Links Like Oxygen
I just got a call from an old friend of mine. Zie just got out of an abusive relationship. I mean, just got out, like two weeks ago. Zie’s currently safe, but in that space some of you might remember or relate to: just sort of wandering around hir house in a daze, all twisted up and confused and not sure what to do next. Zie knows what happened to hir is best described as abuse, but is still using air quotes when zie refers to hir own abuse — zie’s just having trouble wrapping hir head around what’s been happening these last few years, and what the hell zie ought to do now.
I’m going to buy hir a fuckton of books, some specifically about abuse, and some just plain books — part of hir abuse centered around not being allowed to do anything, and not being allowed to think, and I want to give hir a whole big box of, “Here! You are allowed to use your brain again!”
Zie’s got spotty internet access at the moment, so I was also going to send hir some printouts of some of my favorite posts about abuse. I wanted to hear it from you lot: what are some of your favorites? I’m not talking about my posts necessarily (though feel free to let me know if one of them specifically resonated with you), but any post in the blogosphere that made you sit up and go, “Hey now.” Whether it made you think about your abusive relationship while you were in it, helped you put together the pieces after you left, or helped you look at a friend or family member and realize you understood what was happening better now — just any post about abuse that, you know, made you feel like that person just crawled into your head and described what was going on in a way you hadn’t been able to see.
I want to show my friend that there is a whole world of people emerging from the same cocoon zie is. Zie’s been cut off for such a long time, and zie is very hesitant to speak to a shelter (you know, the usual: it’s not that bad, zie doesn’t want to ask for help, etc. I did this one, too, and I wish I hadn’t, but that’s how it goes) — I hope hearing some words from others who have gone through it will give hir a thrill of recognition. And I also hope hearing some words from others who have gone through it and are now living their own lives and writing very powerfully and vocally might give hir some hope for where zie will be someday.
I’m sure a lot of you remember what it was like to lose your voices, and have to work very hard to find them again. I found the blogosphere after I had regained my voice, but for a long time, I couldn’t write at all. I dug up old journal entries, and snatches of stories I had written over the years, and desperate things scribbled into the margins of school notes, and I cut them up and pasted them into new sentences, because I needed so badly to speak but had forgotten how. I suspect the blogosphere fulfills that function for some people, giving voice to words that are stopped up in the throat. I’m hoping to hand hir a big pile of these posts and say, “Here, check it, every abuser is wearing the same face, and there every survivor is, too. You aren’t the exception that will never get better, that nobody can ever understand. You’re not terminally unique, and you will get your life back.”
One thing zie asked me very pointedly: “How do I make sure I don’t do this again? I’m terrified of talking to anybody ever again.” My advice to hir was to be selfish, that nobody will ever treat hir better than zie treats hirself, that putting hirself before others is how zie shows to the world that zie is not somebody who exists to meet other people’s needs and zie will not tolerate being used that way. Zie found that very hard to chew on — zie is, like I’m sure many of you are, somebody who (as my mother puts it) asks hir guests if their feet are cold and beats hirself up if zie didn’t offer them socks. I found being selfish very liberating, but I am not hir, and maybe this advice doesn’t do it. So, if you have some advice about how you changed your life to try to keep abuse out, leave them in the comments. I’ll print out this post and send it to hir, too.
Thanks, everybody.
Comments are closed.
Just wanted to let you know there was some pronoun slippage in the first few paragraphs, you might want to go through and check (if you’re looking to anonymize hir).
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: Thanks — I always do this. I don’t think zie cares about whether or not hir gender is revealed, and I don’t have any reason in particular for making this extra anonymous, but lately I’ve kind of been feeling like it’s just good practice and politeness to not reveal more than needs revealing. And now that I’ve gotten in the (sloppy, apparently) practice of using gender-neutral pronouns more often, I’m realizing that gender really isn’t a crucial detail in a lot of general stories I tell about people, so I’ve been trying to omit it whenever it’s not really necessary.
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I am going to link to myself, I don’t know if it will help but this was part of my healing and it might help her.
http://cheshire-bitten.livejournal.com/223393.html
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sorry hir
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It’s not directly related to abuse, but this caught my attention recently and your comment about beating one’s self up for not offering socks brought it to mind: http://confessionsofahoarder.blogspot.com/2008/12/making-mistakes.html
The blog’s written by a recovering hoarder (her house looks great now!), and this entry discusses forgiving yourself for mistakes. She discovered that she hung on to feelings of guilt in the same way she hung on to stuff – forever, and in every detail. She called it emotional hoarding. I wish I could say she presents a quick and easy solution, but there isn’t one. But just recognizing it – and recognizing that other people do it too – is a useful first step. One of the comments said that the object is ” to tell yourself as much truth as you can, trying to hear it and still treat yourself with the gentleness and compassion you would give a child”, which I think is as apt a description of the healing process as I’ve ever heard.
Best of wishes to your friend.
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Along with your oxygen analogy, perhaps selfishness would be easier for hir to swallow with the analogy of “putting on your own oxygen mask first”: relating to others requires being available to them to some extent, and you can’t be available to others if you aren’t taking care of your own needs first.
This comment is the best!
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How to change your life to keep abuse out – I think a legitimizing social support network is crucial. I say that having been in and out of different abusive relationships of varying degrees, and the only time I’ve been able to break that cycle of falling back into abuse is by actually being able to recognize that it was abuse in the first place – and having that backed up by other people. Social support was never any good to me when it was just friends saying “yeah man, that was fucked up” and then assuming I’d be fine, or assuming that I was stupid for getting involved with another abuser, or worse, encouraging me to get involved with someone who would be “good for me” because of what I’ve been through. A relationship or situation can feel or more often *look* “safe” because the person is actually an abuser and therefore is displaying fairly deceptive traits of being a strong personality, or aggressive or protective, or seems totally concerned with only you, or takes a combative stance toward your past abuser and/or enablers such as family and friends – or even takes the soft, sensitive, emotionally manipulative approach – that can be really hard to see when you yourself and everyone around you is committed to not talking about the abuse.
