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he was in my dream again.

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full transparency - he left me.

he left me and it wasn’t pretty. a year of being successfully isolated from my family and friends, and being manipulated into being a fawning wreck meant that i didn’t handle being alone very well.

its not something i’m ashamed about now that i understand the extent of what was done to me. i was.. really not great.

regardless, i always frame it as “i got out”. i think its better for my mental health to think that way (despite the weeks of “please” and “lets make this work”), but i also think it holds some truth. I got out by not being the right person for him to control. By saying it was irrational to get married so soon, or going on birth control after he pushed things too far too many times, and by - thankfully - having super strict parents who cared where i was and what i was doing.

i want easy. i think he could see i wasn’t a girl he could cheat on four times and go back. if he did anything worse to me, I Would go to the police.

in hindsight i can see what he wanted. Being an r*pist made him feel like a terrible person, but finding a girl to marry and having kids would prove he wasn’t. having a “normal” like would make him “good”. as quickly as possible. and that wasn’t me.

this is all a longwinded way of saying i believe they’re engaged now and all i can think is “i got away”

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ive had some weird dreams about my assaulter and his girlfriend recently. i think because april 30th of last year was the day i found out about everything, and my brain goes crazy about that sort of thing.

about a week ago i dreamt that i got a notification on my phone that said ***** ****** is coming to visit you! and i got extremely freaked out. my case didn’t go anywhere and there is no no-contact order, but he did visit my workplace on purpose after i found everything out, and had planned on transferring to my college at some point. after the police, though, he seems to be staying away from me, and only his girlfriend started showing up to my job (to walk around, buy nothing, look at me, and leave) I’m afraid of having no safe space. and i’m afraid that he’ll realize i can’t do much if he decides to come around where i work. sometimes, in a very fleeting way, im scared that he’ll want to come find me. the dream ended very shortly with me freaking out and looking out my windows for his car.

I can explain myself more with this next dream. Later, i dreamt that I was looking through my easter photos, only they weren’t mine, they were my assaulter’s girlfriend’s photos. I kept looking, scared that i would see his face in them, but i didn’t. Weird, right? This is the girl that my assaulter was with before me, and after me, (and truthfully i’m not sure if they’re still together but frankly i don’t care). In our own relationship he assaulted me several times. After the breakup, she asked me if he had r*ped me. I told her what happened to me (none of which i truly consider r*pe) and she told me the reason why she asked. for months i minimized my pain because she had gone through worse. in literally every way he treated me wrong, she got it worse. I felt sorry for her, i didnt hate her, and i compared my own pain to hers. Eventually, while i still had a case, i had to explain why i didn’t go to the cops immediately for mine. (i hoped it was an accident. him being a repeat assaulter changed my view)… then i got the “hate mail”, as i put it. it was from her, telling me how disgusting i was for butting into their lives, and how i should mind my business and move on. how i was petty, pathetic, delusional, and she pitied anybody who ever had the misfortune of coming into my life (her words, my friends and i would later laugh over this). So essentially this girl defended our assaulter to me after i tried to get some justice/at least make sure there was a record so he wouldn’t try to do that again. for months she came to my workplace (the word “stalk” has been used and that freaks me out) but luckily i haven’t seen him in almost a year and her in half.

and then.. last nights dream. I was sitting in some sort of class or church and lo and behold, this girl is sitting next to me. I ignore her, she ignores me, perfect. then somehow we’re away from everyone having a verbal argument. I don’t remember what she said, i just remember saying “you know what? its okay that you didn’t tell anyone or get help. I didn’t. Not until i knew what happened to you. im just trying to make sure it doesn’t happen again to anyone else, not even you. It’s like we said on the phone, whoever ends up with him will have to deal with this for the rest of their life.”

and then.. she was crying. In a perfect world, she’d get away from this guy and find someone decent. see that he’s not worth it. But as far as i know, there’s a girl out there still dating her assaulter and feeling fine that she told his other victim to fuck right off. I don’t think about it much, because its none of my business what two bad people are doing together, but i am frequently glad that im the one who’s not in the picture anymore.

there is no real point to this post besides reflecting on this stuff and reminding myself why i might be dreaming about my assaulter and some girl. i feel like if i didn’t, my brain would convince me that dreaming about people who hurt me isn’t natural

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these two pieces will be in a show today. i’m nervous and excited for the exact same reasons.

