The Turning Point

October 10, 2004 | Category:

This post is for a writing contest called "Blogging for Books". The assigned topic is "the edge of insanity".

PLEASE CONSIDER BEFORE READING.

Know first:
This entry includes extremely personal information, violence, sexual content, and profanity.

If you know me in real life, if you remember these events, and if we've made peace since then. If you didn't know me then, and can't imagine it, and never wanted to. Stop now. Move along.

Writing this post was a intensely private experience. I appreciate your feedback, but not in an open forum. So I am closing the comments. Thank you.

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I was 20 years old, and I was standing in court. The man over there, who was 24, was up on battery charges. And I was the complainant. I was the one who’d been battered.

The charges were read, and the Judge asked him – did he do it?

And the accused man never looked at me.

He elocuted: Yes. I am guilty. I punched her, and kept her in my apartment, and wouldn’t let her go. And even after I was arrested, and out on bail, I found her where she was hiding. I found her and slapped her for leaving me.

And the Judge, a beautiful dark man with blue eyes, looked down and pronounced judgment. And it was over.

I was escorted out in a daze, and alone I made my way back to the Red Roof Inn where I’d been hiding out. On my grandmother’s money, generously wired. And sat on the bed, in a stupor, for hours.

Eventually, it seeped into my mind that I was hungry, and that it was dark. And when I stumbled and finally stood – stiff and lightheaded – I looked down and realized that I had wet myself.

Calmly I wondered for if there was any reason to wash. If maybe, life would be so much nicer if it just stopped now. I stripped down and crawled under the covers and wished for sleep. And somehow the sky turned lighter and lighter beyond the curtains but I didn't know how. It was attempted suicide by apathy, by wishing things would end. But the sheets didn't claim me.

In the morning, a counselor from the shelter called me. Linda had been brought into my case by the police. I'd given her my number when I went into hiding, but I would only take her legal help, her shelter's advocacy volunteers.

As to the "warm fuzzies" - No. I’d told her over and over that I wasn’t like that, that I wasn’t a victim. This time, when she called, I just cried. The sobs came so hard that soon I was gagging and then vomiting into the cheap wastebasket - with the phone dangling off the bedstand.

Linda drove over, frantically pounding on the motel door. I was embarrassed to open it, to be seen dirty and empty. But I did. I opened the door.

“You have to believe,” she said fiercely, “you have to listen to me and you have to believe. Listen. This is bottom. This is as bad as it gets, honey. Are you listening? Can you look at me and tell me you hear?”

Tell her? I could barely nod.

“Look at me, look at me,” she urged. I pulled my heavy head up, nausea and acid crawling up my throat. “This is bottom. We go up from here. Up. Will you come with me? Please?” And she stroked my hair, and she wasn’t patronizing or pitying. She was kind and she was vulnerable and I believed her.

So, somehow, I nodded again.

Cleaned up and fed, she brought me to a circle of smoking women. They talked and I told myself I wasn’t like them. I tuned them out, and stared over Linda’s head and wallowed in the hurt that was mine. I didn’t know it then, but I was hugging bottom. Not ready to let go and start the long swim up.

The woman who was talking looked at me slyly and said, “What’s your story?”

I looked away.

But it didn’t drop. So ultimately, I cleared my throat. “It was just twice. And I called the cops both times. I fought back,” I said defiantly.

And a woman with a deep scar down her face said, “Me too.”

And Linda told me, gently, “We all fought back, Elizabeth. That’s why we’re here.”

OK, I was being a sanctimonious asshole. Fine. So this was sharing time at the zoo? Then I was going to just have to share, wasn’t I?

In verbal bullets, I laid it all out. Being bullied and ostracized and tossed into a garbage dumpster. The family friend who offered to show me how he masturbated when I was 14. The one who would grab my crotch when no one was looking. The high school guy who tried to force my face down onto his dick, and then told all his buddies that I swallowed.

I gave them all a Technicolor movie about life in the world of stiff upper lips. The family who dropped me off at a psych ward when I was 16, terrified for me and at their wit’s end with my emotional roller coaster, and their inability to solve the hell of my life. To be a pregnant teenager and given the choice of abortion or being kicked out.

I spewed out what it was like to want to be loved, and to never feel it. To chase and never catch that fairy tale. Because I was promised a fucking fairy tale. Right?

About turning away from God. And accepting the guys who grabbed at my body, and rejected my soul.

Look at me, you see Upper Middle Class from Connecticut with every advantage. Except if that’s so true, why am I living hand to mouth, hiding out in a Red Roof Inn without a friend or family member in sight?

And Scar Woman crossed her arms and looked at me and said, “Oh, so mommy was supposed to get on a plane and come save your sorry ass? Take you home and make it all better?”

And I shivered and bit myself. Bit the inside of my cheek so I wouldn’t cry and break down and say “Yes” because that’s exactly what I thought should have happened. Yes, I wanted my mommy.

Scar woman shamed me, looked at my teary eyes and made a sound, a laugh at my self pity. “Oh, poor you, huh? Look I’ve only known you 30 minutes and that’s about 29 too many. You are a sorry bitch. You thinking of spending the rest of your life as little miss victim?”

“Seemed like a plan,” I shot back.

And she snorted, like I was an idiot child.

They were quiet. I was pissed.

They were quiet.

And I wanted to cry again. But scar woman’s insolent stare never wavered and I didn’t dare.

And they were quiet. Waiting.

“No…” I admitted, finally. Quietly. Because the words hurt. The words were razors of admission, cutting me. “No. I hate this. I hate it."

And they all exhaled, loudly. A chatter started. Linda reached across and squeezed my hand, a sweet somberness on her face. I looked down, away. I didn’t know it yet, but they did. That I’d just begun a long swim to different way of being.

And that by beginning, I’d already won.

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