Where social support like friends and family is concerned, that’s behaviour that’s minimizing, not legitimizing. You need to either be around people who will consciously address the issue of abuse and of keeping you safe, or you need to stay away from people if they won’t. That’s why women’s shelters and crisis centers exist. Unfortunately, it’s so fricking hard to reach out. When I was forced to confront memories of abuse and the fact that I was abused, I still could not think of myself legitimately – I knew I needed help and felt too “weak” to do it alone, but felt I didn’t deserve the help because my problems weren’t “bad” enough. I played a game with myself: “dial the number for the crisis center, and simply pretend that what you’ve been through was really abuse. Even if you don’t know if it was, or believe it, even if you have your doubts, even if you don’t think you deserve the help – just pretend.” It’s a version of your approach, Harriet – of being selfish. Oh, the mental acrobatics we have to engage in just to take ourselves seriously.
I don’t have any link recommendations, but for books, a good one that covers both bases of “specifically about abuse” and “just plain books” is Women Who Run With The Wolves, by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. This saved me from an abusive relationship once. It also has stories and a lyrical style that is just plain fun and lovely to read, while also still being pretty muscular in terms of content. I know a lot of people make fun of this book or the concept or whatever – I don’t really know why. It’s not for everyone, but at least there’s no chance it’ll re-traumatize/minimize/inaccurately diagnose problems for your friend. It’s good and safe that way.
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Issendai recently wrote a great guide to recognizing abusive situations in general: How to Keep Someone with You Forever.
My own advice — Abusers often start with small, subtle boundary violations — the kind where, at the party where you both just met, he offers to get you a drink, and you say no thanks, and he says ‘Oh, come on, just have one!’. That’s him disrespecting your boundaries. Or he’ll ask for your phone number, you’ll say no, and he’ll ask again. That’s still him disrespecting your boundaries. A really good guy would have started by offering his phone number and letting you decide whether to call.
If you make a point of not dating men who commit these small, ordinary boundary violations, you will probably miss some decent guys, but you will be filtering out almost all the controlling, abusive types. That’s totally worth it.
The abusers who make it past that filter are the ones smart enough to act sweet initially. There are more filters to apply to them.
If he’s rough to small animals or children; if he makes ‘joking’ remarks about eating cats with mustard; if he hurts you or bruises you when you make out, and doesn’t instantly and permanently stop with the hurting when you let him know it hurts, drop him. If he pressures you to let making out always lead to intercourse, drop him extra firmly. If he claims that all of his exes were mean/crazy/unreasonable, then you know that he lies a lot; one or two would be possible, but ‘all’ mean that he rewrites all situations to make himself virtuous and other people bad, and we know what kind of person does that. Drop him.
Smart abusers arrange to isolate their target and remove her safety systems before showing their true abusive face. So, if the two of you always somehow socialize with his friends, not yours, that’s a bad sign. The more smoothly that happens, the more disturbing it should be. If your time seeing your friends and family is consistently followed by some kind of fight with him or domestic emergency, check one of the warning signs lists. If he wants you to move house with him, away from your friends and family, think carefully. Always keep your own bank accounts. Always keep a job.
One thing I’ve had to learn by experience is that when you try to stand on some of these principles, and the other person gives you a huge hard time about it? With long passionate explanations of how they are wounded to the core that you don’t trust them? Or how it’s a totally innocent coincidence that blah blah? That huge hard time IS a huge red flag. One of the biggest. No matter how sincere it seems. No matter how innocent the person otherwise seems. So one thing I’ve practiced is learning to fly by instruments: trust my rules over how it seems at the time, and stick to my rules no matter what. And the other thing is that, since the hard time can be awfully persuasive and the innocence awfully convincing, I don’t make decisions until I’ve had time to go away and think about it by myself (or talking with non-involved friends) for at least a day. That has saved me from persuasive sales talks that would have lured me into very bad positions if I’d acted on impulse.
And of course, any time anyone is pressuring you to make a decision right now, whether they’re a salesperson or a date, the answer is NO. Because the ‘yes’ option is not in your interest, and the time pressure is to prevent you from noticing that.
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One thing that I’ve found helpful is to take a step back, and imagine that I’m my own older sibling, Or that what’s happening to me is happening to a younger sister. It’s still hard for me to set up boundaries and be selfish, because the urge to smooth things over is SO strong, and most of the time I feel that I can ‘take’ it (or don’t even recognize the situation as bad in the moment). However, it’s often way easier for me to see what’s wrong when I take that step away, and imagine that what’s going on is happening to someone whom I love, whom I feel protective towards.
And I agree with Kathmandu about taking a day on big decisions – being away from pressure is often the only time I realize it’s there, and since I never want to ‘make a fuss’ by backing out of something I’ve committed to, being cautious with those commitments has been helpful. The boundary of ‘give me time’ is one that I’m more comfortable with, though, so maybe zie would benefit from figuring out which boundaries are easier to enforce/ stand by, and then working to use them often, to help build in support in areas where zie’s less comfortable.
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A friend sent me this as a wakeup call during my marriage: http://heartlessbitches.com/rants/manipulator/emotional_abuse.shtml
We spent at least an hour on IM while I read it, with me copying and pasting stuff to her in horror going “oh shit oh shit that’s him! THAT’S HIM!” and her very patiently saying, “yes, it is. Yes, I’ve seen him do that to you.”
It really helped me see how shitty it all was.
Plus, it’s useful to know that yes, these little bullshit things that don’t seem like a big deal ARE A BIG DEAL, especially when there are a lot of them.
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I found this in a local comic book store and it hit me like a punch in the gut just from browsing. I’m still “remembering” things I repressed from that time in my life:
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Most of the posts on here are really, really good. http://violenceunsilenced.com/
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This post isn’t technically about abuse (although that does come up), but it does have really moving and (I think) useful things to say about suffering:
http://therumpus.net/2010/07/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-44-how-you-get-unstuck/
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I wrote this entry last month about how controlling my ex was, which reminds me of what you describe – he wouldn’t let me read books, for example. I am not sure it offers any kind of advice but at least might sound like familiar circumstances:
http://fatbodied.wordpress.com/2010/08/13/violence-without-lifting-a-finger/
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Alice,
I have a friend who’s tends to be really self-destructive and neglect himself or make choices that aren’t in his best interest. To deal with this he imagines that his kid is a teen or adult and engaging in the same behavior, and imagines what he would want to say to her. I think this is a similar coping technique to the one you describe. For some reason it’s often a lot easier to see that other people in our lives deserve the kind of self-care that reflects their worth as a person, but we can’t see that about ourselves.
