A year ‘free’

Today marks the day that I never ever thought would be a reality…. I left my abusive ex a year ago today.

At the time I didn’t know I was leaving for good, I had every intention of going back, but I desperately needed a rest from the craziness that had become my life for the last decade. I had ‘earned’ my weekend away – using my body to ‘prove’ I loved him.

I had realised by this point how bad a position I was in….. It had taken me close to a year to accept it, and in honesty, living blind was soooooo much easier.

A note here about trauma bonding ….. For all of you who wonder ‘why on earth do people stay in abusive relationships’ do your research – trauma bonding is real and it’s like a drug. You get hooked to the abuse cycle and just like any other addict you end up powerless. I had accepted that this was my life, that abuse was all I deserved. It was what I knew, it had become my normal…. I couldn’t imagine my life without it.

So…… A year ago today, I finished work and got on a bus, then a train to my friends house. I didn’t know I was leaving everything I had come to know. Then whilst I was away I found the strength to not go back….. My ex was being abusive via message and for possibly the thousandth time told me he was done.

Usually I would have done anything to be ‘loved’ again. Nothing was off the table by this point, I had slept like a dog outside the door, I had begged, pleaded, promised to be better, do better.

This time was different, I had finally reached the end of myself….. I simply couldn’t do it anymore….. I knew that if I went back that I was signing my own death warrant – not to say he was going to kill me, I still don’t believe he ever would have done…… A dead play thing is no fun after all. But I was worried about what I would do to myself.

So ….. I did the hardest thing I have ever done and made the choice to not return. To seek out a bed in a refuge. To leave EVERYTHING behind. For me the most heart wrenching part of this was leaving my step daughter who I had spent the last decade raising – but I was no good to her anymore …… There was nothing of me left.

A year ago today I made my bid for freedom.

What I didn’t realise at the time was just how hard that freedom was going to be. I plunged at speed back in to an eating disorder that I thought I had left behind a long time ago, self harm to extreme levels and just general self destruct.

It has been a rough year. I am NOT a victory story…… Yet.

A year on and I am sat here a truly broken human. More so than I have ever been in my life. I have no clue who I am anymore, that was erased entirely by the abuse I suffered.

BUT ….. I am no longer subject to daily emotional torment, periodic physical abuse and frequent sexual attacks.

I haven’t truly found my ‘freedom’ yet….. But I have some hope that I will at some point. I have amazing support at the refuge where I currently live. I can safely say that if it had not been for that support then I would have been dead by now at my own hands.

I may be literally half the person I was a year ago thanks to my eating disorder, I may have new scars from self harm, I may have been in hospital more times than I dare admit because of overdoses…… BUT I am still going…..

Sometimes we have to truly shatter into a million pieces before we can start to rebuild. I won’t lie to you…. That is exactly what I have spent a year doing now. But I declare officially that I am done….. Done letting my past ruin my now. My past has now claimed another year of my life….. I can’t allow it to take any more years.

Time to put on the big girl pants and start trying to live again….. I am done merely surviving – I need to heal, I need to feel it and I need to move on.

I am hoping that this blog will be a snapshot of my journey to recovering….. Hope for others where I know it is so so so so easy to lose all hope.

Welcome to my journey ….. I hope the ride doesn’t cause too much travel sickness!

Htlp x

My life….

I wanted to give you all a brief little insight into how I got to where I am today…. I think it’s important. I will no doubt cover things in more detail in time but here goes…..

Childhood

I was born to young and struggling parents. Their second child, first girl. I was not wanted, and blamed from birth for numerous things. I was born the scapegoat of the family – something that has never changed. Aged 3 my father went to prison and social services became involved in our lives for a few years. My mother did everything in her power to evict them. She didn’t like the stigma – she didn’t care about the risk to us as kids, but about the stigma.

My father eventually came back out, my mother bullied social services into withdrawing and life became my ‘normal’. For me this involved emotional abuse amongst other things from my parents. Bullying at school. Looking after my younger siblings. I started self harming at ten years old, possibly sooner. I never ever felt a welcome part of my family, I was regularly singled out and bullied by them – this was also encouraged in my siblings. I said brief, so that is the very brief of my childhood.

At 18 I moved out, worked for a year and that year was really good. The best year of my life in honesty. Possibly the only year of my life that I was both free from abuse and also more or less free from any form of self abuse.

The following year I went to uni. A catalogue of events involving family, my own health and my course and seeing the reality of my childhood for the first time totally broke me. October 07 I broke. I fell headlong into anorexia, a deep depression, self harm and suicidality. I fell hard. But I hid it reasonably well for a while.

Do you remember your 21st birthday? I do….. I spent it at my first ever assessment with a psychiatrist at the eating disorder team. By the end of my second year at uni I was too unwell to continue….. I was presented with two choices – inpatient or go ‘home’ to my mothers.

In hindsight I made the wrong choice. I went home. I needed her to be a mum – an impossible ask. I broke more. Eventually I was thrown out for not getting better fast enough – the mental health team found me a hostel place.

