Disappearing
I couldn’t see it.
Three years of my life, and I couldn’t see that I was caught up in an emotionally unhealthy relationship that was gradually destroying my self-esteem.
It’s complicated. It’s always complicated. His father had been emotionally and physically violent, and my partner was still struggling to heal from a childhood filled with loss, anger and silence.
My tendency was to want to be his light, to take care of him, thinking I could be the one to fill that hole, to ease the sadness and the hardships of being a man of color in the U.S.
We both fell in love real hard in the heat and idealism of the movement. He showered me with loving and nurturing that had an intensity and openness I had never experienced before, and my heart poured open, finding a raw, deep love for the very first time. The good times were filled with passion that kept us on a high for about eight months, during which my heart blinded me from the fact that the bad times were really, really bad.
The fighting started early and only lessened a few years later after going to couples therapy for awhile, but the deep core issues always remained unresolved.
His insecurity and lack of self-love was deep, so he became very easily jealous at me giving love, time and energy to other people and things in my life, because it meant to him that I didn’t love him enough. He rarely wanted to go out to parties or hang out in groups, preferring to just spend time as a couple. Most of the time the questions about my work that he asked were if I was attracted to people I worked with, and he didn’t really believe me when I told him that I wasn’t, making me feel like I had to hide things from him for fear of making him angry. He was threatened by my stubborn independence, by my putting our relationship at an equal level to my friendships and not above, by my embrace of my sexuality, and he always needed to hear the words “I love you” to feel secure in my love, even though to me love was about actions and not words. He talked bad about some of my close friends who were critical of him and saw my unhappiness, and so I drifted away from them or stopped telling them what was going on between us. I drifted away from a lot of my community, although he continuously accused me of never giving him enough time, even though he took up most of my free time and emotional energy.
Carrying his anger with him everywhere, he appeased it often with addictions to alcohol, cigarettes, sex and me. Although he never physically harmed me, I felt the anger and violence in our fights, in his words, his gestures, his fiery reactions, him throwing objects around and hurting himself, which I now see were tactics to control, scare and guilt me. He ran and gardened to release his stress, he came with me to yoga and sought support in therapy, but he still struggled to express his emotions and needs in healthy ways, to truly heal from the pain and loss in his life, and to do the hard and important work to love himself. He saw himself as a victim of a racist and classist society, much of which was very real, but he let the oppression weigh him down and keep him in a fighting survival mode of scarcity, always so desperately afraid to lose me and my love because he depended on me to be his primary salve.
Publicly, we worked together in the movement, and in word and theory he was against sexism and supportive of women’s empowerment. I have always been a strong girl/woman with a strong mother and loving father who upheld full equality in relationships, and politically I have been a fierce feminist/womanist in all ways. But this was my first serious romantic relationship, and it was very private. Our comrades never really knew what was going on behind doors, and at the time I thought that all relationships had their problems and that it was normal to have fights, so I never reached out to our friends for help, believing that we could eventually work out our issues by ourselves. I stopped working with an organization that we had both been involved in, because he wanted a space that was his own and apart from our relationship, but later I heard that issues of his and others’ patriarchal practices came up in the group, although I was distanced from it by then. My compassion for him and my deep hope in the possibilities of transformation and healing made me defend him and our relationship, but I was so focused on his needs that I couldn’t see how it was all affecting me.
"disappearing"
One day I looked in the mirror and couldn’t recognize myself anymore. I looked so tired and pale, and the bags under my eyes drooped from crying all the time. I started going into work late and missing meetings after bad fights that left me depressed and feeling powerless, unable to get out of bed. I hadn’t felt beautiful in so long, and my self-love had deteriorated from never feeling good enough to make him truly happy, unable to satisfy his endless emotional needs. I couldn’t remember the last time I had really laughed with an open heart, or the last time I was with him and didn’t feel scared. Underneath the facade of this stranger looking back at me, however, I could still see pieces of who I’ve always been, the ancestral strength that my grandmothers passed down to me staring back from the mirror, knowing that deep down I loved myself more. More than the security of having someone who would always be there. More than the desire to be loved in the shape of a childhood longing for affection. I remembered a friend told me once that James Baldwin said that we must look in the mirror until we love ourselves and know we are beautiful. So I sat with myself there in front of the mirror until I did once again. And finally, I could start reaching for the pieces of myself that had been shattered and pushed aside for three years. It was only in that moment that I knew I couldn’t stay with him anymore, deeply fearing the possibility of disappearing from myself forever.
