This Healing Shit

On self-betrayal, the body, and what healing actually looks like.

I took this right after spending one of those nights with him. I kept it to show myself the truth and ask myself what was I doing?

This healing shit is for the birds.

I mean, not really. I want it, I need it, badly. But right now I am angry and embarrassed and disgusted. That’s the brutal honesty.

It’s strange how healing works. We’ve all heard it: that it comes in layers, that you think you’ve dealt with something and then life circles back and hands it to you again. Strange to actually live it, though. To go through it and go through it and then go through it some more while some part of you keeps insisting you should be finished by now or thinking you’ve already covered that part.

I’m not finished.

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The surface layer was accountability for what I’d done to another woman.

He told me he was divorced when we met. Said the alimony he was paying was “woooorth it”, just like that, the word stretched out like he was savoring something. Time passed. I didn’t want to admit what I was feeling, so I started digging instead. Found his real last name, since he’d lied about that too. That last name opened doors: his wife’s name, their home address, and proof that they were very much married. When I confronted him, he said they were still together to raise their children.

I’d done something similar once. Stayed under the same roof as my now ex-husband for the sake of the family while we lived separate lives. I knew people who made that choice. I told myself I understood the arrangement.

By all accounts, he hated his wife and she hated him. The way he kept me at arm’s length had a way of managing my feelings toward him, keeping everything just off-balance enough that I started seeing other people too, sometimes telling him, often not. We weren’t committed. He eventually told me he was also seeing two other women, all while living under the same roof with his wife and children.

And like a puppet, I played into his hand. I did my best to be the laid-back one, the accepting one, the one who was down for whatever. The one acting her way into his heart. In reality I was the biggest pushover of them all, because I had learned everything about everyone (from his perspective) and I still chose to play the game. I figured: as long as I know what’s really going on, I can be okay with it. He confided in me and no one else. That was my prize.

I’m not sure what could be more sad than that.

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The self-betrayal is what I’m still struggling with, years later.

I can trace accountability for the other woman. I’ve done that work, and that particular wound has closed in ways I didn’t expect. I consider his now ex-wife a sister and love her dearly. What stays open is this: how do I forgive myself for what I chose? For the four years I had the power to leave and didn’t? For what I let happen to my body, for his pleasure, in the hope that it would eventually mean something to him? For feeling intense physical pain to a point where I chose to give myself over to it because I believed I deserved it and would be rewarded for it? What kind of sickness is that?

I’m not saying the men who physically brutalized me, at his direction, bear no accountability. They do. But that reckoning is theirs to find. What I’m sitting with is my part: I was willing, until I wasn’t. And beyond that point I didn’t have a choice. What I know is that in situations like that one, it becomes a gang mentality. When it’s all men performing for each other, the woman stops being human. I played into not being human. I believed I deserved it. And that really fucking sucks to say out loud.

That choice, repeated over and over, is still living inside me. The disgust, the sickness, the shame. My pelvic floor is collapsing and my hips feel like they’re welded in place. I can’t fathom allowing a man to touch me and luckily there’s no interest there. I’m genuinely happy alone in a way I’ve never been before. I have journals going back decades full of longing for someone to just love me, and somewhere along the way that need got met by me. It’s not lost on me that if I truly love myself, I should be able to forgive myself. Herein lies the pain that my body is still holding. The parts I haven’t processed yet are making themselves known.

This is all coming up because I recently started working with a trainer to strengthen my pelvic floor. And then, by happenstance (as if the universe behaves in happenstance), I ended up in a Nia class. Eight days ago I didn’t know what Nia was. Tonight I attended my second class, and somewhere in the middle of it the feeling hit me right in my womb. My hips shook and shimmied something loose until I couldn’t stand anymore. I stopped and lay down on the floor and let people dance around me. Eyes closed, feeling the music. Just like a movie montage, the flashbacks came one after another: the situations I had allowed, what was done to me, what I had done to myself.

I wanted to throw something across the room. I chose to write this instead.

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I don’t know what comes next. I’m actively working on getting better, physically at least, which keeps turning up the emotional volume. Writing is my medicine for that part, even when — especially when — I don’t know where it leads.

I made bad mistakes. I was played by someone very good at it. And I was the one with the power to leave, every day for four years, but couldn’t find the door until one day I did. Then I slammed the door shut. The truth is I’m extremely proud I finally found the clarity, but it took being hit by a literal truck for me to wake up to how little this man cared for me. I really don’t want to require another major wakeup call to forgive myself which is the absolute hardest and most important thing to do. Like, I know this. It’s just so easy to get lost in it sometimes. I know I need to remain open to what feels like continued healing. The body has a way of making sure you don’t skip ahead.

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