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It may not be hir cup of tea but Pandora’s Project (www.pandys.org) is a support site based out of Tori Amos fans but it’s not a “fan site”. It stems from her work with RAINN and it has been extremely helpful to me as an abuse survivor to have people I can talk with anonymously where I am not judged or asked “but how could you do that?” or “well, it’s not abuse if he said he’s sorry, right?” The site is well run and has an extensive set of safeguards and rules in place to prevent trolling, bashing, etc.
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I like this “Warning Signs That You’re Dating a Loser” list: http://www.mental-health-matters.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=171&showall=1
It says “loser” instead of “abuser” which maybe could help someone who feels that if their abuser didn’t hit them (but obviously I don’t know if this is the case for your friend) it must mean their partner actually was completely normal and THEY are the bad guy for feeling abused. On the other hand it might make someone go “oh so it wasn’t that bad and now I suck because I felt abused”. So, that depends where your friend is coming from and how they relate to the word “abuse”.
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@AK: DUDE! That is actually exactly what zie read that made hir leave — hir sister gave it to hir, and zie realized that hir abuser met 18 of the 20 qualifications. I’d been meaning to google it, since I hadn’t heard of this particular one.
And yeah, I think it had exactly the intended effect. Zie’s now using the term “abuse,” and says zie knows it applies, but still can’t feel like it’s actually about hir (I get where zie’s coming from there, I had the same reaction to the words “abuse” and “rape” for quite a long time), so I think it’s probably a safe assumption that if somebody had hit hir with, “Your relationship is abusive!” zie would’ve been way more skeptical.
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This thread at SomethingAwful.com is full of helpful resources, advice, and those who have been there/done that:
Right Here.
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Here is the post I wrote about leaving my own abusive relationship this June: The hardest thing I’ve ever done.
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I can’t offer any advice at all. I’ve been fighting shit for decades, and I’m sick of it.
But that’s not right. I’m a strong, mostly-confident middle-aged woman who’s getting her shit together, one day at a time.
But yeah, I fall down a lot. Tonight, I’m drunk again, abusing the same alcohol that has seen me through (and screwed up) the last 16 years. I stop sometimes. I restart sometimes. I think I won’t be truly healthy until I look back and see years without it, and don’t use that as an excuse to do it again.
But I’m not self-destructive. If anything, there’s that core of myself that refuses to ever, ever give up. I will ALWAYS be worth rescuing, according to that resilient compassionate core of myself, that part I wish were always in control of my life, that one I seem to only find when I’m driven to give up and cry, and wonder how I’ll manage. Then that resilient compassionate part of myself steps up and takes over.
I keep hoping that I will make permanent connection to that core of the wonderful me, one day, somehow, forever and ever. All I seem to be able to do is find it, lose it, then struggle to find it again. Maybe that’s normal. I don’t know. I don’t seem to know anything about normal. All I can do is find it sometimes, then lose it, then find it again. It’s a wonderful find, and a crushing loss. It’s about refinding, I think, the skill of refinding and finding again and finding over and over again.
That’s all I can do, in the end, is keep relearning how to find my wonderful self, the self that I love with all my heart, over and over again, no matter how many times I lose her. I love her so much that I will never give up the search.
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Not related to abuse, but related to remembering to listen to the voice in your gut, is The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. It’s my go-to for when I need to (a) feel better and (b) kick myself in the pants.
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I used to write about my abuse but recently took it all down and started writing about being a big fat vegan instead. I got what I wanted to out and at times had one of my past abusers look me up and harass me for it for a bit.
One book that helped me was Breaking the Cycle of Abuse by Beverly Engel, also going to a therapist helped too. I see her weekly and just sit and talk about nothing at all some days but knowing that she is there to listen to me, is on my side helped more than I can ever put into words.
I wish I had some wonderful words of wisdom to make things click for hir but I don’t all I can say is I fled my abusive husband twice, the first time I tried to stay with my dad and he got drunk and tried to rape me so I went back the second time I thought I had friends to back me up but they couldn’t help for long and I ended up being homeless for a little over a year and I was too terrified to ask for help because I kept thinking everything was my fault or that they would make me go back or that he would be made to pay for me somehow and then he again would have control over my life and it was pretty brutal for a bit. I can’t point to exactly where I figured out I wasn’t some worthless pile of crap that deserved what happened to me but it snuck in there somehow. I now have my own apartment, got remarried to someone who also had a past of abuse and is a good egg even if at times I still panic that I am going to end up like I was again.
Trust in others will come in time, it has to be earned and there is no shame in not giving it free anymore.
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Harriet, to your friend:
I’m so sorry that someone has abused you, your trust, your self, your soul. It’s not right, it’s not fair, it’s NEVER your fault.
I can’t give nearly the wonderful advice that so many others have here, so I’ll leave that to them. Over 20 years ago, I left an abusive relationship before the punching started, but not before I’d sustained damage that still surprises me now and then. But a funny thing happens over time: you begin to heal. Honest. Cross my heart and hope to spit.
It starts out with little things at first. You start to remember that you like science fiction, or Westerns, or romcoms, or whatever it was that you didn’t watch on TV because your abuser didn’t like it. The first time you say “no” to something you don’t want to do–maybe the first few dozen times, or more–you may have a panic attack or wonder if that person will ever talk to you again…but it works out fine, and you begin to learn that you have the right to say “no,” for no other reason than you wish to.
The real you starts to re-emerge. It’ll be bumpy and awkward and there will be some miserable moments, but there will be moments so exhilarating and profound and liberating that they’ll take your breath away, and then you’ll want to have those moments more and more. You’ll try on things that will fit you, and others that won’t, and it’s all good. You have a future full of things far better than you left, and yes, you WILL find your way into them.
Kudos to Kathmandu for this: Abusers often start with small, subtle boundary violations–this is perhaps the easiest, shortest, most useful way to protect yourself in the world when you’re ready. Another one I like, when it comes to dating, is: If a guy is a prince to me, but a prick to the waitress/parking attendant/etc., then sooner or later, he’ll be a prick to me, too.
I wish you healing, and wonders, and the amazing future you deserve.
This comment is the best!
