7 - growingnglowing - she was not fragile like a flower, she was fragile like a bomb

Hey everyone,

I am glad you have popped in for this blog. I am also completely terrified for this blog, I’m sure you will come to understand why. However, it would be wrong of me not to insert a trigger warning before you read any further. This blog will contain messages about drugs, and emotional and/or physical abuse. Please do not read any further if this will unsettle you in any way.

I had posted a poll on my Instagram story after deciding that I thought I should talk about these things. I finally said “it’s time”. If I don’t get personal with you all, I may miss an opportunity to help or comfort someone. Being embarrassed of my past is getting bland.

My first “serious” relationship started when I was 15. At first it seemed romantic, I was gifted flowers, picture frames, dates, clothes… honestly you name it. There were fights here and there. I met all the family, like all of them. I grew to love his family, went to Christmas dinners, birthdays, watched children be born into the family. I was made to feel like I was a part of it. Most of the time, it was fun and games, as it should have been, being a teenager in a relationship. It started with small things, the way I phrased things, what I wore, or what I did with my friends. Then it turned into who my friends were, who my friends were friends with, who I had slept with before him. Person A became the only person I spent time with outside of dance and school. Person A and I would ditch class together, steal clothes, etc. We argued at school, outside of my house, out on the street, in his moving car, the back of his workplace, everywhere. I moved out for the first time at 17 years old. Person A moved into a rental with his sibling and cousin. I moved in shortly after. It was brought to my attention not long before that that he decided to not only sell weed but cocaine as well. At a previous point in our relationship, he promised me it would only ever be marijuana but I knew that his intentions were mostly self serving. I was not okay with this and it caused a massive fight. He gave me an ultimatum… “support me or leave”. Silly girl stayed. There were so many conflicting factors when it came to leaving. To me, there really was so much romance. We buried a time capsule in a spot near where he asked me out, flowers, coming to my dance competitions and basically everything you could have asked for at 16/17. I laugh out loud when I say that because my opinion is of course so different now. We had a pattern, every Saturday I would bus over while he was still sleeping, his mother had left for work by the time I had boarded on the bus and his alarm went off just before I got there and I had a key to get into the building. We would get stoned and he’d buy or make us food and I would have to leave before his mom came home or we would go out and do something. It was just weed for so long. Then we tried shrooms twice. I remember I was about to be 17. I think it was a couple weeks out, he had booked us a very nice hotel room in Niagara Falls the day I turned 17. I don’t think it was ever in my conscious mind, but I think that I made the decision to ask to try the drug to appear more mature, for him to stick around. We were in his Aunts basement, and I just made the decision as I said it out loud. “Let’s try it”. He didn’t even know what I meant at first and he went “are you sure?” and slowly I agreed. It didn't happen again until my 17th birthday. After my 17th birthday it still didn't happen for a while, but then it was just all the time. We had parties and we would hide in the bedroom cutting lines and no one knew for so long. It was “our secret”. It was fun, it was crazy sex, crazy emotion, and it just all felt like fun and games. These nights, turned into early mornings, which turned into long days, which turned into days at a time. I was in high school man. I was a kid. We went back and forth fighting and being sober, getting high, being sober, fighting, partying, getting high, fighting. It was complete chaos. At some point in this, my recollection is that I had a friend over at our place and something got heated between Person A and I. I went to follow him out of the room to talk about it privately and he had physically pushed me back into the room. It wasn’t aggressive, I slid across the floor on my socks and he didn’t use very much force to actually try and shove me, but my friend had spoken up and said “no that is not okay and you cannot do that to her”. In the end I said that’s not really what his intentions were but she felt uncomfortable with it and I never really took that into consideration. Re-conversing about this event in the present day, her memory of the events, is far more intense and involves me being forcefully pushed down the stairs as well. When we talk about this today In the early days of it I don’t remember much. I remember being so high, I believe from multiple things, and just repeating “stop stop stop” with tears in my eyes and trying to convince him to take his hand away from my throat. He looked so confused. Like we both didn’t know what was happening or why. When he finally pulled his hand away from my throat he tried to apologize and I told him not to touch me and I said “I just want to sleep”. He let me roll over and fall asleep. He didn’t even know why I seemed so shocked and traumatized when we woke in the morning. I had to tell him. He just held me and said it would never happen again. I realized the pattern was that these things never happened sober. The “big” things at least. March break my senior year of high school, I was so excited we had plans all week to do all these fun things. My friends and I even had some plans I think. That changed quickly. Sunday night of march break I overdosed. I had a seizure on our bedroom floor. I didn’t even go to the hospital because I started to wake up while he was on the phone with them. I went the next day. He told me I had to lie and tell them it was Ecstasy. The first and only time I’ve lied on my medical records. Who lies to a doctor? It’s your damn health. This is significant because we stopped for a while. He started having nightmares of me seizing while he would sleep so he just started staying awake and I remember being woken multiple times because I twitched in my sleep and he wanted to make sure I was alert. I couldn’t make sense of how most of the time he seemed to care so much and then he’d turn and be so cruel. After a while we broke up and I moved out. It did not take too long for us to reconnect I imagine but my timeline starts to become blurry around this time. After some time we started using again. Secretly this time. I recall one night at his moms house, we were so high we thought there were faces in the snow on the trees outside. The conclusion: they were ghosts. Which turned into staring out the window - at trees - and flinching at every sound that the house made. No sleep, again.

