My Story

Experiences are not excuses for your actions.  I live by that belief everyday.  I do not let my actions be excused by my past and I take full responsibility for everything that I have done.  There have been times in my life that I have let my past dictate my present but when I come back to sanity, I always recognize and change.  I have recently heard some women excuse their bad choices for men by saying that some guy ‘changed’ them and they can’t help but pick bad men.  I don’t buy it at all.  Choosing a relationship partner is a conscious decision and people need to realize that no one forced them to do it.  I’m not an extremely open person so this particular blog is not the easiest for me to write but I’m going to finally share my story.  I can honestly say no one knows this full story except me because I have only shared small bits to different people.  I hope that by finally telling my story that I can be a testimony of not playing victim to situations and taking control of your life and actions.  There are many details that I will not share because I’m not ready for people to know about them and I’ll leave those for counseling. 

About this time last year, I moved away from Florence and I swore it was the last time and that I would never be back… and yet here I am a year later saying that I will never leave Florence again.  I was at a new job and madly in love with my boyfriend but I had some internal issues that I hadn’t worked out and I let them get in the way of that relationship.  Here is a quick version of what happened. I cheated. (the end)  There was mistake number 1.  Mistake number 2… I stayed with the guy who I cheated with..  I had it in my mind that I had done something so terrible and I didn’t deserve to be happy and I wasn’t happy with my choices.  I was put in a horrible situation because of my actions and ended up moving in with him because I had no where else to go at the time (3^rd Mistake.)  I was scared already and allowed myself to be manipulated by him to do whatever he wanted.  Then came the abuse.. it started off small with him verbally harassing me 24/7 if I didn’t do the smallest thing his way.  So to get it to stop, I let him control me but it ended up making it worse; I became his little puppet and the verbal abuse got worse with every day.  After a couple weeks of the harassment and allowing him to control me came the alienation from my friends and family.  All while this was going on, he would tell me that he was a good man and I was lucky and he would take care of me no matter what and no one would love me as much as he did… allllllll lies.  By this time he had spent all of my money and promised to take care of my bills but he didn’t so my phone got shut off, my car insurance was cancelled (can’t drive anymore), my health insurance was cancelled and my student loans became delinquent.  To top everything off, he is a hacker and had some sort of program downloaded on to my computer so he could see every keystroke I made and my computer took screen shots every second to record what I was doing.  I was trapped, I couldn’t call any one and I couldn’t email anyone about what was going on.  All I was allowed to tell anyone is that life was good and full of roses kind of stuff.  My family HATED him and he would use that against me constantly and he wouldn’t allow me to talk to them because of it.  All that was going through my head at the time was that I had deserved this because of what I did but no one deserves to be treated the way I was treated.  By this time I started shutting down physically and emotionally; the only thing I had to look forward to everyday was seeing my kittens but he tried to control how much time I spent with them too.  Every night there was a new fight about something and one night I walked away from him because I had had enough… that’s when the physical abuse started.  He came into the living room and told me that if I didn’t go back into the bedroom that he would make me. Of course I wasn’t going to do what he wanted so he grabbed me by my wrists and dragged me back there and then slammed me against the wall and held me up by my throat.  He then got in my face and had this evil look and told me to never walk away from him again.  I thought he was going to kill me and at that point I had hoped he would.. but then my roommate came to the door and yelled that if he didn’t leave me alone she was going to call the cops.  He dropped me and went to the door and told her that I was fine and she asked me if I was ok but I just responded that I wanted to be left alone.  Later that night he said he was sorry, it would never happen again, no one could love me as much as he did, and that it was really my fault because I walked away from him and I knew that it would set him off.  I lived like this for months; I was a walking corpse, I did everything he wanted and was still abused in some form day after day.  My mom didn’t know what was going on but she knew something was wrong when I disappeared for over a month.  My grandmother tried to convince her to place a missing person’s add out for me because it wasn’t like me to not contact her everyday.  I was finally able to contact my mom at the end of October and that’s when she went on her campaign to try and get me to come back home.  He would make up lies and tell me that she just wanted to control me to convince me to stay with him.  Then on Thanksgiving I found out that I was pregnant.  I had known for about two weeks but I waited on taking a test as long as I could.  I was ashamed, scared but also relieved; I knew that this was my way out.  We had been engaged since August and ended up getting married less than a week after I took the pregnancy test.  My mom had finally come up with a plan to get me home that he agreed with and he only agreed because I was pregnant.  That first month home was hell because he was here with me.  Even though I was back with my family, he still tried to control every little thing about me.  As he noticed that he was loosing control over me, the abuse got worse.  My mom left one weekend and my sister went and stayed with her fiancé leaving him and me alone at the house.  We had a fight that ended up with him choking me in the foyer of the house.  I remember seeing him pull back his fist because I was fighting back and I though he was going to punch my face so I closed my eyes but he ended up punching a whole in the wall directly above my head.  I ended up with bruises and fingerprints all over my arms but I covered them up by wearing long sleeves for the week.  When my mom got back from her trip he gave her some lie about what happened and I just refused to answer why there was a whole in the wall (I wasn’t going to lie to her and if I told the truth, he would hurt me.)  The next Sunday, he threw fresh coffee all over me so that I wouldn’t drink it.  The doctor told me that week that I could have one cup of caffeinated beverage a day and I wanted some coffee before church so I fixed a half of a cup but he didn’t want me to have it so me came in the kitchen and threw it on me.  After church my mom took me to lunch to talk to me about leaving him.  I told her I wanted to try and work things out.  When I got home, I told him that he had three weeks to get into counseling or I was kicking him out.  He told me that he would do anything because he loved me soo much but he never even tried to see a counselor.  That next Friday he had two episodes before noon and the second one was the scariest one ever.  He trapped me in my room so that I couldn’t get away from him, he slammed me against the wall and choked me several times (keep in mind that I was 15 weeks pregnant at the time), he smashed my cell phone so that I couldn’t call the cops, he finally let me out of the room but wouldn’t let me out of the house (every time I would get the door cracked I was screaming help at the top of my lungs and he would slam the door shut), he choked me against the door to the point that I blacked out and then I started to fight back.  I gave him a black eye, kneed him several times, and bit his arm so hard that I broke skin.  I finally got away from him and ran to my neighbor’s house and my neighbor calmed me down then called the cops.  By the time the cops got there, my husband was gone and all he took with him were my two laptop computers and all of my SD cards so that I couldn’t take pictures of what he did to me.  The cops put out an arrest warrant for him and I went to the courthouse to have file a restraining order against him.  The next Monday, I filed for divorce.  I haven’t seen him since and all I get from him is threatening emails.  He wants me to still live in fear of him but I’m not scared of anything he can do.  The scariest part was calling the cops because I didn’t know what he would do when I wasn’t there to semi control what happened to me.  The hardest part about leaving an abuser is leaving because there is a loss of knowing what is going to happen but I’ve just had to tell myself that he’s not worth worrying about.

I didn't write this today to play victim or to get sympathy from anyone; I want people to know that you can go through literal hell and get back up from it to live a blessed life.  I know people who have been in abusive relationships and they use that as an excuse to act a certain way but I'm living proof that you can live a normal, God-filled life after abuse.  I encourage anyone who is in an abusive relationsihp to seek help; there are women't shelters that will help keep you safe and help you get back on your feet.  Being abused is not the end of the world and you can have a new beginning.  I've got my beautiful beginning and I can't wait to give birth to her in just a few weeks.