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*squeak* Okay I’m actually a bit scared about this right now, but I sometimes joke about eating cats with mustard because making macabre jokes (in the company of people who understand and enjoy that sort of thing and NOT those who display even a bit of discomfort) is kind of a way for me to deal with the crap of the world. I’m not serious in the least and it’s more along the lines of that old line, “I love cats, they taste great with ketchup”. That doesn’t make me abusive… Does it? :’(
(I’m sorry, I know I probably come off as a troll here but thinking about this seemed to have flipped a lot of my insecurities involving repeatedly hearing what a devious malevolent and horrible creature I was, hiding behind a veneer of innocence that had finally been pulled off, look at how you make me feel you act like this on purpose!!, etc. etc. and being utterly powerless to convince them otherwise. *deep calming breath* So I still get this awful sinking feeling sometimes that I’m “not seeing myself right” and my attempts to be a good human being are all fake and I’m just mistaken in thinking they’re genuine.)
I can completely understand why hearing something like that from someone who is abusive immediately stamps it that way and I would never suggest you feel otherwise. That’s what keeps you feeling safe, and so it should be.
Harriet if you feel this post looks too much like a troll attempt or an exercise in “making this all about me me me”, please delete it. I don’t want to come off that way at all, and I may have slipped up. I’ll post the rest of the (on topic) stuff I wanted to say separately. Thanks! I’m… going to go talk myself down now.
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I don’t remember what is was that exactly tipped me off that some of the things I’d experienced were actually abuse. I think it was more of a slow slide into realisation that came alongside my slide into feminism, and of course, hearing the stories of others who went through similar things that finally lent coherence to the chaotic things I was feeling.
I know there have been far more utterly brilliant things I’ve read over the years than I can recall off the top of my head, many of them this very blog.
But here are a few that I do remember, and though it was quite a time ago I distinctly remember having very strong reactions to. I hope they help in some small way:
http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2009/04/why-do-they-stay.html
http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2009/04/battered-women-the-sequel.html
http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2009/04/and-another-thing.html
And OH THIS!!!
http://thehathorlegacy.com/the-myth-of-the-woman-who-craves-abuse/
There are a ton of posts from http://thehathorlegacy.com/ and http://whatprivilege.com/ that are not necessarily dealing directly with abuse, but are still really good. It’s the kind of site where you find a post you like, then you keep clicking and clicking and clicking through the back-links and before you know it you’re neck deep in awesomeness and you want to share it with EVERYONE but you can’t even find your way to where you started and it drives you crazy that you can’t make everyone you know read everything you just did right now! So it’s like Fugitivus thay way.
PS: I’m switching my handle from “Anonymous” to this which I don’t use anywhere else. I was too distraught to think of a different name that last time I posted, but here it is.
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Harrietj: What a coincidence! Or maybe not really, this list has gone around the web lately I think. I like that it has several actual tips on how to deal with the abuser and get out of the relationship, not just about what you should do after you already got out.
Jurhael: That is a good thread but everyone should be aware that the Something Awful forums is NOT a “safe space” and doesn’t aim to be one – victim-blaming, misogyny, rape apology and racism is everywhere. I think they’re trying to keep it out of that thread (which seems to have some really good and knowledgeable people!), but if you click anything else about abuse or rape you’re guaranteed to pages and pages of “well why didn’t you simply X” and “I hate to say it, but women lie about this stuff all the time” and so on. Just saying =)
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The book I found most helpful in recognising that what I am living with is abuse is called “Why does he do that” by Lundy Bancroft. It looks at the myths of abuse, the different types of abuser, how they operate and how we the targets get sucked in. It is very enlightening.
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One book that I found really helpful was . It basically talks about different ways of thinking about the world, and one of the first chapters is about voicelessness and what that’s like and how it comes about.
I found it really useful in understanding the abuse I went through growing up, because it laid everything out in such a way that I could see what was behind the stuff that I’d found so problematic: They were trying to force me into a voiceless or near-voiceless state. It didn’t really take, thank gods, but just the fact that they tried is horrific and should be considered abusive even though it mostly didn’t work. (If someone tries to hit you, and you dodge, they still tried to hit you!)
Having it laid out like that also helped me see some of the parts of my thinking that were based in that – places where it had worked – and fix them or at least route around them. In your friend’s case, the later chapters may help remind xyr of how zie was before this relationship, and get back to that way of being.
If your friend would prefer a less female-centric presentation of the concepts, the Perry scheme is similar and gender-neutral, but I don’t know of any especially good presentations of it.
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: Breathe, man. It’s cool.
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@AK: Yeah, I had to click through to that one and read it before I approved the comment, because my first thought was that an SA troll had appeared to get bizarre at us. I’m still overwhelmingly surprised at how positive a thread it generally was.
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: That one is my favorite. It’s the first thing that sprung into my head when I thought, “I should get hir some books,” and it was the first thing I went out and bought.
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There is a book called , edited by Terri Windling, which is a collection of fantasy-ish fiction about abuse. It’s more about child abuse, but the dynamics are not unfamiliar. Terri Windling ends the book with an essay about her own relationship with her mother as an adult. Anyway, there’s a lot of good stuff in there.
Also I like Scarleteen (even though I am in my mid-thirties), and this post by Heather Corinna is pretty great: To: Current Resident of that Broken-Down House.
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The Gift of Fear, by Gavin de Becker, isn’t specifically about domestic violence, but is a really good guide to listening to your instincts to evaluate the potential for violence. He makes a very good argument for intuition, even if you can’t name what it is that’s setting you on edge, and that might be a good additional read for someone trying to retune their boundaries.
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: I’ve thought about it, but I couldn’t give that to anybody without a long disclaimer about, “In the domestic violence section, he says the first time you’re a victim, and the second time you’re a volunteer. So know that even the smartest, most thoughtful people can still be cruel, privileged assholes to abused women, and that even people who are incredibly educated can completely and utterly fail to be aware of life circumstances other than their own, and even those who seem to be full of incredible compassion are fully prepared to blame victims in the right circumstances. Not to mention, these smart, thoughtful, educated, and compassionate people can do great damage to the public’s understanding of victims, as you will see other cruel, privileged assholes quote this line every time domestic violence is brought up, because they know that even the smartest, most thoughtful, educated, and compassionate professionals announce an unqualified approval of blaming domestic violence victims every time they speak of the subject.” And I’m trying to keep it simple with hir for now.
That’s been a blog post long in coming. Man, I am pissed at Gavin de Becker for that evil fuck-up of a line — I see it in every comment thread on every newspaper article about a woman being tortured by her partner. Doesn’t matter if she’s disabled, a minor, without family, without a job, without another place to live, afraid to call the cops due to legitimate bad experiences, tied up, without any support from anybody around her, or has grown up in a culture telling her abusive behavior is normal behavior and can’t find a single soul who will tell her the way she’s treated is wrong — it happened a second time, so she volunteered for that shit!
