended for me when we got home, but it would very rarely work. I would be forced to leave the pub with him knowing that the beating was coming. Preparing myself for it. Being ready.

Other times it would come from absolutely nowhere. I might be cooking dinner, and he’d come into the kitchen and decide that I was cooking wrong and the next thing I’d know the pot of potatoes cooking on the stove would be flying at my head, boiling water and all.

And there was never any apology. Never even any acceptance that he had done anything; let alone done anything wrong. He broke my nose twice and would ask the next day how it happened. Denying any knowledge when I tried to remind him that he’d punched me; saying if he’d done that I’d have worse injuries than a black eye or a broken nose or fingers.

He also abused me sexually. In ways that 16 years later I am too full of shame and disgust to speak about publicly.

And yet despite all this I still thought I loved him. That he loved me. Somehow I deserved this. And in reality he was all I had. He had isolated me from all of the people who could have helped me. Either by stopping me seeing them or by turning their thoughts about me against me. He continually told people what a terrible person I was, how untrustworthy and sneaky I was and eventually they believed him.

He would play little mind games with me. He would give me money to buy things in a pub full of people and then take it back when no one was looking. He’d then berate me for asking for money for baby food or nappies; getting all the people in the pub to agree they’d seen him give me money. “What had I spent it on? More drugs? Fucking junkie bitch.” Other peoples perceptions of me changed. They saw him as a good man trying to help someone who just abused his good nature.

And I put up with it. I put up with the physical abuse and the sexual abuse. Its not that I didn’t try to stop it; however anytime I tried to seek help it didn’t end up being help at all. Like the time I called the police after he had pushed a full filing cabinet down the stairs on top of me and the officer turned up and saw that I was a raging mess and couldn’t talk coherently due to fear and panic. And my abuser, who was now calm and friendly explained that I was crazy; a drug addict who had called the police for attention, and in the face of an officer of the law who was clearly unsympathetic and thought the worst, I couldn’t speak up. I couldn’t articulate in a rational way the way I was being treated. I just kept raging that he tried to kill me and the police needed to do something. So the police officer helped to carry the filing cabinet back up the stairs and told me to calm down else he’d arrest me. And then he left. He left me with the man who’d tried to kill me. He left me to face the wrath of a mad man.

Or there was the time that I told a friend and they told me to stop taking drugs and it would be OK. Only I knew this wasn’t about drugs. It was about control and power and I had none. Or the time I contacted Women’s Aid and all they did was give me a key worker who wanted to meet once a week for a chat, something that’s difficult to do when your abuser won’t let you go anywhere without them.

And when I had the baby that my abuser had tried to ensure would never be born; had tried to kick out of my stomach when I was 20 weeks pregnant. The baby that not once had he ever acknowledged or cared about or wanted. Despite this, he managed to keep up the show that he cared by organising a limousine to pick me up from the hospital. So that everyone told me how lucky I was to have a partner who cared so much.

The violence escalated. In ways I’d never imagined. He’d beat me whilst I was breastfeeding the baby. He put a cigarette out on my chest whilst I was breastfeeding so that the ember dropped onto my sons eyelid and burnt him. And it was around that time that he started to strangle me.

He’d strangle me whilst I was holding the baby; something would annoy him and he’d grab my throat and he would squeeze, sometimes stopping just long enough to allow me to remain conscious; occasionally until I collapsed completely. And I’d wake up in a heap on the floor with my son screaming underneath me and it was after a time that this happened that I had an epiphany. I had been strangled, beaten and abused until I didn’t know what to do and he had left the house to go to the pub. I walked into the kitchen and I saw a small but very sharp knife and I knew I was going to kill him; it wasn’t even a decision I made. It was just an acknowledgement of a fact.

Goodness knows why it took so long to happen but I suddenly realised that this relationship was heading only one way; he was going to kill me or I was going to kill him. And I wouldn’t be killing him in the heat of the moment; no, I was going to wait until he was passed out drunk and I was going to push this knife into his chest, into his heart. And I was going to repeat it; time and time again until he was dead. More than dead. Until the rage I felt from his continual abuse subsided.

And so that’s why I left. Something about that moment of clarity changed me somewhere deep inside. It terrified me. I was calmly and seriously considering murder and I actually could see myself doing it. And it wouldn’t be self defence; not in the conventional sense; I wouldn’t be doing it to protect myself in the heat of the moment. It would be planned and cold blooded and it would be self defence but only to stop him killing me; either by design or by accident, at some undefined point in the future it was going to happen. Because in that moment I knew with certainty that he would kill me if I didn’t kill him first and I wasn’t going to let that happen.

