“I ended up staying with him just to keep him alive.”
Anonymous story:
Some of the names have been manipulated in this story to keep the story tellers identity anonymous. The name John is meant to be “John Doe.”
Unknowingly, we can be trapped in a world that is in fact a pit of quicksand, sucking us in above our heads, pretending to drown us, before giving us the strength to pull ourselves back up. We get the perfect amount of time to briefly catch our breath. We can enter into this state of limbo, and then sporadically are flung into thin air, only to be relieved by a ruthless plunge into a different section of not yet sinking quicksand. Just when you hit the ground it is your choice to run or to wait until your body can summon the energy for flight. Staying in a toxic relationship is equivalent to sinking into the quicksand ignoring the hands of the people who are trying to pull you out. You are at the edge of a cliff, teetering perpetually. If you wait long enough, eventually you will fall off. If you run away too fast, your bones will crack and your breath will cease. We live in a world where a social media app becomes the magic mirror that manipulates and deceives the viewers on the other side of the glass. A lot of people can’t understand the love we can so easily develop and cling onto, for such detriment to our identity. It is impossible to get out of quicksand when you are three feet deep and have no one pulling you out.
I remember the first time I saw John. I was living in Tokyo with my friend, and anonymous posted a picture of her holding someone's hand in comfy grey sweatpants. July 9, 2015: “UM!!! Who??? Is??? That???,” I commented. Other individuals flooded the post with heart emojis. The next time I saw John was on August 3, 2015, when she posted another Instagram picture. Tall, wavy hair, alternative, and charming. She posted a picture of him in a beaded rainbow necklace and sunglasses. They seemed so effortlessly cool on December 28, 2015 when she posted: “Happy birthday. I love you.” It was a relationship that perfectly illustrated “relationship goals” through the deceiving eyes of Instagram, to the unknowing worshipers behind the magic mirror on the wall. The last photo I saw of John was on July, 17 2016. It was a blurry photo of the two drinking out of Styrofoam cups with straws. No caption. No comments.
“You probably think you know a fair amount about this relationship,” she said to me. But I didn’t. I had not a single clue.
“For me, most of the relationship is blurry. Your brain automatically blocks and blurs things from your memory to protect you,” she said. The first thing anonymous told me was that John suffered from borderline personality disorder, which made it very challenging for him to maintain stable relationship with anyone, including family. As somebody with BPD, John acted on risk and impulse, which fed into him harming and threatening to kill himself as a way of manipulating her into staying with him. “There came a time where I knew the relationship was unhealthy, and unsafe but I spent a lot of time trying to convince myself that things were okay and that I could make him better, and thus, improve the relationship. My friends and family tried to convince me to get away, but they didn’t understand the severity of the situation. They didn’t understand the heavy weight I carried everyday with my role in his life. I tried to convince my friends and family that things were okay. If I could make people think that, maybe it would help me believe it.” A majority of a toxic relationship is denial about the reality of what is going on. Stepping away is like severing a body part; what feels like a “necessary part of your existence” is gone.
Anonymous had known John since her freshman year of high school, but not well. The summer going into her sophomore year they started talking. They spent everyday together, a choice he made, not her, “A warning sign I missed”. In a few days she was going to camp in Michigan for three weeks “You’re choosing camp over me,” John said to her— after only hanging out several times.
From her junior year of high school to halfway through her freshman year of college, she dated John on and off. She emphasizes the beginning of the relationship and how although it became extraordinarily unhealthy, it was “good”, or seemingly so, at one point. “We would go on adventures outside through different parks and beaches. We had a habit of cuddling up and watching House for hours at a time. We’d make our own pizzas on the grill and have bonfires to make s’mores in the summer.” This was her first real relationship. “ I hadn’t experienced anything like this before, I missed the subtle warning signs of gaslight, manipulation, and control. Of course looking back now they are like flashing stop signs. But all I saw were green lights.”
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Why don’t you just leave?” That question is more useless than trying to find a penny you threw in the ocean. “There is something that is keeping you there,” she said. John was a master manipulator, who started slow but knew what he was doing enough so that at points she couldn’t even see it. When she did see it, he’d immediately turn to the kind and loving boy she met freshman year. She was living in a nightmare that she couldn’t wake up from. Abusive relationships sneak up on you. It is hard to realize you are in one. He controlled everything like who she hung out with, what she wore, what she posted on social media etc. “It got to the point where I couldn’t be an individual.” The quicksand thickened, and she sunk deeper.
“My senior year of high school I was in my dream musical, Rent, and I had to kiss a male actor on stage. I was so excited for friends and family to come. John came with my family, which was already a tense situation (they didn’t like him much. Sign #1!) Once the show was over I met my friends and family in the lobby of the auditorium where he screamed at me - In front of everyone. In front of the director, my friends, strangers…my family. He told me it was so inappropriate of me to have been kissing someone on stage, and he was convinced that it meant something. I was mortified,” she said. “Now, I don’t know whether he felt it genuinely meant something or if this was just another opportunity for him to manipulate me and gain control in our relationship. Whatever his tactic was, it worked. He convinced me that what I did was wrong and from that point on everything I did was run by him because I had ‘broken his trust’. Not to mention the fact that he’d cheated on me several times, but that was ‘okay because he was mentally unstable and couldn’t control himself’ he claimed.”
