Now that we've discussed the glorification of abuse, let's talk about: Long Term Effects of Abuse
Let's just tell one more truth? There are many, but how about an honest story?
As you could probably tell, I absolutely hate when authors decide that abuse is just a clever little back story. Do you know what abuse victims would give for it to just simply be a backstory? Do you have even the slightest idea what they would give?
Anything. Absolutely anything.
No doubt. No hesitation. They would give anything.
Because when the victim finally gets help, and word gets out about what happened, life as they knew it is over. Everything changes.
You think it's going to be this magical time when everything is okay and all the pain and worry just goes away, but getting help is only the start of the rest of your life. And it's a long, long life.
As soon as people find out you were a victim of abuse that's what you forever are. Suddenly you lose your identity. Soon you become nothing more than just a survivor and you absolutely resent that term. Survivor
You don't think you're a survivor. That word is for people that have been through hell and you guess you went through hell, but that was just your life. That was something you could handle. For all those years, that was the person you were and you're not a survivor. You were simply living.
So you hate it.
You lose so much sleep over that one stupid word. You'll go night after night staring at the ceiling, wandering around the house, crying in the shower and not because you're reliving the abuse. It's not about reliving things.
It's about regretting things.
You hate that people only see a poor, abused kid when they look at you.
And a very sick, very sad part of you wishes you'd never said anything. That twisted part of you wishes you were still being abused. You hated the abuse, but sometimes you hate the aftershock more.
Back then, things were simple. Everyone was happy. Ignorance was bliss.
Back then, you were a person. And you really, really miss being a person.
You miss being able to have real conversations with people. You miss people treating you like an equal. You miss being able to be sad, or angry, or happy for your own reasons.
When it's all over, you realize that you are and always have been simply an object.
So you miss it. You hate yourself for missing it, but you miss it.
When you survive being abused, you lose every bit of freedom you ever had.
Because living in fear was more freedom than living as a survivor.
As soon as you set a goal people just assume it's because you want to prove you're a survivor. You want to prove that you have control over your hopes and dreams. You want to have control of your life.
You can't simply just set a goal because you want to have a goal. Because you want to work toward something.
It's automatically decided that you set the goal because you were abused.
All the people you meet that learn about your history of abuse are only nice to you because they feel obligated. They think it makes them a bad person to treat you like a human being. That it's insensitive. That they have to walk on glass around you and be caring and understanding. That there are certain things they can't say or do.
They give you free passes and you don't want them.
You just want to be normal.
You can't even have ownership of your mistakes. Your very own, goddamn mistakes are all justified and that's the most demeaning, aggravating thing. Everyone else can mess up and go through the motions. They can be irrational, but you...you always have an answer. You're automatically forgiven. If you fuck up, it's okay. You were abused. Everyone understands.
But you don't want an excuse. You want to do bad because you are bad. You want to have an honest screw up, but they won't let you.
Everything you do is now owned by the fact that you were abused.
And slowly but surely, you let yourself become an object. Because everyone else treats you like one. That's all you are.
You're an abused object.
You think of everything as a consequence of your abuse and you'll never know whether to blame your abuser or yourself.
Having a relationship of any kind with anyone is hard. It's one of the hardest things you have to do.
It's not a simple "there's a new boy at school and I'm falling for him, so I'll tell him everything and he'll just be okay about it. He won't freak out. He won't treat me different. He'll love me unconditionally".
It's not like that at all.
When you try to talk to your siblings about the divorce they blame you for being the cause. They blame you for letting the abuse happen. For driving a wedge between your parents, who blame themselves for not knowing something was wrong. They blame each other for letting it happen. For letting their kid down for so long.
But no one has the courage to blame you face-to-face. They just hate you silently behind your back and try to be nice when you're watching. It wasn't your fault. No one's allowed to treat you the way they would treat a normal person. You're always on a pedestal you wish would break. And you lose your family because you were a coward that found courage.
When you go on your first date, you think he only asked you out because he felt bad for you. You think he sees you like a project. Like something he can fix and make all better simply by noticing you. And you wish it were true, but you know it's not. You know that a cute face and a nice ass can't fix what's wrong with you.
When you have someone that sincerely does not care about your past and treats you like a regular person, you grow so attached to them that suddenly you depend on them. And every night you stay up worrying that you're going to drive them away. And then what? What's going to happen when you lose the one thing in your life that you can count on?
