From someone who’s been there - FB Note 2007

You go for a while thinking that it’s over and you’ve moved on. You convince yourself that it was a life-time ago and you’re not that woman anymore. But then someone makes a joke, tells a story and you’re right back there.

A friend once said to me that they wish they could be with a man who’d slap them around every now and then, isn’t it true that real love makes you so possessive and jealous that a man would go to any extent to be with you. Women who go through this should appreciate how much their men love them. I smiled when I heard that because for some people abuse is this passionate exciting moment, followed by amazing make-up-sex and all is sunshine and roses afterwards.

But the reality couldn’t be more different. Before I get into it though, I feel the need to justify why I’m writing this. One of my pet hates is pity, so this in no way meant to get people going ‘Ag, shame, Amanda’ or some kind of an attack on ‘him’. I’m just trying to tell the story from the perspective of someone who’s been there.

I’d always thought of myself as a strong person, things like that only happen to weak people who asked for it anyways. There must be something you did to drive someone to that much anger, judging by that ‘panel-beating’ you must have done something really bad.

I believe that at the heart of abuse there’s a need to control. Control what you do, who you see, how you behave and even how you dress. The worst for me was the constant fear, you know which buttons you’re not allowed to push and you know the consequences if you do.

There’s also this strange cycle, for a while everything’s rosy, then as Celine Dion put it: ‘I can feel there’ll be a storm tonight’. It could be totally unrelated to anything you’ve done, it could be a problem with friends, but the room just fills up with this terrible stench of anger and if you know what’s good for you, you don’t do anything to drive them over the edge.

Some days are better than others, the hardest thing to believe is how wonderful abusive men can be. From buying flowers, to giving the best loving to constant reminders that ‘you are my world’ and ‘I would die if I had to live without you’. This I guess is the trap. You feel needed, you’re the only one in the world who understands this person and after ‘an incident’ you still feel like apologising for making them mad or forcing them to hit you, and as I learnt, almost kill you. (Sounds crazy, I know).

Then there’s the other side, the fragile person behind the abuser, they know they have a problem and need you to help them get better. You hear things like: ‘I’ve never had anyone willing to love me completely like you, you’re an amazing woman,’ and you think to yourself, ‘I am, hey. I’m such a martyr’.

But through all this madness, there’s this constant logic that creeps in, this is not right, I’m smarter than this, I know that love is not meant to hurt this much.

But I guess I’ll blame the way we’re raised as women, being fed B.S about: a good woman will hang in there, that’s how a man knows you’re worth marrying. We don’t cry about our problems, nor do we go around discussing them, in public everyone should think everything's perfect. It’s our lot in life as women to be strong for the men we love, you’re meant to be his ‘safe place to land,’ when the whole world is going crazy around him, as his woman, you’re supposed to make him feel like a king. Even the bible says that the woman is supposed to submit to the man, it’s the way of life.

So all around you have the best solution & know exactly what you had to do, the worst for me was the:

1) Judging: How can you be so stupid, pack your bags and leave the bastard.
2) Pity: Ag, shame. Cant you stop whatever you’re doing to get him so angry, tow the line and ‘Qina where u at!’, bekezela!

But it takes a special kind of person to ask the question: ‘Why do you think you don’t deserve/cant do better. Is he worth you losing yourself so he can feel whole?’. Then it’s up to you to realise just how much you love your self relative to how much he needs you.

I was telling a friend the other day that the song: ‘I’m gold’ epitomises what I’ve always known about myself. I have to thank my parents for that, I guess. I’ve grown up believing that there’s nothing more beautiful than me and when I take the time to examine who I am as a person, I’m in love with the woman I see looking back at me.

The next question, then has to be: how do you stay with someone for years if you think you're worth more? I could say that maybe I was brainwashed, but I genuinely thought that it was me showing how ‘amazing’ I am, loving through thick and thin, till death do us part and giving ‘my all’ as it were.

So what’s the point of all this vele? Well, I think abuse is already a hell on it’s own without people romanticising it or acting like it's something to be taken lightly. I can’t speak for the abusers, but from the other side, abuse is definitely not just about men proving that they love you/women abangenas’milo being punished, it’s a whole lot more and until you’ve been there, you can’t even begin to understand what it’s all about…