Vile

He used to take my photo and critique it later. He’d save them on his phone and bring them out at intervals, zooming in on various parts of me and telling me what he didn’t like about them. A camera roll of unhappy imperfection, a catalogue of my flaws. In later years, there were pictures of me turning from the camera, sheltering from its critical glare. Zoom in, zoom out. There are photos with my shoulders hunched and my eyes hollowed, looking but not seeing. The fight and the light extinguished. I’m catapulted back to a place where I’d cry daily, hourly even. My eyes puffy and red from perpetual tears, my self esteem and veneer cracked and chipped. Chip, chip, chip away and the cracks appear. Deep ravines etched across my face, body, spirit. A trapped, frightened shell of a person, waiting to be attacked, being shouted at from the doormat before the front door had even clicked shut behind him. Bemoaning my faults.

You. You have the look of a lioness, you hone in, focus on your prey, go for the jugular, or the Achilles heel. It’s him taking stock all over again. You appraise me with your glare and in your eyes I see my faults and flaws. They are reflected back at me, I see me how you see me, how he saw me. Useless, slow, a nuisance. I could make you a list of all my shortcomings: size, face, height, feet, hair, make up, clothing, personality, lack of intelligence, inability to cook, sing, draw, run, walk, drive, tell a joke. The list is endless, he was remorseless and attacked relentlessly. He made me feel as though I was failing as a wife, a mother, a woman. Midwifery saved me, it gave me a tribe of people who cared, and allowed me to slowly rebuild my life. The thing that saved me is being shaken to its very foundations. I can’t defend or advocate for myself in your company, let alone do so for anyone else. You are crushing my dream.

The man who was meant to love me and fight for me, instead stripped me bare and squeezed the life out of me. He saw my vulnerability and used it to his advantage, made himself the bigger man. He pushed and pushed and pushed, then pushed some more. Reduced to a crumpled crying mess, he would step over me and turn it around. I was irrational, had a high opinion of myself, was too sensitive, had misunderstood him. The sobbing on the floor with him looming over me wasn’t my insanity, it was his cruelty. He squashed my dreams of a family and a home and safety. I wanted to feel safe and loved, he stole that. He threatened to take my children from me, because I am mental. I stayed in a house that I loved, that I chose, but that had become my prison, because I was an unfit mother unworthy and incapable of providing for or loving my girls. He forced me to choose. He forced me to stay because he told me that social services would take my children from me if I tried to leave with them. He forced me to leave, otherwise I’d have been buried alive.

You are now trampling my dreams, because I have nothing else left to give. He laid the foundations of destruction, but you’re carrying on his legacy. I don’t have the confidence or self-esteem left for you to beat down, there’s no surplus for you to strip away. You just take me back to rock bottom. There are no prizes for being a bully, for manipulating and subjugating people, no awards for making others bow down or shrink in your presence. Submission is not respect, nor is it love or admiration. It is fear and humiliation and the hope of escaping the shame and torture that you are about to inflict.

I have no fight, you get to feel like the ultimate powerhouse because you are unchallenged, unwavering in your certainty that you are right in how you treat me. Do you recognise the shadow that falls across my face when you sting me, or the sadness that threatens to topple me before I manage to steady myself, avoiding your victorious gaze, while inevitably apologising and complying? Do you see the flush of anger or shame or hurt, or perhaps all three? Maybe you’ve been there yourself. Maybe you know that feeling but you like being on the other side and dishing it out. May I never be the one dishing it out, may I never be so cruel.

He spun me around like a carousel. Up and down, round and round, too fast to get off or to even get my bearings. The conversation, mood, turned on a sixpence. Confusing and irrational, it left me guarded and afraid of the direction that life might take. Dinner could turn into accusations. Bed time became blame time. The supermarket was the backdrop to “Please love me!”. Eventually I wasn’t allowed to go to the supermarket to do the shopping, no choice, no freedom. I didn’t see the bills or mortgage statement or credit card repayments, but I paid half. He paid and checked my phone bill, and then checked my messages. Going out involved a cacophony of “Who with, why, for how long, where?”, with a torrent of texts requesting my return as soon as I left the house. Staying at home was easier, and my life shrank to fit within those four walls. I got up, I went to work, I sat on the sofa and studied, I went to bed. He was less angry that way. The kids were a weapon, as was money, freedom, sex. My life was small and claustrophobic. Leaving meant I had to break out and start living. Raise my chin up and tilt my face towards the sun, make friends, go out. Your gaze, disappointment, disapproval, it has made me pull up the draw bridge and shrink my life back down to a handful of people again. People I trust not to trample me. I will not let anyone else in because I am not strong enough to pick myself up and dust myself off another time. I cannot do it, you are enough to contend with at the moment.