This comment is the best!
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Harriet: I think that what you’re doing, providing information for your friend, is generous and brave. From the sound of your friend, though, it sounds like zie is actually coming round to the idea that zie was abused pretty quickly (at least, in my experience, it’s not such a big step from putting ‘abuse’ in quotation marks to being able to say abuse without any qualification, which is still a far cry from being able to handle it, but still).
Barbara Kingsolver’s Pigs in Heaven, or Prodigal Summer, are neither of them about abuse, but are very fine novels, which are extremely uplifting and inspiring for women who are not in a good place. I love all of Kingsolver’s work, but these are the two that are the most positive. Prodigal Summer is my go-to novel for if I’m feeling like crap.
(And I also imagine that if you haven’t read if already, Pigs in Heaven would interest you, though I’m always wary of recommending books because of the issues they deal with).
I hope your friend can find some peace so that zie can rediscover hirself.
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Harriet, thanks for the qualification. I read it years ago, and found his general message of “don’t let people make you disbelieve your intuition, anyone who makes you justify your discomfort is proving you’re right be uncomfortable” very valuable to me. I haven’t reread it since I started getting much more into reading about feminism and antiracism on the internet, so that line didn’t jump out at me at all, and I didn’t even remember it was in there. It’s a pity it is, and has led to such virulent excuse-making, because I think otherwise it’s a very good exploration of violence.
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: That’s part of why it pissed me off so much. I was really digging the book, and following my bear through the house saying, “And then, you know what Gavin de Becker says then, and also, I forgot this part, Gavin de Becker thinks…” and then I got to that line, and was so shocked to see something that mean and stupid come out of his mouth. Because up until then, I’d been planning to buy this book for every woman I have ever met in my life, and now I can’t talk about Gavin de Becker without saying, “Okay, but let’s bring up that shit he said, ’cause let’s not let that slide.”
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For building healthy relationships, especially in the wake of less than healthy ones this book, Extraordinary Relationships, changed my life. It gave me a framework from which to see people’s abusive and/or negative behaviors as adaptive, providing them with something good, instead of just unhinged and wrong.
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– Thank you for sharing this. I am a middle school counselor and I have never seen a piece of writing so perfectly describe my job. I run groups with the “highest risk” girls in the school and that article describes how the groups inevitably unfold absolutely perfectly. I truly believe that the most valuable thing we can teach young women is to value themselves enough to make it through suffering of the most foul kind. Those young women just need the empowerment, love and self-worth to build the strength to get to the joyous parts.
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I agree with learning to be selfish. I read a book that helped me with this, even though it’s not about abuse “Taking ourselves seriously and getting it right” by Harry Frankfurt. Great book.
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Everybody has already gone through everything I would have said. I’ve also been scrolling through and adding some stuff to my to-read list.
But, just one minor thing….Harriet, you still have pronounfail in the last sentence of your first paragraph.
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: UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGH
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Phew! Thank you Harriet. Honestly I get so silly sometimes. I was talking to myself about this the other day (xD) and really, it’s not just one behaviour or other that can help you pinpoint with absolute certainty whether or not someone is abusive. It’s more like a cluster of behaviours backed by an “attitude”. And that’s what makes it so difficult to predict. Attitude and intent are subtle and can’t be easily apprehended or exposed for what they truly are. The important thing is to believe that you don’t deserve to be treated in a way that makes you uncomfortable or hurt. That someone who doesn’t mind doing that even on occasion is not right for you, period. And I don’t just mean romantic relationships, this goes for every kind.
It sounds so simple, yet we drown in this stupid belief system that our feelings are not important enough to be acted on, that they don’t deserve respect or atleast not as much as the other person’s. The simple fact of “you’re hurting me and you don’t seem to be stopping” is all the message we need that we should distance ourselves from situations and people. There seems to be this terrible cultural narrative of The Right Way To Do Things in Relationships™ which involves “looking at things objectively and acting on what’s REALLY there instead of how you feel” as if the way relationships make us feel ISN’T the barometer of how to act in them. Think of all the so-called “Bad Boys” on TV – he acts like a shit, treats the woman like crap, but then she finds out that it’s all because of some Deep-Seated Trauma™ that he’s faced or is facing and once she breaks through to The Truth he’s able to open up to her and they all live happily ever unabusive after la la la la la.
Yeah. BS. “Acts like a shit” and “treats you like crap” is all you need to know. None of that other stuff matters. You know why? Because breaking through to The Truth won’t change them. Even if The Truth does exist (which could be just hearsay), the fact of its existence is completely meaningless to you if you are getting destroyed and eroded in the process of finding it. You are not responsible for dealing with it, xe is. You need only offer your help and support if xe extends the same courtesy to you and you don’t feel like crap because of the way xe acts with you.
There’s also the whole “being too picky” claptrap. If you don’t “give people a chance” then you’re just arrogant, stuck up, bitchy or worse, missing out on the possibility that this is the one thing you’ve been waiting for all your life that’ll make your dreams finally come true!!!! Again? BS. You know the thing with a system where people are arrogant, stuck up, bitchy, etc. and push genuinely good people out of their lives because they wore the wrong shoes or something? Not only would such people eventually end up dying alone and miserable, or learn their lesson and straighten out real quick, I get the feeling *leans in close and whispers* that they don’t even exist! :O It’s crazy, I know! And even if they DO exist, that is NOT you. (If you doubt me on that, ask yourself this: do you hate people and think they’re worthless trash because you once saw them wearing the wrong shoes? Well, there you go.)
You have the right to feel safe. You have the right to feel good. You have the right to have your feelings, needs and wants be respected and treated as real, and you have the right for them to be met. You have the right to involve or not to involve people in your life to any degree that makes you feel comfortable and safe and happy. You have the right to decide what you are willing to put up with in your life and what you are not, and no matter what people say, you have the right to stick to that.
It is damn hard to get to a point where you can believe this as wholeheartedly as you should, and live it with every fibre of your being. We know, most of us are on that same journey ourselves. It’s not a straight road, there’s no one way to it, we can only each get there in our own time and in our own ways. The one way we can help you though, is to tell you that no matter what you hear from anyone else, what cruelty they mete out to you that keeps you from seeing it, that point we’re all reaching for exists.
