From the depths of our wounds does our greatest triumph emerge. This is one such story.
My fins are up at Dolphin Point, Alaska!
Emotions are just pouring out of me. I am crying, sobbing, healing maybe? The contrast of happiness in the present with the pain of the past is so distinct. Like black and white, they are alien and separate from each other in every possible way. And the only thing connecting these stark emotions, is me as their shared container. Perhaps also my tears connect them. Today they feel like the rain quenching a drought. Back then they felt like a flood devastating my inner world.
The Pain
From age 17 to 24, I was in a relationship that can only be described as abusive. I don’t have physical wounds. But I have so many deep emotional cuts and gashes. And that is not even the most painful part. The saddest part is I could not even see them, when and how they were inflicted even though I could feel the pain.
He was spiritual. A good guy. Spoke about God and enlightenment. He was charming. When we first met he felt like an enigma. Mature than all the boys I knew around me. He made me feel special. Like a princess in the beginning and all this made me ease my power, my agency and I did not even notice when he had managed to unwittingly or manipulatively gain full control over it. He had somehow on purpose or accidentally over the course of the first year made me see how every other relationship that I had — my parents, my sister, my friends were not good for me. Or for my spiritual growth. So my circle of safety eventually was just him. And then it started happening. He would undermine me in my own eyes without me noticing. He would admonish me for ever thinking for myself. And I was so ‘in’ at this point that I always concluded I must be the problem.
I liked to take pictures and whenever I would do so, he would say to me — “You don’t have the talent for that. Your compositions are all wrong, Stop kidding yourself”. So I stopped.
We were walking down the road with a couple of his friends and I was joking and being funny as I thought was natural to me. Later that evening he convinced me how being funny was not my thing. It made me look like I was pretending to be someone I was not. So I stopped.
He told me to wear colors that didn’t draw attention to me. Nail polish and makeup were for slutty girls not good ones. So I stopped caring at 19 about how I looked. I bought subdued colors, wore a salwar kameez (Indian dress with a stole) much more than I had ever done.
As someone who had danced on stage, thousands of times, he would tell me again and again and convince me that dance was a form of feeding the devil in me. It was a way of bringing the attention of other men, and therefore I needed to stop. So I did. I needed to be like Sita, he would say. And I thought yeah Sita stands for virtue, being ‘good’. So I stopped.
He would say how I need to eat less otherwise I would be a fat old lady. I started eating less. I saw myself as fat and ugly.
If we ate out. He ordered. If I said I wanted to eat something specific. He would somehow convince me that what he wanted was the best and right thing for me to eat. And I would concede.
If I had to use the restroom while we were out, I was such an inconvenience. He would scold me saying why I never took care of these things before we left the house. (To this day whenever I feel pressure to suppress my truth I have to use the restroom within seconds of that emotional trigger. Emotional abuse is real. Period)
Slowly with time, this dynamic became more and more violent. It became the norm. I was always wrong. I was always stupid. I was impulsive. I was bad. I was yelled at in front of other people for the smallest things like accidentally tripping on a stone while walking. And I agreed. I deserved it. I should know how to walk. I was slapped. I was shrugged. And I always told myself, “I deserved it.”
Me, from 2010 while I was in the thick of it.
Until the pain was all I felt. I hated the world. I hated my life. The only place I felt safe was the bathroom, where I would sit for hours and then even only tears would flow out of me in floods with the most sincere prayer escaping my lips “God free me from this pain”. And then I would hear his voice in my head, I am in pain because I am wrong, and this is my ‘karma’ I need to get through. So I would get up and move on. Go on with life, eat, sleep and go about my business on the surface, but I was dead inside and would find myself making the same prayer in the same bathroom a few days later.
The Diagnosis
I was sitting in my room. Eyes wet and vacant and mind foggy from a recent crying in the bathroom session. Just sitting, staring at nothing, doing nothing. When my mom walked into the room. She said the same thing she had been saying for over 6 years now. “Mansi Jaake baaher se karle apne masters beta” “Go do your masters from abroad, child”. After a few long seconds of the loudest silence I have heard, I experience being out of my own body and hear myself say the words — “Theek Hai”. “Okay”. I am shocked at those words as they come out of me involuntarily. Bless that woman because she sprung into action right that moment. She started setting up interviews with potential schools and for the first time in 6 years I felt a tug of hope inside me, it was a very unfamiliar and confusing feeling. It was like I was in this dark pit and I could not hold or see but only sense this rope dropping down.
Throughout this process, every obstacle that he would put before me as a condition to not go were magically removed one after another. And how multiple instruments contrived to bring me to the US is a story for another time, but within a few months the impossible had happened I was going on a scholarship to study in San Francisco in the fall of 2013. I remember him coming to see me off the airport and on the surface, I felt this discomfort of leaving the familiar. But as soon as I lost sight of him walking through security, I started feeling safe outside of the bathroom for the first time. I was alone for the first time in a way that I remember looking around the airport and feeling moments of aliveness. Feeling curious again. And as the plane took off somehow I left behind the first of the many constraints that I did not even know were on me.
In the US, knowing no one and trying to figure out commuting, housing, phone plans, bank accounts slowly and steadily started shoveling off years of crap that had settled on my sense of agency. I started surprising myself. Wow, I could do that? In class slowly I started being ‘myself’ joking and I would hear people say “you are funny”. That would surprise me. Really? Really? I am intelligent? I am funny? I have value? This process of external validation slowly started removing the blindness of why I was in pain, why I was so intrinsically unhappy.
