Deeper Well
The cognitive deficits sting. I’ve accepted that I’ll never be the same, but the specifics of the loss materialize almost daily.
A woman kept populating in my suggested friends on Facebook, and I couldn’t place her. I knew the name was familiar, and the face…and when it finally came to me after five or six days of seeing her in the rotation, I was stunned. She’s someone I’ve known of for decades, met, hugged, and spoken to last year, and recently found myself in a position where her profession and my personal safety intersected.
I’m getting older. I’ve been through a lot. But this one bothered me. This was one of those opaque walls that are new, and they block so much of what I knew.
Cognitively, I’m dipping from a shallower well. And it injects a small amount of hopelessness into my mind every time I am reminded. When my bucket scrapes the bottom and I dredge up useless sludge.
I was never the quickest, but I was quick. Never the sharpest, but I was sharp.
My wit and banter were cited as reasons the abuser was intrigued in the early days. I don’t give a shit why he chose me - it certainly wasn’t with good intentions - but that recollection stings a bit more.
They seek out what they want to destroy.
Unremarkable men who harm others love a bright, beautiful, bold woman.
Surviving the destruction has left me wondering what’s left. Physically, I wish I were invisible. I don’t care what I look like, or how much I’ve aged, or if anyone finds me attractive. It’s unimportant.
But mentally, I long to know if anything else will return, or improve, or heal. The opaque walls and sludgy buckets have a way of weighing one down.
That being said…
The juxtaposition of what has been taken and what has been given is a mindfuck I grapple with every day.
When it comes to what has been revealed - my god, what a deeper well.
I still have so much to learn. I’ll never be done learning. I am humbled and awestruck by the Kit Gruelles of the world. She has a gift for zeroing in on the most crucial details and the most telling signs when sharing the latest crimes in IPV. I am inspired by the moving and succinct combinations of infographics and informative text that the Eric Threlkelds share; breaking the horrors and the hope down into digestible, shareable bites.
I also have so much to offer, as I translate my lived experience into a useful body of work. It’s not easy work. The deeper the well, the more realizations I have, and they come at a price.
Abuse aims to attach shame to the survivor, and it lingers. It’s like a stain that just won’t lift. Shame keeps us afraid, fear keeps us silent, and silence is necessary for an abuser to avoid accountability. Shame is powerful, and it’s easier to shed intellectually than it is to actually rid one’s body, mind, and ghost of it. It hurts. It threatens to drag me into an eviscerating trip down memory lane…I ask why, and how, and what I could have done differently.
In that regard, time is not my friend. The well grows deeper with each passing day, and the trips become more difficult. But I am strong enough - or stubborn enough - to find a way through.
Because what has been taken is vast…but what has been given is limitless. I have but a pebble, but it can make ripples for as long as my story lives on. It has already helped some. I hope it helps many more. No sludge, no opaque walls…just the clarity to see before it’s too late. Before the well runs dry.