And so I took the risk, and I jumped. I left the relationship quite abruptly, knowing that if I processed all the emotions with him I might be convinced to stay and try to make it work. I knew it was the right decision when I finally felt free once more, a great heaviness lifted from my heart, a joy inside me revived. I embarked on a year of meditation retreats, went out dancing with my friends again, got excited about new possibilities of love, and started rebuilding my support systems. Only in the aftermath of the break-up, in dating other people and closely observing other relationships, have I been able to understand that relationships are not supposed to be that painful, that I deserve a relationship that is free from fear and control, and that what was going on in that relationship was an intimate kind of abuse of power that can’t be excused away by structural reasoning. I very much tried to hold my ground and myself in our fights and in our relationship, but even I, an organizer, intellectual and fierce woman, couldn’t shield myself completely from the subtle mechanisms of patriarchy and capitalism that put men’s emotions, needs and desires above women’s, that isolate romantic relationships as private matters surrounded by silence not to be addressed in community settings, that require possession and control of independent women, and that create emotionally-dysfunctional men who feel the need to be hyper-masculine and never learn to be vulnerable or face up to their own pain or insecurities, and thus grow.
It is hard to think of my ex-partner as an abuser. It is difficult to name what was going on as abuse, because I don’t believe he’s a monster and that I am a victim, which is how the dominant society portrays abuse. Because I am an organizer, I understand the bigger picture, and I know that we are who we are because of bigger systems and that wholeness is not created by isolating or punishing those who because of their trauma harm others. And because I have been practicing the cultivation of compassion for myself and others, I see so clearly now that craziness and destruction stem from unhealed wounds. We have grown up in a violent society that fosters unhealthy behaviors, creates a lot of harm, and doesn’t allow us to heal from that harm, which makes it very difficult to love in healthy ways. I do believe it was abuse because it was about power, control and hierarchy, but what I really mean – when I can bring myself to say that it was an abusive relationship – is that he never healed his own pain and thus unleashed it on me. He never consciously wanted to hurt me, I still believe that, but he didn’t do his own work to protect our love from his past wounds. He needed and still needs some serious resources to get whole, resources which are not bountiful or accessible in our community currently. And both of us needed to go back to the drawing board and love ourselves first.
Two years after I broke up with him, and only now am I beginning to see my full self in the mirror again. The light is finally back in my eyes, and my skin glows again with excitement, hope and a deeper wisdom and appreciation for who I have become in this journey. It is, however, a continuing battle everyday to love my whole self, to heal from the wounds, to open myself to love and being loved fully, and to re-gain my sense of self-worth and deservingness in relationships. I still struggle to be conscious of my own needs and regard them as equally important, which women of color have been trained to never do. I am still developing the skills to be able to communicate those needs, to not shut down when I’m hurt and thus contribute to the silence. Through somatic therapy, I am digging in deep to my emotional history, to the times and places where as a child growing up in a white racist society I felt ugly, unworthy, invisible and voiceless. Everyday I understand more and more how I need to heal my own past trauma in order to move forward and learn to be in healthy relationship with myself and others.
Looking back and thinking about what I would have needed while I was stuck in the whirlwind of that relationship, I mostly wish that our culture, especially in the movement but everywhere, was less afraid and more open to talking about the trauma in relationships and the fact that we have to heal ourselves in order to authentically love in healthy ways, and in order to move forward honest, principled transformation and anti-oppression practices in our communities on a larger scale. The culture of silence and privatization kept me feeling isolated, disempowered to share my experiences and unable to understand the bigger picture of what was going on. If our communities took responsibility for supporting healthy relationships, and if we could have been brave enough to ask for help and guidance from those who loved us, perhaps we could have publicly exposed the challenges in order to reconcile and intervene in an unhealthy dynamic. Many of us in the movement walk around with so many wounds unhealed, and so we harm others and ourselves against our political principles. We need to build more infrastructure in our communities to dialogue on and address these issues seriously and realize that these very intimate fissures and harms affect all of us collectively and impede the visions of comprehensive social justice that we work toward.
He and I haven’t really talked since I broke it off, and when I reach out to him now to process what happened between us and try to find closure, he tells me that he’s still not ready to talk with me, although we occasionally see each other and exchange a handful of words at community events, a gulf of unspoken emotions floating between us. I am saddened by the distance and silence, and I grieve the loss of the love we once had for each other. And even though I know ours was not a healthy relationship, I still see him as part of my community, as someone who shared an important part of my life with me and who taught me a lot about myself, as someone who tried very hard to love me in the ways he knew how, as someone who I will always care about and who has a lot of healing to do. I hope one day we can talk openly, honestly and lovingly with each other as stronger and more whole people.
I have no choice but to continue believing relentlessly in the possibilities of healing, transformation and building healthy communities.
I have no choice but to do the heart work to become whole again.