And it took many more months to get away from him. It took planning and returning to him once I’d left and it took every ounce of my depleted strength to finally break away. And the only reason I left was because it I was terrified. Not of what he would do to me, because I’d accepted my own death a long time before that, but because I was terrified of the person that he had turned me into. I was terrified that I could and would commit murder. That he had made me want to do this;I didn’t recognise the person that I had become. So that’s why I left; not to protect myself from the violence, but because I was terrified of what I’d become capable of.

My story into abuse can be read here: https://themadnessthatismylife.com/2015/01/23/imperceptible/

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Temporary release.

16 Saturday Dec 2017

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Sometimes, when life is going swimmingly and everything is all right with the world I struggle to understand why anyone takes drugs. I especially cannot imagine why anyone who has been to hell and back through addiction would ever pick them back up again. You know what it’s like both sides of the line and you know that it is infinitly better on the drug free side.

And then something will happen, it may be something catastrophic, or it might be one small thing, that, pulled on top of all the other small things just makes you forget the negatives. And you remember why. It’s like a switch in the brain that wipes the times you just wanted to die because you’d had enough of addiction, the craving, of being sick and tired. It erases the feelings of withdrawal and the constant nagging that used to sit in your gut wondering where you were going to get your next hit from, and it is like someone got a highlighter pen, or hit “control+B” to emboldened only the memories of the good parts and greyed out the bad.

You remember the way that the skin pushed against the tip of the needle as you gently pushed it against the vein underneath. The push of resistance before it pierces the life of you. You remember the colour and rush of the blood as it forms a cyclone as you hit the right spot, drawing it into the barrel of the syringe. It’s almost branded on your brain; the feeling of anticipation as you move to push back plunger. As you turn the tide of the blood and begin to push the golden brown liquid into your body. Knowing, as only an addict can know the nothingness that will inevitably, slowly, if only temporarily, come.

Because every addict I’ve ever known has been someone who felt too deeply; who struggles to manage their own emotions. That’s one of the reasons they ended up addicted. The pull of absolution promised by the release from the struggles of life, is sometimes more than they can bear. So they turn back to the needle, to the quietness that they crave. To the almost irresistible feeling of momentary peace.

How many people can honestly say that they’ve never just wanted the world to go away and leave them the hell alone?

To know that you can not feel confused, scared, an emotional and physical wreck, and instead feel nothing is a hard knowledge to live with, because who wouldn’t, addict or not, occasionally just want release from all the pain stress and heartbreak of real life. As an addict you know better than anyone that that release is available. And that, unlike a lot of other solutions, it works. Once you know it’s possible, there’s nothing stopping you apart from fear of going back to addiction. And when you feel confused enough to be considering using, you probably aren’t in the right frame of mind to think that far ahead. You forget that one hit is too many and at the same time will never be enough.

So occasionally, not using, even after years of recovery, can be a life or death battle. And sometimes people don’t win it.

I’ve always been lucky enough to have people to pull me back from the brink. Who I can turn to to unload before I get to the stage that I’ve wiped out the memories of addiction and replaced them with thoughts of oblivion. And I’ve always managed to speak to them before I walked off the edge. Not everyone is that blessed.

So before you judge someone for relapsing, for turning back to drugs and all the turmoil that ensues, imagine that at your very lowest; if someone offered you a temporary release from all your problems, would you consider it? If only momentarily?

Open letter to an addict.

01 Monday Jun 2015

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letterI’ve been asked to write to you; to say something that will make you realise the error of your ways and to stop the madness, the craziness that is your world.

I can’t though. What they don’t realise is that there is nothing that I can say that will do that. There is nothing anyone can say, that in a moment will flip a switch to turn off the craving, the need for that drug or that drink. It doesn’t work like that. If only it did. If it did you would likely have stopped years ago. Perhaps you would never have started. Who knows.

What I do know is that the world of an addict is tumultuous. People, and by people I mean non addicts, those “normal people” we are supposed to strive to be,  would like to think it is one of misery and of desperation. There is no denying that is true, but it is also a world which is exciting and slightly or sometimes a lot, dangerous. A world where rules are there to be broken and adrenaline flows in abundance. There is a certain attraction in the lifestyle, in fitting in where many wouldn’t, you can be someone that you couldn’t be in the “normal” world; respected, strong. It is not always grey in the world of an addict and it is important to remember that. To deny it would be to deny the truth.
In a world that you’ve never completely felt at ease in, you have, as an addict, carved a niche, a place where expectations are few, or at least are ones that you can live up to. If you don’t live up to anyone’s expectations you have an excuse, a reason; what do they expect? They know you have problems don’t they? They shouldn’t expect so much from you.