This comment is the best!
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As much as I like large portions of Gift of Fear (the domestic abuse warning sign checklist totally saved my sanity), that “victim-volunteer” part always pissed me off, too. I’ve warned potential readers about it, but now if I feel compelled to refer the book (’cause he DOES do a great job of spelling out how your intuition works, how to trust it and how to recognize signs of Teh Bad in a way that so few “experts” do), I’ll make damn sure to disclaim the shit out of that and explain that there are VERY good reasons why a woman in an abusive situation might stay following the first assault…like, for example, the fact that abusers make sure to isolate their targets from any help before they let the fist fly.
Sigh. Guess we’ll have to be our own damn heroes again. We can do it, but the fact that we have to over and over again wears me out.
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De Becker’s book changed my life and taught me to analyze and reduce the flow of meaningless information I allowed in my life. It’s why I never watch the news or even reality television. Everything rang true enough, particularly the stalker chapter, with exception of that chapter on domestic violence. fortunately, early in the book de Becker advises readers to be mistrustful of people who would seek to make them feel bad for terrible things that happened to them at the hands of another person. that era was all about the “tough love” and I cannot believe the kind of fatuous an destructive messages that were passed off as “helpful” to DV survivors.
deB doesn’t know what he’s talking about w/r/t DV. Someone close to me has been in an emotionally and occasionally physically abusive relationship for years (attempting to use the legal system to extract himself from the situation). his batterer was female and three times he called the cops on her and eventually his lawyer told him doing that would “piss off the cops”. He felt threatened and there was nobody to protect him.
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I also second issendai’s LJ post and Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Bancroft. I read the Gift of Fear recently and it’s pretty good, but some parts aren’t so good either (which have already been discussed).
I like this article from The Toronto Star: http://www.thestar.com/comment/columnists/article/547327
I also thought this letter to Cary Tennis about being in an abusive relationship, and the questions he asks in his response were pretty good. There are some good comments too (didn’t read all of them though, so I’m sure there are crappy ones as well). http://www.salon.com/life/since_you_asked/2010/07/18/barbershop/index.html
I also want to recommend I randomly found this book in the library a few years ago and flipped to Chapter 6: Intimacy and Healthy Relationships. I was bowled over by what I read because I had never seen anything like this; about how to have a healthy relationship and what one looks like. I really needed this because I had fucked up ideas about relationships in my head (though I haven’t been in an abusive relationship, but grew up with abuse). I really like the rest of the book too, of course!
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The book that got me to realize that my friend’s (ex-) spouse was/is emotionally abusive was .
I hate hir for what zie is still doing to my friend (jerking hir around financially and saying that zie “needs to get a full-time job” and also be responsible for all the childcare decisions and the backup childcare provider, frex). But that doesn’t help my friend anymore; zie’s as untangled as zie can be, which unfortunately isn’t much.
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Also, best wishes to you and your friend!
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PPFA has a pamphlet called “Is This Love: Evaluating Your Relationship.” It’s intended for teenagers, but I’m 22, and I read it today and found quite it useful for:
a. analyzing whether one’s relationship is healthy, abusive, or in a gray area
b. identifying that I myself was in a relationship which was either abusive or heading there soon up until about three months ago.
Here is my post about it.
Also, I am very grateful to everyone else who has posted links here…as you can see, I’m still struggling about whether to call my last relationship abusive or not. Part of it’s because he never hit me (though I did fear violence, particularly when I was ready to leave). The other part is because, like I said in a comment on a different post, my first boyfriend raped me, and if I say the second one was an abuser, how much of a loser does that make me? (I am not kind to myself.) And also I don’t want to sound whiny.
Fucking stigmas.
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You are not a loser, Genevieve, not at all.
I have four good friends who are divorced. I would call at least three of the exes as emotionally abusive. I think there are more emotional abusers in the world than most people would guess.
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I remember a few months after I had gotten out of my abusive relationship, feeling the same disillusionment I’m sure your friend is feeling, I heard about the Twilight series. All I’d heard so far was that it was a vampire series. Being a total nerd for any horror or occult related story, I went out and bought the first book. As I read it, I slowly started to get this horrible cold feeling in my stomach. I realized how much Bella sounded like me, or any one in that terrible situation. But what made me so terrified…is that she glorified it.
I found this link just recently, but it sums up the Twilight series very well, with a positive message at the end: http://discipuladc.livejournal.com/304454.html
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Thank you, Renniejoy.
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Recommending “When Love Goes Wrong” by Susan Schechter and Ann Jones. A pretty good read, as well as some good advice and thought-provoking questions…and none of that victim-blaming crap. I’ve recommended it for most anyone abused in a relationship. HTH.
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1. I love your blog. It is full of life and thinking.
2. I respectfully submit that eradicating ‘he’ from ‘her’ in favor of ‘hir’ is terribly distracting. I can work with ‘womyn’ because it’s a longer word that reads more or less the same, but ‘hir’ jumps out at every repetition and distracts from the meaning of the passage in which it appears.
I am equipped with an outie peener, so may be disqualified from an opinion on this matter.
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@BT:
Well. Whatever to that, man.
From the writer’s perspective, I tend to agree. It’s a real struggle to make myself remember to do this, and it sure doesn’t flow naturally. But there are several reasons I think it’s a good thing to do, so I deal with the struggle, knowing that eventually it will come more naturally, and a world where gender is not a requirement of every facet of goddamn life is a world I would like to live in, so I’m doing my part.
This is not an apt comparison, and it makes me wonder if you know what these words are or why I’m using them. “Hir” is a gender neutral pronoun, meaning neither male or female. “Womyn” is not gender-neutral. It means female. It’s not a substitute. It’s actually the complete opposite of the words I used.
“Hir” does not do this. “Hir” is a word, incapable of intention or action. You are a person reacting to reading “hir.” You pick this word out, because you do not read it frequently. I also suspect you pick it out because it obscures your usual reading abilities; as long as this word is in use, you can’t form an image in your mind of the subject the pronoun refers to, because you aren’t able to visualize their gender, which indicates how reliant you are upon having gender identified before you can do just about anything.