Around this time I turned 18. He was even there to celebrate. Guess what my ‘present’ was? The answer is drugs. From what I remember vividly the times after this were pretty back and forth and uneventful. We did spend a lot of time together, so it felt like we were back together. Except for one small little detail. He had made this ‘friend’ while we weren’t dating and she was messaging him a lot. I asked him a few times who she is because he even was borrowing her car on the weekends and we were doing drugs and having sex in it and still I wasn’t allowed to meet her. When I asked why this was the case he said that she would probably get jealous of me because he thinks she’s into him. But they’re just friends. He goes so far to say “I don’t like her like that, she’s not even attractive and plus, her pussy probably smells like curry”. Are you as thrown off as I was? Ok cool. They’re dating now. Well the last I knew of anyway. I stopped asking after this. It was pretty well what I would have called ‘normal’ at this point. Person A was living at his dads in an apartment building, spring was coming, there was almost no snow left on the ground, and I had a photoshoot the next day. It was late, and his dad was at his girlfriends maybe. We were up pretty well all night drinking and getting high. The first thing wrong this night was that I said please don’t leave any hickeys on my body I will be doing a photoshoot tomorrow and he did not listen to that, I had to pull away from him, which only made the hickey worse. It was not uncommon for us to mishear things or say things that made absolutely no sense at all. We were fooling around and he had said he was streaming it on Twitch. I said ‘no twitch is for video games’ and looked down at his phone and his phone screen wasn’t even on. There was some more gibberish and I was trying to get his attention to let him know he’s really high we should just relax and lie down and go to sleep, besides we would have to do that soon anyways, since I am shooting at 10am in the morning. By this point its like 6am. I convinced him to let me lie down and he would not stop talking so we’d have a conversation and I’d say goodnight and he’d wait maybe 30 seconds and strike up a conversation again. After denying him so many times he became angry and got up out of the bed. He was already wearing track pants but put jeans on top of them, threw on his house coat and was saying that no one loved him and he was going to leave. At this point I am just trying to be very kind and say that’s not true, I know you feel this way now but lie down and it will be fine. I convinced him to sit on the bed with me and was talking softly to him. My idea was to get him to relax, put him to sleep, and walk home. I am now sitting on his lap facing him talking about all of his family and how much they love him and how we will go see them on the weekend or something and I just seen it switch. The look in his eyes went bland and my stomach hit the floor. It was as if he was looking at me but looking completely past me. He tried to push me off of him to resume his tantrum but I was able to hold him down on his back for a few seconds. It was pretty much all hell after that point. He pushed me off of him and held me down the exact same way only with his hand around my throat. Once I stopped struggling and was yelling him to get off of me he literally took off out of the bedroom and out of the front door. I threw on the clothes that I had and took off after him, thinking what the hell else am I supposed to do. When I got out the front door of the apartment he was not out there so I went looking and found him in the stairwell. Trying to rope him into coming back to his apartment was purely hell. I tried to bring him up the stairs and he swung at my face, pushed me into the wall, tried to push me down the stairs before taking off up the stairwell. I tripped down them but didn’t really fall because of my grip on the railing. This is where it sort of clicked in for me. What the hell am I doing? I am standing in a stairwell in my bare feet and I almost got my shit rocked, for what? After being there for a moment I followed back up the stairwell and headed for the apartment. My intentions were to grab my belongings and go at this point. I am exhausted, I am supposed to be shooting in the morning and I am also starting to ‘come down’. When I get there he is in the apartment with his dad and they're going back and forth in Khmer. His dad asked me basically what the hell was going on, and I really couldn’t think of much to say. As I’m standing there Person A yells something at his dad and takes off out the front door again. I felt pretty defeated. His dad drove me home at 7am and the whole time he was saying to me “you’re just kids you can’t be doing this to each other”. I’m in the car thinking man you don’t even understand, you don’t even know the half of it. After speaking with Person A after the ordeal, turns out he didn’t recall this incident either. I had left him a text saying I was finally done with everything and he claimed to not have any idea what played out or why I would say that. I think about how sad that is.

For a while I asked a lot of the same questions you probably asked while reading this. I felt a lot of shame, even though I hadn’t talked to anyone about it. I felt and still sometimes feel embarrassed. How could I put myself into that position? I always said previous to this relationship that I would never be in a relationship like this or ever let someone treat me so vilely. I used to say “someone who knows they’re in a toxic relationship and chooses to stay is stupid”. Then I realized my opinion had changed to “someone in a toxic relationship will leave when they are ready no matter how many times you tell them to leave”… But over the last few days of writing this blog I realized I almost killed myself to be in this relationship. I never told anybody. I covered it up. I felt stupid and damaged. I had nightmares, anxiety attacks, cut myself off from people because I just couldn't figure out how to tell the people who care about me what was going on. Slowly it started to happen, in bits and pieces. Protect your friends. Speak up, challenge them, challenge their partners red flags, and challenge the red flags they’re presenting to their partners when you see them. This experience alone has really mended me into who I am and who I am becoming. I am scared of certain things like communicating with new people and being vulnerable, normally I just coldly assume people or scenarios are distasteful, selfish, and cruel. I hate feeling this way. I care about being kind and empathetic and honest towards others and that’s what I am pushing myself to do. I made the decisions in my life to learn the hard way and that’s what I’ve done. To share this experience with all of you has been an extremely emotional process since I don’t dig up these emotions often. With that being said, it has made me feel free, not weak. I am living life so differently now. I am so happy, curious and adventurous. All I can feel is everything slowly getting easier. I promise you, it’s not the easiest thing I have done, but it is getting easier.

Please talk to someone, and if you cannot find anyone you trust, write to me.

Xx