So next let’s think about your children and your family. If you loved them you would stop. If you cared enough it would be easy. Every addict has been told it many many times. What they don’t realise is that in some way this is the only way you can be a parent. The only way you can get through the moments where you feel helpless and useless. That the drugs have nothing to do with you loving your children or otherwise, and much more to do with the fact that you need them to even function as a human let alone as a parent. The drugs or drink are what allow you do as much as you are doing. And you are doing your best aren’t you?

And the criminal acts? They are just necessities in the lifestyle of an addict. How the hell else are you going to earn the money you require to feed the hunger of your addiction? What do people expect from you? That constant ache that grumbles constantly lest you forget that soon it will need more fuel. It’s constant demanding to be fed. It’s like a constant voice in your ear, whispering at you incessantly, warning you of the consequences if you fail to fulfil it.

But I want to tell you this: it can be done; that switch is there, it’s just not possible for anyone else to flip it for you. You have to find it yourself. And right now that might feel like a fumble in the dark, but hopefully, you will find it. Actually, in some cases it is more like a dimmer switch that slowly turns off, gradually you will realise that there is another way to live. A way that is more than survival, and perhaps a little bit more like living.

And life can be exciting in different ways. You can get an adrenaline rush from the simple act of being able to lay still on your bed without the incessant chatter of your addiction whispering in your ear. You can wake up and realise that you didn’t think about drink or drugs all of yesterday and find yourself smiling that you went a day without thinking of it.

And you can learn a whole new side to your children. A side you never knew existed due to your previous unstable state. You can see the pleasure in their face when you lay in bed in the morning, snuggling up to them rather than making excuses to leave, so that you can feed the hunger of the addiction. You can get to know them again, on different, fairer terms. You can love them for the amazing people they are rather than just because they are your children.  And it may take a long time to build the bridges that you didn’t even realise you had burned, but it will be worth it. Every moment.

And perhaps one day you will know the pleasure of paying a bill with your own hard earned cash. Not stealing it, not begging for it or borrowing. The feeling of doing something so mundane and simple that you are surprised to realise that you are doing something that those “normal” people do. It may sound stupid to you right now, but maybe not, but it’s true, one day it will be an achievement.

The main thing I want you to know is that you can do it. You and only you can change the path of your life. It won’t be easy, and it will not be a straight path. More likely, it will be hilly, and rocky and the road will not be straight, but there are many routes along it that you can take, there is not just one road to follow, you can do it your way.  And you can make it. I know you can. Because if I can make it, the pathetic person that I had become, you can make it. Don’t expect it to be easy. Nothing worth it ever is; remember the things you’ve had to do to feed your addiction, it wasn’t always easy, but you did it anyway. All you need to do is put one foot in front of the other and grasp every helping hand on the way.

Imperceptibly insidious.

23 Friday Jan 2015

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It starts off as something good. It’s nigh on perfect. The phoning to check you got home safely, asking if you have enough money, wanting to spend every waking moment together. All proof, as if you need it, that they care, this might even be “it”

At some undefinable point the balance shifts. It’s almost imperceptible. The phone call you used to get to check that you got home safely changes. The question “are you home ok?” Changes to “are you home?”, that in turn changes to “where are you?” Or “why aren’t you home?” Almost the same words, completely different question.

You don’t notice. It’s imperceptible.

Their concern that you have enough cash, might somehow turn into “how much money do you have?”, and then it may turn one of two ways; either asking what you have done with your money, or possibly requests to borrow cash, most likely small amounts at first, perhaps getting larger. There may be believable excuses as to why they need this money, the excuses may be increasingly unbelievable, as may the excuses they give for failing to pay you back. It doesn’t really matter, you love them, you can’t say no. Anyway, if you say no they may not ever pay you back the money, and you can’t afford to lose that. Or you don’t want to say no. You love them.

At first you spend all your time together. It’s intense, you can’t stand being apart. You cancel plans with friends and family because you’d rather spend time together, it’s a choice you make freely. Gradually you realise you haven’t seen friends for a while. You want to show off this new person in your life, show off the perfectness of it. You make plans. You meet with friends, your friends and family may be just as enthralled by your new relationship, they may be as charmed as you are. Your partner, on the other hand, may not be as enthralled by them. They pick up on things which seemed perfectly innocent to you and with the twist they put on them, things that family or friends say seem like insults and slights. You may begin to think perhaps your friends aren’t as good as you thought, or maybe you don’t believe it; either way the amount of hassle you have to go through to see friends or family means that you start to not bother. After all you have each other, that’s all you need. It is worth it. The other person is like an addiction, all you need.

