Leave Him

It's not selfish to want to live

Lot and His Daughters by Artemisia Gentileschi, ca. 1635-1638. (I think she, like I, had some doubts about their supposed seduction of their father.)

[CW: Abuse]

I’m not going to get into everything he’s done¹, because you already know, and—let’s be honest—you’ve got a million justifications rattling around your head, most of them in that tone of smooth self-assurance that fills your eyes with smoke. You’ve done your best, too. You’ve worked hard and then worked harder to improve: to become more pleasing, less angry, less stubborn, less demanding, less opinionated in front of his friends, less together with your own, less judgmental, less wrong all the fucking time—how the hell can you still be so wrong after everything you’ve tried, after how much less you’ve struggled to become? 

You’re sure that if you could just try a little harder, if you could just make your brain work a little better, if you could just really see things the way he tells you that they are, everything would be fine. It would be the way he promised all those years ago, in those first weeks after you met—some improbable coincidence which he said was a sign from god/karma/kismet that he’d found the only woman in the world for him. The only one who could understand him, who completed him, and who was nothing like those psychotic bitches who had damaged him so much before. All he needed was your eyes, your touch, your smile, and all of his life’s terrible injustices fell away. What power you felt, back then. The power of a goddess, of a saint, of a muse. Your labor was the magic that would save him. Why begrudge it?

But the thing is—it hurts. It hurts all the time, honestly, but you do your best to forget about that pain, to lock it into a place in the back of your mind where it can scream and jibber while you do everything you can to make things better. Sometimes it seems that you succeed: the day breaks and he’s happy and charming, just like you remember. Those days he smiles at you and compliments your cooking or your outfit without any sting in the tail. You tremble beneath his touch, breath hitching on the mantra that now he understands, that now things will will be better, that now you can have the beautiful life you thought you saw so long ago. 

But you can’t relax. The door closes a little hard; another glass rattles in the sink; he frowns at his telephone, and you could faint from the anticipation: from where will it come next, the blow? 

Your body knows, even as your heart hopes. It’s coming. It always comes, and it’s always your fault. A line of fire, rushing water, the stink of ozone, now you’ve done it: the perverse relief of shouts, of tears, of the savage way he strips you down—and it can be a cool savagery, precise, intellectual, got up in the finest cloth masculine pseudo-rationality can provide. At least now you know what you did wrong. At least now you can limp away to fix it. 

Between the crests and the troughs you hardly think anymore. Certainly never about yourself. When was the last time you asked yourself how you were doing, if you liked where you were going, if you wanted something else? Do those questions make you flinch? Does it feel like a sin—the kind that catches in your throat, that pushes up your bile—to even consider yourself as valuable for who you are, and not for what you give? 

You could give your life to him, and it wouldn’t make him any happier. After all, you already have.

You could give your life to him, until one day you die of it—first in spirit, and then in flesh. 

You could give your life to him—or you could snatch it back for yourself. 

Dearest sister, friend, stranger: Be as selfish as a runaway child screaming alarm down the driveway. Be as selfish as dog growling over her bone. Be as selfish as a woman who may no longer be turned against herself.

1. This is a dynamic that I know most intimately as one between women and men, and that’s how I present it here. Nevertheless, while the Western patriarchy certainly reinforces and engenders this kind of abuse, it’s by no means limited to men as the perpetrators and women as the victims. It can be part of a romantic relationship, a parental relationship, work, religion, sports, etc. Gender is relevant but not limiting: queer people of all genders are often particularly vulnerable. This piece isn’t meant to address every abusive dynamic; I know I’m leaving out a lot of shading. It’s here for those to whom it can speak; I hope it might help someone.