His abuse was about power, control, manipulation, its insidious nature has destroyed me to the core. It might take a lifetime to rebuild trust in others, to learn to make friends and confidences, to let my guard down, to let people in, lest someone make me tumble again. Another fall would be catastrophic. How would I get up and dust myself off a second, third or fourth time?

He has robbed me of my identity, devalued me, rotted my insides. It’s made me afraid. Afraid of waking up, leaving the house, making eye contact, saying my own name out loud. Walking into a room full of people takes gargantuan effort and a poker face to rival the best of the best card sharks. The undercutting, belittling, snide remarks that few would call abuse, but that mount up to a lifetime of regrets and broken dreams and unkept promises. The moments that are stockpiled, the times I want to mumble under my breath, “Sorry for existing”.

He treated me with such generalised disdain, contempt, and sometimes outright disgust, that I have very low expectations of the treatment that I am willing to accept at the hands of others. I don’t expect tea or friendship or anything fancy. I’m not even sure I expect you to want to talk to me. I don’t want recognition or praise. I want to get through the shift unnoticed. I want to lie low and not provoke outrage, disappointment, scorn. I want to finish my shift with my head held high, without considering ways that I could make myself disappear before I have to wake up and be with the world again and again and again.

Today I had three panic attacks. I work too quickly or too slowly, the guidelines and expectations shift like quicksand under my feet and I just don’t understand. I’m scared of my own shadow when we’re on shift together, and I pray that everything will stay within normal limits because I dread having to ask for help. I am the ultimate failure. I once asked for help and was met with such derision that I wanted the ground to swallow me whole. I faced the office full of midwives at handover and was humiliated publicly and purposefully.

I want to tape a sign to myself that says, “I know I’m shit”. Using me as a punchbag is easy pickings. He broke me a long time ago and you can’t break me much more. I left him because otherwise I’d have died. My self-esteem and reserves of resilience will not take much more of a bashing because they are already nigh on obliterated. Every day, putting on the mask and facing the world takes more courage than I sometimes have in my pocket.

I drove to work this afternoon, intent on having my NIPE training signed off. Instead, I had the first panic attack. Driving into the car park, I was already in tears at the thought of having to go back into the building. When I walked into the hospital, I could barely keep my legs from buckling under me. The door code to the ward had changed and I couldn’t get in before the panic took hold. The weight on my chest was unbearable, my breathing was ragged and laboured, the sweat was pouring off me as the adrenaline coursed through my body. I locked myself in the toilet cubicle and melted, my whole being was wracked with guttural sobs. Mascara leaked down my blotchy face.

I finally got into the ward and knocked on the glass door. A door which swung open and saw me crumble before a senior midwife who had mentored me through the very darkest of my student days, when I walked away from my marriage. Despite bearing witness to the despair, she had never before seen me cry, and you did that. She made me tea and it threatened to slop over the sides as my shaky hands tried to bring the cup to my lips.

When I was a student, she’d sat me down in a cupboard of a room with my tutor and told me that I allowed people to walk all over me and treat me like rubbish. Her words have haunted me ever since. It felt as though it was my fault: I invited this treatment, and it had happened again. I had yet another person around me that thought it was acceptable to treat me like a worthless piece of something she’d stood in. It’s a pattern that wends its way through various chapters of my life, so surely I am the common denominator. I must make it happen because I am a bad person. I’ve spent two years diligently checking my roster to see when our paths will cross so that I can at least prepare myself for what is to come. The ritual humiliation that I don’t think my shoulders are broad enough to bear anymore.

I don’t want to confront someone who makes me want to disappear. When I left the building, I sobbed into my scarf and my body shook as I started the ignition. On the way home I wondered how I could disappear, cease to exist, and make it look like an accident. The only reason that I didn’t decide to drive away and continue head first into a verge was because the last person I’d spoken to was the life guru and I wouldn’t have wanted to shovel that level of guilt onto her. I already felt guilty as she’d tried to help but made me cry more. A story she told was a trigger from my own marriage, which was then exacerbated by a seemingly innocuous comment making my nasty brain tell me that we shouldn’t be friends. He used to not let me go out and socialise, there was no music, no talking, no laughter. Maybe I’m not good enough to be her friend, my brain is telling me to step away because my hideousness will poison her life. He used to tell me that my own parents didn’t love me. My dad offered to pay for my wedding to make up for his lack of love. My mum never hugged me as a child. When I walked away from him, I left behind the rest of my life because I was too ashamed to admit what my life had become and ask for help, or beg for forgiveness for having shut them out.