Imperceptibly, your relationship with even your closest friends has changed.

One day, you realise that you are not your own person. Your world revolves around this other person. They are the sun to your earth, only like the sun, you only see the light occasionally. Unlike the sun, there is no way of predicting when that will be, or how long it will stay.

They may or may not become physically or sexually violent with you. It doesn’t matter; you suddenly realise you are walking on egg shells around this person. Your happiness, indeed your entire state of mind and self esteem depends entirely on them and the mood they may or may not be in. It was insidious. You can’t pin point a moment in time. It just happened, along the way, without you realising. Seemingly harmless, but ultimately cruel, and harmful. And because of the insidious nature of it, you have lost the resources (money, friends, family, self esteem), that you need to escape.

That’s when you need support the most, and somehow, the abuser has managed to remove every support mechanism from you. You are literally isolated; socially and emotionally. Every escape route blocked and secured with amazing vigilance by the abuser. You probably feel like you don’t deserve to be treated any better. That without this person you are alone. They may have even convinced you that this is your fault, that there is something wrong with you.

This is why I think it’s so important to discuss abuse. I have seen friends of mine getting dragged into unhealthy relationships and I always try to broach the subject with them. It’s a difficult conversation to have and I’ve lost a few friends afterwards, but hopefully, when the time comes that they find themselves creeping around on eggshells not knowing where to turn, they will remember that conversation and it may give them a route out. Hopefully they will know that no matter how long ago I last saw them, no matter what has happened in between, they can reach out to me for help. There will be no judgement. There should be no shame. At the very least I know that I have tried, I have tried to leave them a door to escape from, and sometimes that is all that we can do.

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Significant insignificance.

10 Wednesday Dec 2014

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I’m feeling fairly reflective this evening. I’ve been studying Trauma on my course and it makes you realise how fragile life is. Life as you currently know it anyhow. One minute you could be driving along worrying that you are late for work, the next you could be dead, be it from an accident or a brain haemorrhage or a heart attack. It really can be that quick. Alive. Dead.

In the case of a road accident, you could argue that being late was the cause. Because if you were on time something different would have happened maybe, maybe not, but one thing I do know is that life is full of moments which at the time you may not even pay attention to, and yet, with the power of hindsight or to someone else it is huge.

You may not even realise that it happened, there may be someone who is walking around right now, whose life you have massively impacted upon and yet you don’t even know it. The moment was so insignificant to you that you don’t even realise that it happened and yet to the other person it had huge significance, good or bad. Insignificant significances.

There are certainly people in my life who have done this for me, who have shown me an unwarranted, but absolutely needed bit of kindness that has been a turning point in my life. In the very least they have made me think differently about my life.

An example of this was when I was about 22. I was a single parent, who had just got out of a really abusive relationship and was attempting, for the first time, to cope on my own. Oh, and did I mention that I also had a huge heroin addiction? I weighed 6 stone (I’m 170cm tall) and I felt like I was going to die. Not just from the addiction, but just because life was supremely tough. I was living in a bedsit in a women’s refuge, I had no friends and I was also withdrawing.

I’d gone into town to see if I could see anyone to get some gear from or to shoplift to earn some money, but I was having no luck and I wanted to die. I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. I was cold, I hadn’t eaten for 2 days, mostly because I’d forgotten to, but also because I was skint and feeding the baby came first.

And then I saw him approach me. I was standing in the local shopping centre, feeling desperate and instead of avoiding me, he came up to me. He asked if I was ok, and I nodded yes. He asked me if I wanted to sit down on the bench with him for a bit as I looked ill. So I sat down and we chatted for a bit. He asked me when I last ate and I told him I couldn’t remember. He told me to wait there, and he disappeared, only to reappear 3 minutes later with a can of coke and some chocolate for me to eat. Then said he had to go and left.

This good Samaritan significantly changed my life that day. I will never forget him. He showed me a bit of kindness when I desperately needed it. He may have even saved my life. His actions have become something that I have tried to live by; if I can help someone else then I should. It doesn’t take a lot, words of encouragement, a smile, a car of chocolate and a can of coke. All can be insignificant things which change the course of someones
world. Insignificant significances.