The mind does not have to be a prison. Feelings, change, observations, ideas - they don't have to be dangerous to you. I have kept myself so barely held together over the past decade and change that I would reject it out of hand. It was frightening, and foreign, and threatened to expose the truth that I knew was there - I was depressed because I was under someone else's control. I think someone who hasn't been in that position can't understand it. I think that's why it takes so long to come around to - it feels ridiculous to say, from the get go. 

As a child, and as you grow into an adult, you are told things. Like how your mother loves you and is always there for you. That family is good and if you marry you can at least look happy to the outside world. The second part is true, for a time. We could have gone on playing that scene indefinitely as long as you find comfort in the repetition. At least you know the lines. 

The trouble is, you forget what the truth looks like. You forget what it feels like. To feel valued and important. To have inherent value. What's important in life? Survival.

When I married W I was trying to please my mother. He had all the right qualifications, a fancy piece of paper, and most of all (how could I not see it?) was just like my mother - snide, critical, judgmental and cold. I thought that was just what men were supposed to be, even though I had two relationships to that prior to show me what it is like to be in a relationship that wasn't about control. I couldn't be barefoot and pregnant. It never felt like an option, and I never discussed this with my parents. I felt that if I went home, my parents would drown in the shame of having a harlot child and a bastard grandchild. I didn't need to think the thought - it flashed across my brain for a split-second, fully fleshed out. I couldn't go home if I said it out loud, or let it inhabit my thoughts any longer. 

Before I realized I was pregnant, I had this mad impulse to never see W again. We had been dating for a year, he had said I love you when drunk, and I accepted it because...? He looked like a poor man's version of a celebrity crush I had, he seemed dorky and arty and was an intelligent conversationalist. I had never met a guy who was so smart without being a pompous asshole. His family seemed to have walked out of a pancake commercial, I observed when I visited them for Thanksgiving. There was always marijuana and alcohol in his life. Soon it permeated into my own. I couldn't put my finger on why I wanted so desperately to disappear far away from him - I knew then that when I stayed up at night crying by his window, because he would tell me that he loved me under the cover of darkness and when the sun rose he would look at me with disgust and be rude, dismissive and blaming. I wished for cold silence instead - that would have been more palatable. My cousin visited and said he seemed nice but he drank too much. I said I thought that was the American way. I went to all my pre-natal appointments alone.

I wanted my life to dissolve. There was no way to resolve what I had blocked out for years - I was fifteen years away from the self-awareness to recall the abuse of my mother, from punishing me with bread and water, to washing my mouth with soap, to terrifying the living shit out of me as an eight year old by striking a ruler close to my hands to count out the rhythm of notes on a piano score, to reading my diary and punishing me emotionally for what I would say, to storming into my room as a 12-year-old and tearing down my posters. She took away what I loved from me. Complaining that I was unladylike, she transferred me out of a co-ed school. Because I had to focus on my studies as a 12-year-old, I wasn't allowed to do choir anymore or audition for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. If you take everything that makes a child who she is away from her, who does she become? To her dismay it bred a fight in me.

Once upon a time I did have an untameable rage. I would like to find that again. That fight I had in me. I know I had it in 2023, when I decided that I would no longer share a room with W. In May I began sleeping in the kids room. Soon I would leave when he started drinking. (Looking back, I wish I had packed up the children when I found beer in the fridge. That is the one thing I would change, now. But I couldn't think about them, I couldn't let them see how distressed I was. Thinking about that now, that is a silly thing, the idea that I had to keep it all together. And now I am desperately trying to locate my feelings, to show an appropriate amount of ??? It doesn't mean I need to hide everything and pretend things are OK.) W moved out in August 2023.

At the end of summer, it will have been two years since W moved out. I learned something important recently. You can't negotiate with terrorists. If someone behaves in a hateful, selfish way, believe them. So they promise something if you do something for them. How the fuck are you going to enforce that? If you can't enforce it, if there is no consequence, then it was never a negotiation, it was a hostage situation. The only thing to fear is fear itself.

W can still hurt my children. He has a reason to - he wants to hurt me. But how is that any different from who he was before? It isn't. 

What is different is that he cannot interact with me in person. He will never be in the same room as me again. In truth, once my mind accepts it, he can have no power over me. 

He was always able to hurt my children. He will continue to be able to do so. What I can do is to teach them how to protect themselves when I am not there.

The mind does not have to be a prison. The mind can speak a word and make it so, if it says it again and again, a secret name uttered in the dark.