Anonymous had some of the best times throughout her senior year of high school but she explains “I lost who I was in him, trying to take care of him.” Her whole life became a treacherous secret kept from him, in fear of becoming attacked or threatened. His threats got more intense like “because you wore those shorts, I want to kill myself.” Eventually he started FaceTiming her, cutting himself and burning himself. “This tormented me. You can’t just hang up the call,” she said.
“I can’t begin to explain the number of times I tried to leave him. Things were so unhealthy, so scary, and the pressure was unbearable. Anytime I tried to break up with him, he would Face Time me and show me where he was. He would say different things depending on the mood he was in. One time he called me in his car with the camera pointing towards the edge of a cliff. He was crying and said ‘If you break up with me I’ll do it.’ Of course I would panic and respond, ‘I love you. I need you. I don’t want a life without you.’ It was always this immense amount of panic that caused me to spew things that I didn’t want to say. He knew that. So he’d do that each time.”
Senior year of high school, despite being with John, she didn’t consider herself with him. She didn’t want to be with him but felt she had to stay to keep him alive, “I was living a double life. I totally had other relationships in my life. And thank God. Truthfully, that is what kept me sane.” There was a lack of support throughout this relationship, as she unintentionally pushed everyone away in order to keep John stable. There was also overwhelming support no matter how bad things got, from people like her best friend Izzy and her mom. They never gave up on her, although she admits losing friends that had had enough of the relationship.
John was very strict with her about reaching out to his family members, but at one point after threatening to harm himself on face time, he went missing. “Just like that I stopped hearing from him. I tracked his phone but found no location. I tried to call his parents, no answer. I texted them. Imagine texting somebody's parents that you can’t get a hold of their son and you think he’s in trouble. I called the police. At the time John was renting a hotel room and had left college. The police broke into the room and found him unconscious on the floor.”
It took this stunt of his to get his parents to finally see what she had been trying to tell them for years. “As if the scars all over his body, which he left visible for his parents to notice, weren't enough.” John’s parents finally brought him back home. John stayed in his room. He ordered drugs from the dark web with the intention of killing himself. He tried to get into car accident after car accident, because he wanted to die. His parents had no idea. Anonymous tried and tried to warn them. Finally he was taken from his house and forced into a rehab facility. “I finally felt safe and free.” Unfortunately, rehab didn’t stop him from contacting her. “I started getting these emails from his therapist who had only heard the story from John’s perspective. He completely lied about the relationship,” she said. He began sending her letters which were clearly not reviewed by any professional (although she was promised this by the therapist), as they explained methods in which he was trying to kill himself in this facility. “At this point I knew this was only to manipulate me, but that didn’t make it any easier or less scary.”
Anonymous couldn’t break up with John on her own, because she was afraid that he would successfully kill himself. Knowing that he was in a safe place where he could not kill himself, was the only way she knew she could cut him off completely. She confided in her mother (telling her as little as possible), and finally John’s parents became involved and he was severed from her. Or so she thought. Until she started receiving flowers, and teddy bears, and then emails. To this day she doesn’t know how he got her address, but somehow he was still holding out hope.
Out of fear she still has John’s location via “find my friends”. “Over Christmas break, I pulled up “find my friends” and saw that he was home. Two blocks away from me. I had an automatic physical response.” Even though the relationship had been over for years she was reminded of the attempted break ups with him, and how he would call her harming himself and begging her to stay with him.
She had another boyfriend a couple years later. The ghost of John was still very much so alive within her soul; no matter how hard she tried he wouldn’t leave her body alone. “One time my boyfriend and I were on the phone fighting and he said something almost word for word that John had once said. I don’t even remember what he said, but the next thing I knew I had passed out.” That was as recent as this fall, 3 years after breaking up.
“I don’t want this to be my story. Although this experience influences a large part of my life, this is not my identity. For my senior thesis I wrote a play about my experience in an abusive relationship. The play highlights the subtle stages of an abusive relationship. While writing the play I knew I didn’t want to write a story like every other abuse story I’d seen. Those stories did not match my experience, an experience I was confident other women knew all too well. While doing some research I found a statistic stating that on average, the victim in an abusive relationship tries to escape seven times before successfully getting out of it. I named my play Six Times More. I tried to leave God knows how many times.”
If you’re out there reading this and in denial about the relationship you’re in, here is a message from the wonderful lady I interviewed for this story. “Maybe in a few years you’ll be reminded of my words. Don’t lose the part of you that everyone loves. He took away my identity, friends, relationship with my family, and so much more. I know now that despite his manipulation and power, I was never responsible for his life, and neither are you. If you are in a similar relationship, get the help you need. You don’t have to do this alone. I suffered through years of abuse to try and keep somebody alive. He made me think like that was in my control, but it’s not. He had the power to make that choice for himself, not because of my actions, but his own. If you find that any of what I’ve said or described resonates with you, I hope you take back your power and do what deep down you know you must to do.