What happens when the one person who doesn't see you as the scared little five year old you once were just gets tired of you? What happens when they leave?
You ask yourself that all the time but you know the answer. You hate the answer.
When you have sex for the first time you can't help hating how easily you let yourself be used. You're just an object of pleasure. You hate yourself because you let your abuser use you and now you're letting some boy use you.
This boy says he loves you. He says that it doesn't matter what happened when you were a kid. But you can't help wondering if he's proud of himself. You wonder if he thinks he's showing you what it's like to be with a real man. He thinks he's fixing you and you think you'll never be able to stop comparing everything you do to being abused.
You can't stop wondering if he looks at your skin and sees the same thing your abuser did. You hope he doesn't see what left you laying in a hospital bed all night, crying and begging the nurses for your parents when you were seven. You can't stop wishing he would look at you like that with your clothes on even though when he does, you don't see it.
Because you feel like you owe him. You owe him for showing you what it's like to be with a real man and not some pedophile. And you never realize that you don't owe him a damn thing.
When you see duct tape you cringe and when you hear wood splintering you get sore for so many reasons and yet there is no reason at all.
When your college roommate decides she finally wants to get wasted for the first time you can't help thinking about how great it's going to be to not think about your past for a while. To just get shit faced with someone new and pretend nothing bad has ever happened.
But you're both too young to buy alcohol, so you trick a cute guy in one of your labs to buy you beer and then ditch him to party with your friend. And when you ditch him, you realize that you just used him. You took what you wanted from him and treated him like trash just like your abuser did to you. In that moment, you and the cute boy from your lab are expendable.
When you wake up the next morning, despite the awful hangover, you can't help loving that you haven't thought about being abused...until you realize that thinking about not thinking about the abuse is thinking about the abuse. And although you can't remember everything about the night before, you know you had been wishing your abuser could have seen you out having fun. Being a real person. You wish he could see you be happy.
When you're lying on the bathroom floor, clutching at the toilet, wondering what possessed you to think that mixing whiskey and chocolate milkshakes together was a good idea, one of your suitemates comes in and shames you. As she watches you, sitting in a crumpled mess, still wearing yesterday's clothes and last night's smudged makeup, she looks disgusted and disappointed. But she covers it with a thin, transparent smile.
It's the same look people give you when they know what happened. It's the same, weak attempt to be nice when they're feeling nothing but shame for you.
And you hate everyone that looks at you like that so you simply hate everyone.
When you finally find the guy you think is the one, you lay beside him at night, listening to him breathe the heavy, deep breaths of sleep and know that there's always going to be the third person with you. It doesn't matter where you go or what you do, that memory is always going to be there. You two will never be alone.
And at night, you hear the third person. You hear your abuser and you wish you could think about the ones you love as often as you think about the one you hate. Because the guy sleeping quietly next to you deserves your attention. He knows everything and yet he doesn't care. It doesn't scare him.
You want to reach out and touch him. You want to shake him awake, but you're afraid that in the darkness he'll hear the third person too. And you can't do that. You can't become an object to him too. He's the only one left that treats you like a person. That treats you normally.
He's so good to you that he deserves all the attention you waste on a memory. On a space that you will never fill.
And as complete as he makes you feel, you'll never be whole again.
When the abuse stops, you don't have to lie anymore, but you still do, because it makes you feel better.
When you were being abused and you lied about it, you learned that you don't have to live in the real world. So, now that it's over, you lie and you lie and you lie. Because you miss it. You miss your old self and your fantasy world. The one that made everything okay. It made life bearable.
You lie about things that don't matter. Things that no one else cares about.
My parents split because they don't love each other anymore. I don't have a boyfriend. I've never been in the hospital. I've never had sex. I've never gotten drunk.
The lies are stupid. They're petty. But they mean the world to you.
I've never read about that. Wattpad doesn't show you that side of abuse, because that side's not pretty.
It seems that all these authors forget that beauty fades and time goes on and that perfect, pretty little story just goes away. But the truth is harder to forget. It's harder to hide from.
The truth is, abuse isn't just a backstory. People use it to give their character depth and yet, somehow their character manages to be more shallow than a kiddie pool.
If you're going to write about abuse, be honest.
Don't make it all about how some guy saved some drowning girl. You don't drown in a kiddie pool.
You drown in the lies. You drown in the hate. You drown in the comparisons.
You drown because that's a lot of weight to carry.
And heavy objects have this funny way of sinking.