I’m not saying you’re a bad person for picking this word out, or for not being used to it. I’m not used to it. That’s why I have to go back and edit several times after I post something with gender-neutral pronouns, because I always, always fuck it up. This is a skill I don’t have that I am trying to teach myself. I did not realize how dependent I was on gender as a basic descriptor until I started reading other people’s work where they refused to identify gender. My brain could not even begin to connect with the work, visualize the characters, or deal with the work as a whole because I hadn’t filled in the gender requirement that I didn’t know was there. That’s a real deficiency, and it bothers me. It bothers me that I can’t even begin to process things that are entirely unrelated to gender until gender is identified. My brain is so dependent on a binary gender system that it goddamn breaks when gender is refused to me, even if I’m just reading a story about an interaction with a coworker. That’s not okay with me. I don’t want to live like that. I want a better brain.
I am trying to do the same thing with gender that I had to teach myself to do with race. When telling a story about a black guy, I used to say, “So this black guy.” I had to train myself to really consider, “Is race an important factor here? Does it need to be mentioned? Does it have anything to do with the story?” And I faced some uncomfortable conclusions. Sometimes, race was relevant to the story, but only because my internalized racism had been part of the story, and had significant bearing on the emotional impact of events. If, say, I had been on a bus when a black dude started acting crazy, and then went to tell that story to my white friends, omitting the race felt like it was an incomplete story, because my friends wouldn’t have understood just how crazy the man was, just how scary, just how funny. Race had a significant impact on stories when it fit into internalized stereotypes, and removing race from the picture made the story far less significant (a white dude acting angry in public doesn’t get turned into a heeeee-larious meme). I found that I often identified race as a relevant factor in a story when I was subtly asking my audience to draw upon their own internalized racism and bigotry to fully understand the context. I was uncomfortable when I realized that stripping race out of my stories made the stories seem less interesting, less worth telling. It was obvious that the racial context had a lot more to do with the story than any other reason why I might want to tell it.
I suspect I do the same thing with gender, identifying it when it doesn’t need to be identified as a way to fully frame the emotional subtext of a story, and create emotional connections with an audience by bonding over our internalized bigotry and stereotyping. Forcing myself to strip gender away from a story is a way to force myself to see the ways in which the gender of the actors in a story changed the way I felt, thought, and reacted, and the ways in which a story is sometimes only interesting if it reaffirms what I already know or think about gender. That’s not okay with me. I want to be better than that. And it takes practice, so this is me practicing.
I suggest to you that it does not distract from the meaning of the passage whatsoever. This is a feminist blog, committed to the eradication of oppression and violence based on gender. If you are continually distracted from my writing because gender-neutral pronouns are difficult to process, I think that’s well in line with the purpose of my blog and my writing. More succinctly, I’m not here to make you comfortable with my language. If gender-neutral pronouns make you uncomfortable or confused or irritated, that’s a pretty big signpost pointing toward an area you could work on, if you decided it was important to you.
Having shit like this to work on is not by itself an indicator of your feminist cred — that’s just an indicator of how the culture you live in treats gender, i.e. a primary indicator of identity that must come before anything else, even completely mundane stories about internet strangers. But, depending on how you choose to interact with that indicator, that will say something about your feminist beliefs. That’s not to say you have to agree with my take on the issue. But it is to say that I entirely doubt your concerns about the words I use are coming from an aesthetic preference alone.
Also, consider this:
If you find it difficult to navigate a world where gender is not identified, what you are experiencing is a world where your cis privilege is no longer active. In my opinion, that is a worthwhile experience to have, and repeat.
This comment is the best!
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I’m not sure it counts, but Joanne Harris’ Chocolat (both book and movie) has a character coming out of an abusive marriage and finding her own ground again. With aid of the main character.
I’ve been racking my brain for weeks to come up with recommendations for your friend. I’m sticking with the one book I recommend to just about everyone: Un Lun Dun by China Miéville. Miéville is all sorts of awesome, and this book deals with two 12-year old girls who discover an alternative world, and end up having a great lot of adventures. The book, or rather, the story itself argues with many of the tropes in our thinking about power. Plus, it’s fun.
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Harriet, I loved the point that you made here in the comments about how trying and failing to replace every gender-indicating pronoun with a gender-neutral one engages you with cultural and personal gender bias. And it made me wonder how this sort of thing plays out in a language, like French, where every single object is gendered, either feminine or masculine, only a few that are neuter. Very interesting stuff.
But I also thought that maybe, if you write up your drafts on Microsoft Word before posting them, depending on what version you use, you could try using the “Replace” tool as a final editor. You can just type in which words you want the system to find (“he”) and what word you want the system to replace them with (“zie”) and it takes care of it automatically. So that way nothing leaks out on the site. I just learned about this tool myself, and I thought it was pretty nifty!
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RE: Gender/race/any-other-marker-neutral language, couldn’t have put it better than Harriet.
Frankly, this is just another point on the spectrum which includes using “he” as a universal pronoun, “-man” as a universal qualifier (“chairman”, “businessman”, “salesman” even when they’re women) and so on and so forth. Yeah, people chafed and railed and got all derisive and shush-y when words like “chairperson” and “he/she” were introduced in normal spoken and written language too. Are these unpalatable as well?
BTW what do you think of when I say the word “person”? What is the image that springs to mind? If you haven’t yet come to a point where you’ve questioned the most basic assumptions of what you most easily consider to be a representation of “human being”, then now’s a good time to start.
Personally, I’m still not completely fluid with using words like “hir” either. “Xe” is as far as I can handle when writing myself, but I stumble on that too when it comes to talking. But I’m learning, I’m determined to get there, and I do NOT use gendered language any more (if I ever did, I thankfully can’t remember). I make a conscious effort to atleast use “they” as a singular pronoun in speech even as people around me use “he” (uuuuggghhhh does that ever grate like nails on a chalkboard!).
Personal experience time: When I first encountered gender neutral language, it felt like spiders crawling around in my cranial membrane too. It was new, it was weird, it challenged the comfortable familiarity of the one thing we pretty much take for granted as unchanging no matter how the writing style varies – pronouns. Even though it caused an unexpected disturbance in my reading pattern at first, after much reading and getting used to, I could intellectually understand the reasons for its importance. It took time (years I’m sure), a slowly strengthening determination to continue down that path, and reading, reading, so much reading of many things which used such language (both with and without explanation) to impress upon my brain the feeling of it being as natural as whatever I had grown up learning was “normal”.