Midwifery had been my sanctuary, providing shelter from home when it got bad. It protected me from the loneliest times and gave me a tribe of women to laugh and cry with. Work was a safe space where my brain could relax, because he couldn’t get me there. He couldn’t inhabit that world and therefore couldn’t inhibit it, he couldn’t nip my ambition in the bud or tell me I wasn’t enough because he didn’t know. Luckily, he’d already done the leg work – he’d made me feel so insecure that I already knew that I wasn’t good enough to be a midwife, to care, to be close, to love, to feel, to be. I had no right to hope, dream, aspire, breathe. The life guru has worked tirelessly to make me feel as though I am enough, that the midwife that I am is enough. This weekend I have failed her because I let the nasty voices in. There was once again an external voice jibing, questioning, picking, critiquing, contradicting, belittling. The voice inside my head had a complete meltdown. Of course I’m not good enough, you’re just vocalising what everyone else is thinking, I shouldn’t be a midwife.

Twelve hours is a long time to spend on a knife edge, wondering what will be picked up next. I’ve twisted the knife into my own skin, there’s no need for you to sink the blade in further. The goal posts shift and I am exhausted by that, and I can’t learn, work, care or even stand up straight if the expectations are ever-changing. Twelve hours feel like four days and I don’t think my nerves can hang on in there if this is going to go on for another year or two or five or ten. Even worse, your behaviour is accepted as the norm and sneaks into other people’s leadership styles. If you can’t beat them, join them. Grown women shrink in on themselves. Others become hunters baying for blood.

This evening, one of my daughters wrapped me in a hug and held me tight because I hadn’t seen her for a few days. The flood gates opened. She struggled to make sense of my garbled sobs, finally managing to pick out “missed you” and “mean to me”. She’s eight years old. My eight year-old daughter stroked my hair while I sobbed because you’d made me question my value as a midwife and as a person. You make me want to melt away and not exist anymore, blend into the background and disappear. I turned into a ghost in my own home. I had no opinions, no say, no casting vote, I was invisible because he made me invisible. He dismissed my presence to mere fragments scattered about. That’s how you make me feel on shift, such is your power to humiliate. No longer a person, no longer with any worth.

I walked away from an abusive husband, from my home and my family, please don’t make me walk away from a job that I love and that saved me. I’m terrified that I will make bad choices and let bad people into my life because they might treat me as he did and you do. My home is empty a lot of the time, but it is safe a lot of the time. If ever we were in the car together, he’d slap my thigh and hold on tight to it. Power, pain, possession. You assert, whether knowingly or unknowingly, your hold on me by knocking me down a peg or two every single time we cross paths. It’s not once a shift, it’s constant. You’re now flinging me around on that same carousel as he did, I have no idea which direction the shift will take. I remember once that you acknowledged my existence without there being an undertow of humiliation. It was so rare that it stopped me in my tracks, and I held my breath waiting for the punchline that would knock me to the floor. I don’t hold my breath for those moments: they put me equally on edge because with him it meant he was building up to cutting me down even further.

************

I’ve not yet decided whether you’ve beaten me. He bested me. He got me out of my marriage, my home, full-time motherhood, financial security, he forced me out because it was the only way to save my life. When I started writing this, I wanted it all to be over again because two years of your behaviour has taken me back to a bleak place. I hated myself and wanted to die.

In the past two weeks, the members of the tribe that I can bear to let in have tried to superglue me back together and show me that I am enough. Senior midwives have hugged, loved and supported me because I am a person and maybe I deserve that kindness and respect. The life guru has checked up on me at the beginning and end of each shift, because she knows what he did and can see what you’re doing, and because she cares. Can you imagine someone caring that much? He’s told me, and you’re telling me, that I’m worthless, yet there are people in my life who care enough to check I’m OK.

Even so, you’ve further undermined my trust in other people: I don’t trust that the life guru doesn’t just pity me, why else would we be friends? Maybe she feels as though she’s stuck with me, some sense of obligation keeping her in my life. Our friendship scares me because she will inevitably see me the way I see myself, I will manage to destroy it, she will leave. I didn’t trust the midwife who invited me to dinner with her family before my night shift last weekend: why would anyone subject their family to me when I am this awful? I am left confused by the awesome people who seem to want to spend time with me, and the terrible ones who treat me appallingly. The tribe build me up, the bad people obliterate any scrap of self worth that I had. I’ve let my life shrink back down to the four walls in which I live, I’ve pushed most of the people away because what if he’s right, what if you’re right? I’ve downsized because I am scared. What if you’re right and the tribe are wrong? What if the awesome people start to see me the way I see myself, and the pattern repeats itself? Every time I get knocked down, it gets harder and harder to drag myself back to my feet again. I honestly don’t know how many times I can get myself back up again.