In the hostel aged 22, I met my (now ex) abusive partner. That was my life then for almost a decade. Weirdly, his control made my mental health improve initially. Living with abuse was my normal, so much so I didnt even realise until it was too late. I lived with emotional, sexual, physical, financial abuse and coercive and controlling behaviour for many many years. Until I literally couldn’t do it anymore, I ran out of space to push my feelings down into. I was breaking again. I was overdosing again. I had stopped eating again.

I finally fled almost a year ago now. I have no words for how thankful I am for the refuge that I live in. It has been a really hard year. More of that info to come too ….. I did promise to be brief here.

Today, I am trying to decide if I fight or give up. I have given myself until 12/09/20 to decide…. Exactly a year since I left my ex. I am struggling and broken. My anorexia, self harm, depression and PTSD feel like a mega mountain that I don’t know if I can climb and conquer.

Sorry for the depressing end to this post.

Hope you are all well

Htlp x

Hunting the lost pieces.

So, tonight, I have come back to this blog and deleted to restart….. I shall explain why in time, but this original is now almost 3 years old, the last year and a half has involved more smashing than I thought I could ever survive….. Yet somehow I am still here.

I have always found the written word easier than the spoken, somehow I think I was just made that way. I hate phone calls, but don’t mind messaging. I am useless at telling people how I feel, but I could quite easily write to them and tell them. Even in my head, things come out as stories rather than conversations.

So, why the title?

Around 13 years ago, at the age of about 19, I broke. Not physically, but mentally I smashed into a whole load of pieces. I have spent the last thirteen years both breaking into yet smaller pieces and attempting to glue the pieces back together, sometimes in fits and spurts, often simultaneously. Thirteen years on, and it has become (often painfully) obvious that I am missing some pieces. Recently this (once again) became apparent, it is beyond irritating to be missing pieces. Have you ever done a jigsaw, and found yourself struggling to finish, but keep persevering only to finally slot all your pieces in and discover a gap still remains? Now try to imagine that that puzzle is you, and you have been working on that puzzle for your whole life on and off. Thirteen years of your hardest work, most determined effort, and then …… missing pieces.

At this point, I don’t know where this blog may go. I will be honest…. I am not sure whether I want to find those missing pieces. Maybe the masterpiece is more beautiful without them, kind of like a mosaic made out of pieces of a smashed piece of art. Perhaps I need to find them, perhaps I don’t. Right now, all I do know is that it bothers me. It bothers me that I lost them, that I feel they are missing. It bothers me that I can’t remember what they look like, what they feel like. It bothers me that I don’t quite feel whole as a person, that I feel like there is something missing.

So….. crazy person ….. how do you even know they’re missing?

Honestly …. I can’t tell you. I just know. I know the person I was. I know the person I am. I know that they are so different that I no longer recognise myself. I don’t see that as necessarily a bad thing or a good thing. I miss the person I was before I broke, of course I do, but that person broke for a reason. And I no longer have the strength to risk breaking again.

I feel the need to declare here that I am a Christian, I believe in God, I believe he has a plan for me….. I don’t have a clue what that plan is, but I believe it none the less. I am not of the school of ramming it down other peoples throats, but I have no doubt that at times it will come up. So if you don’t approve of that, please heed my warning, it is a part of me, it influences me and I cannot change that.

So….. who were you before you smashed into pieces?

I was 19. I had just started university after a gap year working with young people. I was outwardly confident (almost to a point of arrogance in hindsight), I knew what I wanted to do in life and what I needed to do to get there. I was determined…..If I wanted to do something, it could be considered done. I was disorganised, something that plagued me through school, and still does to this day. I thought myself strong, resilient, reliable, hard working, friendly, a little loud, trustworthy, going places, brainy. I also, in utter contradiction, considered myself depressed, struggled with self harm (though hid it from almost everyone), smoked, enjoyed a drink (or ten). I felt like I was going somewhere.

I hear people thinking “Wait, you said “before you broke”, but you were already depressed and self harming….. you were already broken.” To this I simply say that even if I was already broken, I had A LOT more breaking in my future, I just didn’t know it. The reason I consider this to be before I broke is because this was my normal. I started self harming early in my life (maybe 10, possibly earlier), I had been depressed possibly since before I even got as far as double figures. I wasn’t broken, I was coping, to me there is a very real difference. At 19 I was still functioning. I was still driven, I still had a life, I had not broken …… Yet.

I expect I will share much more with you in time. For now I shall finish with this:

I am hunting the lost pieces. I may decide the mosaic is more beautiful without them when I do find them, I may choose to leave them out. What I do desperately need is to know what they look like, what they feel like. I hope in time I will hunt them down and be a step closer to feeling whole again. For the moment, they are lost, I am not whole, I feel I am missing something, a part of me. I need to know what the lost pieces are before I can decide whether to include them in my mosaic.

This blog will be a journey. An anonymous one – in time you will understand why as I share more. The anonymity is necessary, both for my safety and to allow me to be truly honest.

Welcome to the journey,

Htlp x