choices

Control is a very insidious thing. It creeps upon a person, snaring you bit by bit. Entraping you so carefully, you hardly notice the spiderweb wrapping your hands, your feet. Silken strands steal across your mouth. Then you open your eyes and discover you can't speak. And you don't recall the way to run, or to push away with your hands. You have forgotten, even, the fact that you have a right to all these things. Instead of fighting, you apologise for wanting more.

Looking back, I realise I was becoming aware of my imprisonment for several years before I acknowledged it aloud. I remember fantasizing about my boyfriend's death. Not the actual dying, I didn't want him to suffer. I simply wished that he would no longer be there. Although I dreaded the loneliness, I dreamed of being alone.

I woke up to my condition around my fourtieth birthday. Finally, I was ready to admit that things were dreadfully skewed. For 24 years, I had allowed him to reshape me, while my real self looked on from her chair behind my eyes, hidden among the shadows in my head. Somehow, around my fourtieth birthday, something changed within me, and I began to climb out from the ill fitting skin. I began to speak up. To insist on being myself in this way, and this way ... and this way too. Piece by piece I reclaimed Me.

He fought to press me back, but I would no longer allow it. As he grabbed at my hands, trying to retie them, I understood that he did not love me. I began to see that I did not love him either. We had been using each other to prop up our sagging confidance - my lack of self worth, his insecurity.... I understood now that he was not so strong as I had believed. It was possible for me to call his bluff and escape.

I think about the placement of blame - who did what to whom? Does it even matter? I think about the fact that I stayed through all the physical abuse, only to leave when he showed signs of becoming a softer man. I think it was this that hurt him the most. He might have understood, perhaps, if I'd been unable to forgive him for inflicting his rage on me, and refused to come back. But I had stayed through all of that, because I fooled myself into believing his love made everything worthwhile.

His mistake was allowing me to see that I was holding onto a myth - the love I had believed in so desperately, was nothing more than his desire to own me. My mistake was in my mute compliance as my life was arranged for me, as though I were a child. There is blame to be placed on both of us, and on our parents, and their parents. I supposed it might go back to the beginning of time, if I wanted to spend the energy in all that introspection. Instead I will move on. Life is too short to dwell on what might, or should have been. There is a bright future ahead. This time I will keep my eyes open as I make my way forward.