If you’ve ever heard me speak about past relationships, there’s a phrase I like to use a lot: “protect their integrity”.
What protecting someone’s integrity means is a conscious decision not to speak maliciously, or in an attempt to malign someone you’ve dated when sharing details of the relationship. For me, this typically takes the form of me recounting a story or an event, but focusing on the things that I did and avoiding statements like “he did” or “he said”.
However, I ran into a problem writing this blog (which started as a letter to myself) when I realized there was no way for me to tell this one particular story of mine without taking the other person out onto the playing field with me. In telling my story, I need to involve him. Because in choosing to protect him and “protect his integrity”, I was the one paying the price.
I gave up my right to heal and process, and was keeping myself in a hiding place of shame.
No more.
– – – – – – –
It didn’t matter that every girl in the United States is taught from a young age to give walking papers to any guy who dares to use the phrase, “If you loved me, you would . . .”
I did love him. He never forced me to do anything. But the atmosphere of anxiety and the constant teetering on the edge of a meltdown loomed like a wall cloud, and it’s darkness followed us everywhere.
It started small.
At the time we met, I was in possession of a pack of American Spirits, which I had owned for six months and during that time, smoked three. One week in, he asked me if I had ever smoked before, and I shared that I carried a pack of cigarettes with me and smoked sometimes, when I felt stressed or bored.
We spent an hour in my car discussing this, during which he cried and told me that he didn’t know what he would do if anything were to happen to me due to my smoking. This same conversation happened two more times before I reached into my bag and gave him the used pack and my lighter. He threw them away, and told me how happy he was as he held me.
It felt vaguely confusing, but I was thankful that someone loved me enough to call me out on my stupid habit.
Another week passed, and the topic of alcohol came up. We discussed in depth our views on it, and found that they couldn’t have been more polar. He came from a family of alcoholics, and I had just returned from Ireland, where drinking was a cultural norm and no community was begun outside the doors of a bar.
“It hurts me when you drink”, he said. “I hate when I can smell it on you.” I felt a stab of regret for the glass of champagne I had enjoyed an hour prior at a friend’s New Year’s Celebration, and wondered if I should refrain from kissing him for the remainder of the night because of what I’d done.
The topic of alcohol became an argument that we had at least twice a week, and our fights began to get in the way of everything. We were never on time. I put makeup on only to cry it all off as he begged me to understand that he struggled with anxiety, had been mistreated by his parents, and couldn’t control his anxious thoughts.
I was adamant that I didn’t want to do anything physically before I was married. But when he found out that I had lost my virginity to someone prior to dating him, he asked why I would give myself to someone else in that way and withhold it from him. It’s what people do who love each other, and he loved me.
He never forced me to do anything. He didn’t have to. We were in love, and he wanted to show me how much.
Thus began the process of chipping away at me, with flirtation, with laughter, with tenderness, with gentleness. Finally, so worn down from pushing him away, from saying “no”, and from attempting to explain my reasoning behind my refusal, I gave in. There was nothing off limits, and I felt that my consent was the ultimate proof of my trust in him. At times, my body would need several days to recover.
Again – he never forced himself.
But when I looked in the mirror at myself as I dried off from a shower, I started to skim over parts of myself. Some parts seemed shameful, and I distinctly remember the day when I thought my hands looked otherworldly as they rested on the sides of my body.
No matter how careful, he was always anxious about the possibility of pregnancy, and I had taken the morning-after pill so many times that I started to get sick on a regular basis. My body was out of whack, and I began to hate it even more for what felt like betraying me.
Outfit checks became the norm. I would bend over so that he could look and tell me if someone would be able to see down my shirt, should I move around. In order to avoid an episode, I sent him my selfies before I would post them. Within two months, I was only wearing sports bras, and was only allowed to change clothes if I was at my house, or his. One afternoon, I came over to take us out to dinner when he spotted a dime-sized tear above the back pocket in my pair of jeans. We drove an hour round trip back to my house so that I could change my pants before we went out.
“Your body’s mine, and my body’s yours,” he would say, sometimes while wrapped up in cool sheets wasting away the days hiding under covers in his room. Sometimes, while I’d stare at the corner of the ceiling while he sat crying, telling me that I was cold and how I was hurting him by my ‘careless’ behavior.
Feelings and thoughts I had been healed from years earlier slowly began germinating in my mind, a slippery decline into anxiety and loss of self. We were enmeshed. I couldn’t tell anymore where he ended and I began.
I don’t know who I am without him.
Why can’t I make him happy?
If only he would get help.
Why won’t he get help?
I can fix this.
I want to die.