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tmi warning but i just saw the post with the poll about choking, asking about its level as a kink and turning into an informational post about the risks, danger, and statistics involved.

the stats about abuse and homicide highly disturbed me.

the very first time i slept with my assaulter, he choked me. didn’t ask, didn’t check if i was alright, didn’t check if i was okay with it during or afterwards, just did it. and i always felt very what the fuck? about it but never brought it up or anything. and it became a thing every time. he wasn’t gentle in any way and everything was about what he wanted, not my discomfort.

i never saw him angry. ive read his angry texts to someone else, though. ive heard about his yelling and insults and different kinds of threats.

i sometimes think well maybe he didn’t abuse me. maybe i just knew an abuser. he didn’t do to me what he did to her. if he had manipulated me more openly, gotten angry with me, assaulted me in a different way, maybe this disgusting feeling i have would be justified. but i know that’s just minimizing my own experience.

not really a point to this. just my thoughts.

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today (i think) officially marks me being away from my assaulter longer than we were in a relationship.

i know its kind of a weird goal to want to reach, but for a while i was destroyed by the thought that i gave so much of my time to my assaulter, and someone else’s assaulter. to realize that it wasn’t exactly a MASSIVE chunk of my life and that i could move on and be happy is huge for me.

Around october I think i’ll have been away from him for longer than we even knew each other so that makes me happy too.

some of the circumstances have been on my mind recently. with it being april, sometimes i think i’ll do it! i’ll tell everybody what he did! i have proof so there’d be nothing he could do!

but that scares me. some of my art will be in a show this month. i feel strong yet scared at the same time

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for a while i blamed myself for the first assault.

in short, because i had initially said “it would be nice, but no” I felt i set things up against myself. i ignored the fact that i said no within that sentence. and that i said no twice later, told him to calm down, then started crying before he even stopped.

nothing that happened to me was my fault.

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reblogging so my thoughts don’t crowd the poem.

i’m unsure how to feel about this one since i havent written a poem about this topic in several months.

there are a few things about it that ring true to me now and didn’t before, and vice versa. I know now that being assaulted didn’t kill me/my spirit but it did for a while.

Throughout therapy I was asked what I would do if back in that moment. My first instinct was anger. I can really only imagine myself as an onlooker, and I wanted to interfere. “She already told you to stop touching her, why are you hugging her?”

After a while I realized I wish I could be the one holding myself. Though I didn’t want to be touched, part of me yearns to hold myself as I held myself - replace his overstep with compassion.

difficult thoughts to navigate.

also i feel like it falls apart at the end. but oh well.

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this writing goes into a bit of detail. nothing explicit, but if someone who knew me or my assaulter read this, it would be very exposing. Thus it’s one of the more revealing things on this blog. TW for the uncensored R word

this was shortly after I learned I was not his only victim. i had been so brainwashed and manipulated that even out of a relationship with my assaulter, i gave him the benefit of the doubt and assumed he really had just made some horrible but honest mistakes. knowing he had done it before and did it again changed everything for me. i wanted to report.

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this was the first piece of art i made after being assaulted.

i know now that this wasn’t the first assault, but it was the first one where i realized he was assaulting me.

when i drew this, I had already told him how horrible and alone i felt. you tell someone your boyfriend assaulted you and they tell you to leave him, and i was in too deep to do that. he’d successfully isolated me from everyone. and when i turned to him and told him “you hurt me. i feel like i’m dying” he said “try not to think about it. it won’t happen again”.

it happened again 12 days later.

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im gonna say something here that i dont know if i should say, because i try to keep this as a space for my recovery thoughts.

ive been through therapy for some of the specific assaults, but not the relationship as a whole. i don’t have the time right now, and im worried starting later will be bad for my recovery. but thanks to what i’ve had, its helped me realize that i wasn’t just with a guy who made some bad decisions. i was with a guy who manipulated me, lied to me, and abused me the entire time we were together.

and what bothers me sometimes is another thing i’ll never understand. while we were still speaking (i hadn’t learned some things yet), he told me about his struggle with antidepressants. how he didn’t want to have to rely on a pill every day to make him functional. how he tried to stop, felt like shit, and one day felt better. because he’d taken one. and he didn’t want to have to depend on something to make him happy. and thats why he left me. (bullshit. another manipulative lie, i found out)

i dont know what about that still bothers me though. several times, he had told me i was the only reason he could safely be off his meds. of course i dont think that’s healthy but its what i was told, and i honestly believed him. i hope whatever part of me is bothered is not the scared, fawning part of me saying “look. i did mean something to my abuser”. i dont know if it’s another part of me that asks “is that what i am? an antidepressant?”. i think mostly i’m uncomfortable with more evidence showing how easily discardable i was, despite the entire thing being a manipulation tactic.

which is a lot of words for something that occasionally bothers me but can be waved away with “i wouldnt want to mean anything to a s*x *ffender anyways”.

but i think its a part of me that will be raw longer than other parts. i find myself healing at different rates about different things, with hardly any explainable pattern.

maybe i shouldn’t think about it so much? shouldnt put it to words?