Now? I’m still not perfect (no one is) but when someone uses words like “xe” or “hir”, I don’t immediately jump to fill in the gap with preconceived ideas of what said human being should adhere to. I find more and more that my mind quickly holds “male/female/all/none/some combination thereof/some concept so far unfamiliar” all at the same time equally in a floating cloud and doesn’t miss a beat. If I never find out any more about that person, they are still real. And if I do find out more, well good to know I guess.
My point is that if *my* brain can eventually come around to adjusting to literally a new way of thinking, then so can *yours* and so can everyone else’s. We all have the same kind of human brain after all, don’t we? (Although I do question the existence of mine sometimes.
) Everyone is different of course, and everyone will take their own time and their own way to get to a place where they can start taking this kind of thing on personally. But your brain is infinitely malleable in its own way, so there is NO excuse – if you truly believe in social equality and justice – to reject this outright.
Take your time getting there, but remember that this is a VERY important step to take on the path towards full acceptance of every stripe of human being, the path that we all – hopefully – are trying to walk ourselves, till it turns into a well-travelled road that no one can even believe didn’t exist once.
PS: Wow I can’t believe one of my rambly posts up there actually turned yellow. And on Harriet’s blog no less, it feels like such an honour! *bows in humble gratitude*
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Harriet,
All points taken and considered. I appreciate your detailed and thoughtful reply, as well as those that follow.
Without overstressing the point, let me say I am 100% aligned with feminist ideals, insofar as I’m awakened to them… one reason I read you is to find new territory of thought to explore.
It’s strictly a matter of readability, for me, I admit that completely. Nothing more than that, unless it’s a lack of rigor, too. That standard doesn’t really apply in this context (which is, if I paraphrase rightly, what you’re saying).
I’m actually getting blown up by this issue right now, because I’m writing an essay on feminism in zombie cinema (no, really), and I’ve spent half the piece stepping around male-centric linguistic and cultural landmines. It’s unbelievably fraught, once you get into it — I don’t think a genuinely feminist movie has ever been made, if you apply even the most basic feminist criteria to the subject. And the language of cinema is crushingly masculine in nature.
The neutral pronoun thing has long been an issue in our language, which doesn’t tend to nominate gender for all things as French or other romance languages do. The word most recently to become obsolete is “one,” as in “one never knows.” “Their” has replaced “she” and “he” for certain applications, despite the plural source. We have male and female persons, but not neutral persons — although we did have, in some forms, in the past.
In Old English, we had useful neuter words, like “heo,” which indicated nominative neuter or feminine, “hit” (pronounced “‘it”) which was analogous to the modern “it,” but could be used to indicate persons, not just objects; “him” and “his” were both masculine or neuter depending on usage, while feminine genitive and dative were both “hire.” It goes on and on, of course.
Those folks were not feminists by a long shot (although objectively the peasant classes were more liberated than we are), but their language was at the very least bi/curious, which is awesome.
So now that I think of it, “hir” is just coming back — not a new word at all. It used to be “hira,” meaning “their,” without gender, and now it means “of this person,” without gender. I can go for that.
In my lifetime “Oriental” has been replaced by “Asian,” “Negro” with “Black” (and fifteen other variations), “crippled” with “handicapped” or “physically challenged,” etc. and it’s not like I go around talking about Negroes and then saying “oh golly sorry, old habit!”
I guess what I’m saying is, thank you for explaining. I get it.
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Since we’re on the subject of gender neutral pronouns, I have a question. I’ve always been a little cautious around them, although I’m trying to overcome that, but having got more enthusiastic after the comments on this post, I was talking to my Very Feminist Fiancé about it.
VFF is dyslexic. This means he frequently picks up on issues with words that I wouldn’t notice (we’re both English students). The issue he raised with ‘hir’ is not a conceptual one – he says he’d love to have a general neutral pronoun to use because like you, he’s uncomfortable about gender as a descriptive device. It’s that when he sees words, he hears the pronunciation in his head, and he automatically sees ‘hir’ as rhyming with ‘stir’ or ‘fir’, ie, pronounced identically to ‘her’. Now, whether you view this as a problem is, I suppose, individual, but his point was that if you want it to be more widely accepted by people, that’s easier to do if it really is gender neutral in every single way. [The problem is less pronounced with 'zie', but is of course the German for 'she']
For the record, neither of us has a problem with pronouns that are more strongly connected to female origins than male; I was just wondering if ‘hir’ and ‘zie’ aren’t in a way slightly self-defeating.
And apologies if this has been covered before; this thread’s been running a while, and it’s hard to remember all the comments, although I did skim them to try to check.
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Yeah, I’d like to raise a hand and mention that although I don’t read “hir” or “zie” as pronounced in the same way as “her” or “she”, I still tend to read the overall set as shading to feminine. And that’s equally likely to be a problem with me or with the words.
I think the trick is that “she/her/her/herself” is the only pronoun set in standard usage that collapses the distinction between possessive and objective—”he/him/his/himself”, “I/me/my/myself”, “you/you/your/yourself”, “they/them/their/themselves”, and of course my personal winner in the GNP Olympics, “ey/em/eir/emself”. So because “zie/hir/hir/hirself” has the same word in those middle two spots, it feels like a find/replace for the feminine pronouns, and that’s how I interpret it unless I take a moment to think. I agree with Scheherezade that this is a troubling quality in a GNP.
The set that showed up in an earlier post, “zhe/zhim/zhir/zhimself”, felt gendered in other strange ways (my brain decided “zhe” was “she”, “zhir” was “her”, but “zhim” was “him” and “zhimself” was “himself”—a decidedly bizarre reading experience), but did not succumb to this particular problem.
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I started reading recently and I think it does a really good job in exposing the insidious ways that emotional abuse starts. As I’ve been reading it, I’ve been thinking, “yup, that’s how I felt around my parent” (i.e. doubting myself, feeling not good enough, confused about conversations and thinking “what happened?”). Highly, highly recommended.
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Okay, back on topic, the Post-Abuse Reader: I went through an 18-year relationship in which I was gaslighted until I literally thought I was crazy — I recommend ‘The Gaslight Effect,’ ‘Walking on Eggshells,’ and ‘Why Does He Do That?’ (for the latter, read ‘Why Does Zie Do That,’ in my case).
Also, books on narcissism — I found ‘Why Is It Always About You? : The Seven Deadly Sins of Narcissism’ very useful, as well. People that are cruel to other people don’t entirely understand that other people are, in fact, people.
Most of all, supportive friends changed my life.
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