I ended up turning down an opportunity to spend a month in Africa with Adventures because his reaction to the news affected him so violently. (Not as if I was in any spiritual condition to go.) But in that moment it was clear: there was one more sacrifice I had to make to show him how committed I was. I had to show him that I wouldn’t abandon him.
It didn’t work.
The more he asked of me, the more I pushed back, and the more we fought – and the more we fought, the deeper the cracks in our foundation grew, and the further I felt him drifting from me. I wondered why I was such a terrible person. Why didn’t I have the same rights as he had to express himself? Why was I so difficult? Why couldn’t we even celebrate Valentine’s Day without spending so much time bickering with each other that we missed our dinner plans? Why did he turn away from me and begin to cry when I pointed out cute actors in a movie we were watching?
In my mind, I had given everything up to him – my body, my fashion sense, my hobbies, my friends, and even my God-given calling. It still wasn’t enough.
One night when we both knew things were ending, I confessed to him that after everything, I just wanted to go to sleep and not wake up. I was depressed and empty and completely lost. I didn’t have anything left to give him – and yet, there he was, still needing more.
This wasn’t right, he said. Fighting all the time wasn’t right, and our dreams and desires didn’t line up.
My entire body went numb. I wanted to scream, “I have given you EVERYTHING I had to give! Why isn’t that enough? Why don’t you want to make this work!?”
I had gone from a free-spirited, confident, playful 21 year-old to a mere shadow. And now I was being rejected by the one person I had striven for so long to please, to become, to understand.
Just like that, it was over.
A solid year passed before I began to understand exactly how much what happened had affected me.
At the time, I had attempted to open up and express hurts about the breakup to our mutual friends. But both times, I was met with the same phrase: “That just doesn’t sound like him.”
My response was, “You didn’t date him.” And then I would quickly change the topic.
It took two of these reactions to teach me that what I had done was shameful, and that I must have sounded like a liar. The message was loud and clear. What had happened between us was shameful, and I shouldn’t talk about him or I at all.
I was so bound by shame, hurt, and doubt that I hardly spoke of our breakup to anyone, even close friends. And when I did, I tried to tread lightly. After all, he had promised not to talk badly of me to his friends – it seemed like it was only fair. We had so many people in common; what kind of person would it make me if I told the truth of how devastated I was, while he had moved on and started dating someone new?
I acted out in bizarre ways in the days following the breakup, the strangest of which involved buying a long brown wig and wearing it un-ironically for about five weeks. I woke up one morning in a state of despair, took myself to the nearest tattoo parlor, and got the first tattoo I could think of. I dove back into a relationship I had ended prior to my latest one and attempted to bury myself in the power I felt I asserted over that person. But the truth eventually caught up with me one night as I performed one of my new nightly rituals: drinking close to an entire bottle of red wine before lying down, half-on, half-off on my bed, and weeping. I realized that I will never hurt enough people to justify or stop the hurt that existed in my own heart.
I sloppily opened my Bible and found these words from a lifetime past, underlined in black pen:
“Do not be afraid; you will not be put to shame. Do not fear disgrace; you will not be humiliated. You will forget the shame of your youth and remember no more the reproach of your widowhood.”
A warmth crept into my heart, one distinctly different from the warm haziness of Merlot, and all it said was, “Kayla, I don’t hate you. You don’t embarrass me. You are not hidden from me.”
I nodded, rolled over onto my stomach, and passed out.
The healing process took a really long time.
It moved slowly. In fact, I think the process is still happening. I started my (guys, cover your eyes) period while at Training Camp, and my emotional reaction was so disproportionally intense that it prompted one of my teammates to say, “Hey, it’s a good thing, right? It means you are healthy and your body is working like normal!” Processing that led me to realize that I was still angry at my body and all of its normal, womanly functions.
I still stand in front of the mirror and see parts of myself as dirty, as not totally belonging to me.
I still get a small thrill when I wear a racer-back style dress and let my bra straps show.
I still need to unlearn shame patterns, and re-learn how to love myself, love MY body, again.
And I still need to find forgiveness.
But here is something I have come to understand as recently as the past few weeks: yes, it’s been over a year, and yes, I still have nightmares because I never let myself look back long enough to actually see and process this for what it was. But that doesn’t mean my case is getting thrown out. I don’t have to live with this wound. And like a good doctor who doesn’t discharge his patient while still recovering from surgery, God won’t leave me here, at the end of this blog.
It’s okay not to be okay, because this is a process.
There’s a scene in Home Alone where Kevin walks outside and yells, “I’m not afraid anymore! Did you hear me?! I said I’M NOT AFRAID ANYMORE!”
Of you, of opinions, of my past, of speaking out, of the things I’ve done and of the things that have happened to me –
I am not afraid anymore.