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i feel like the flashbacks are very bad lately. and i get these weird feelings where i become certain i’m stuck in the past. like i could pick my phone up and see his name, or hear his car pull up to my house. it’s terrifying because it makes me feel like he’s “out there”. are those flashbacks?

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there are days where i look into the mirror and wonder what about me made me so easy to hurt. which integral part of me made me prime choice for abusing.

i try not to think that way. the assaults and abuse weren’t my fault, and practically had nothing to do with me. they were the actions of a monster and i just happened to be within arms reach.

but he was in my dreams last night.

yesterday i was remembering some of the other things i’ll never know:

the other girl, she said he’d yell and curse at her. in some of their messages, he talked to her in a way i never saw. i never saw that he was a truly mean and abusive person. i never saw that because he didn’t want me to, and i’ll never know why. to keep me from leaving so he could use me and hurt me in more subtle ways? to control me, because once i saw the truth i’d leave? to make me think he cared, for a reason i could never guess?

and when he hurt me, no matter what i said, he only stopped on his own. once i started crying or once i gave up, thats when he stopped. im glad he did, but he didn’t for someone else. i dont know what made the times with me different. i know i was his “practice”. his way of proving himself to be a good person, that he could be with someone and not violate them. maybe proving himself wrong was all that stopped him. and once again, maybe it was to give himself the benefit of the doubt later on. i wouldnt have been with him if i knew what he’d done. me not knowing was all that kept me around.

in my dreams he was back. probably because i keep worrying about seeing him. he came back like nothing happened, acting nice. the other girl wasn’t around anymore. he wanted to make things right. i gave him what he deserved - nothing. but he still harassed me. finally it happened - the recurring thing in every dream he’s in. i told him “i know what you did”

the only difference last night was that he proceeded to tell me he’d kill me, then he hunted me down.

i think its the stress of finals. i hope thats all it is. ive come really far, especially thanks to therapy, but sometimes i get the sense that something inside of me is constantly terrified and i never know until times like these.

there’s no nice easy moral to these feelings. there’s just a shocking sickness in my heart that i can’t shake

or perhaps these are the symptoms of ptsd my therapist mentioned

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a poem i wrote about it when i was still in therapy, a year after both assaults. i’d like to say something more, but i don’t have the words.

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i haven’t posted here for a long time.

i finished EMDR therapy. nearly a year and a half after the assaults. by now it actually has been a year and a half.

it did its job. i don’t really visit those memories anymore because im no longer having constant, constant nightmares, flashbacks, fear, and paranoia. even the other emotions, ive been able to deal with easier because of that.

of course if i think about what happened i still get very scared and very upset, but its not always on my mind, and im not nearly as paralyzed as i used to be.

theres less trauma to process and thoughts to share. honestly, due to how i deal with things, most of my thoughts are spiteful to the point where im not even sure they’re right to share. im not making art about it because the emotions aren’t sitting inside me and clawing to get out.

but im still nervous in public places. scared he’ll show up to my job again. i told my therapist that if i run into him again i dont want to cry or run away. i want to be brave.

i never want to live with that fear and pain again. he has no impact, no control over my life. being scared isn’t wrong, but i know now that i don’t have to be. not of such a pathetic man.

im not stronger than i was back then, i just know my strength now.

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there’s such a big difference in remembering and realizing.

i remembered what he did to me for months, and him saying he would never do something so bad. i only realized what it meant that i wasn’t the only one later on.

i remembered feeling miserable, alone, and unloved for months. i only realized later that was because i knew something else was wrong.

i remembered the spontaneous bursts of gifts, and only realized later it was lovebombing to fuel his ego.

i remember having to pay for everything to cover his lack of funds, and only realized later that my funds were the ones being manipulated.

i remember being told over and over and over again that i once shut down for days - had it hung over my head whenever something was wrong, and when i finally said “no. that never actually happened” he said “oh. im sorry then. i misremembered.” i realized later this was gaslighting.

i remember being told over and over again how angry i seemed. how i was so mad it was hard to talk to me. i remembered the confusion, because by that point i was nothing but broken fake smiles and sharp sobs, even in public. i only realized later that this was emotional manipulation. that this is what made me lose my will to fight. it broke me.

and i remember a lot of times when i said no. when i said “wait”. when i said “stop”. when he’d give me an excuse or explanation or a simple guilt trip. a lot more than what i’ve told anyone.

i realized a long time ago that things were never once safe with him.