I was in pain because I had no agency and I had no self-awareness of that either.
In over 6 years I started hearing a different story about me from others. And once that started happening I started building courage, started opening up to new friends about what I had been through and their reactions would make me question the normality of my relationship. Finally, a friend said you need to speak to my mother she could possibly help you. And I remember being petrified to such an extent that I flaked on the call appointment last minute and wrote her an email instead. And the tone of my email to her was so protective of him. As I read that email today I am stunned at how much loyalty I felt towards someone who hurt me so much so often knowingly or unknowingly? Why? Why? Did I feel this way? The rage just surges right back up even as I write these words.
She was the first woman who told me how important it was for my safety that I completely cut every possible way that this person could get in touch with me. That as an emergency responder for women in abusive relationships she needed me to cut all ties with this person and make sure I understood that very clearly. At first, it felt like an overreaction to me but as soon as I tried to end things with him. Things started getting ugly. Thank God for the distance because I shudder at the thought of what could have happened if I was physically near him. I learn of things that shock me at first and then they start making sense, like fog clearing slowly. I find out about how he was using some people in San Francisco to spy on me and control me. This information was the loudest alarm bell. It literally dropped the blinds off my eyes and I could finally see how he had always used information about what I did to control me. Dark patterns started becoming completely visible. And in that moment the natural instinct of self-preservation (finally) kicked in. It was like suddenly ‘Kali’ took birth in me and pushed out ‘his Sita’ and became the strength I needed to sever this ugly, toxic tie. And so I did, finally in October of 2013 after 7 long years of the prime of my life.
Graduating academically and more importantly emotionally in 2014!
The Healing
But the diagnosis was not the end. It was the beginning. Of another process — healing. The messy part of gaining an understanding of what happened. Why it happened. Processing the pain of how no one saw it. Why? Not my mother, father, colleagues?? Reconciling with myself. Why??
These wanderings fueled by anger mostly would take me in many directions. Books, teachers, healing practices. Inner work, affirmations. Hateful interactions with family. Shunning of relationships. All of it. But I could not meditate, the girl who would meditate for hours just could not meditate. I could not sit in silence with myself because the true perpetrator was me. I had let this happen to me.
The invisibility of emotional abuse is what makes it so devastating.
So I not only had to live with this pain but also live with myself and also learn to heal and love myself. But I did not know how to heal or love myself. I had never learned how to. And that is when two angels came into my life to teach me just that.
He is funny. Silly. 6'.1”. Has kind green eyes. He is agnostic. He treats me like I am an equal. He hugs me when I trip accidentally. Asks me tips on how to take good pictures. Loves it when I sing out loud for no reason. Constantly tells me how much I make him laugh. He cheers me on enthusiastically as I reclaim my place on the stage as a dancer again. He says more often that I want “You are a superstar”. He loves me for who I am and not who he wants me to be. He wants to not just grow old but also grow as a human with me.
She is drop dead gorgeous. Eyes bright and alive like a priestess with a warm and comforting smile like an old friend. She is my soul sister. We talk almost every day. Share everything with each other. There is no one else in the world who knows me, my deepest fears, my craziest dreams the way she does. And no one who shares with me as vulnerably too. She says “I am so so so so grateful to have you in my life. I am so proud of who you are!” She loves me and I know it. I feel it in every word even when she just says hi.
On the day of my first dance recital after 11 years! Tears rolled down the moment I stepped on to the stage. Through dance I am learning how to express love for myself now.
On an incredible trip to Peru with this angel! Together on this day we climbed many steps and ladders, literally and figuratively!
From utter loneliness to true human connection. The kind that feels alive almost like a new being that is created by our mutual love and respect, that we nurture and tend to like we do a baby. The kind that takes work, courage and raw vulnerability to build. That is what taught me how to live with myself, my pain, that is what taught me how heal myself and eventually fall in love with me too.
Today I can tell you what happiness feels like. I feel it when he and I sit in silence and just one unplanned glance drenches me with love. Happiness is when she leaves me a long voice message sharing details of her fears and joys and asking me in the most sincere way “how are you doing sister? Tell me about your day” Happiness is when I feel an emotion swirling inside me and I can name and manage it. Happiness is when I am writing my own story.
Me, not so in control here and loving it!
I, sometimes in my mind joke about how it took an American man and a Brazilian woman to heal an Indian woman from the wounds of an Indian man. It still makes me chuckle.
Yes, the invisibility of emotional abuse is what makes it so devastating.
But do we not live in a society where all pain below a certain level of gravity is invisible? The pain of postpartum depression, the pain of exclusion? The pain of being misunderstood? The pain of being cheated on? In a world where even 12 Million women sharing #metoo stories of sexual assault and harassment was not enough to make that pain visible.
I hope we as a people can learn to talk about emotional pain without any agenda. Without it being measured up against a graver pain. Where after going through this I don’t have to hear myself say “Thank God! At least I was not raped”. And a rape victim say to herself/himself “Thank God! Atleast I was not killed!” Why do we only acknowledge extremes? Sometimes not even then, shockingly!
We as a society urgently need to learn to hold space for pain, any pain and validate it none the less. Pain is pain. Period. The pain of being yelled at by a boss to the pain of losing a loved one to the pain of ‘insert anything else here’. All wounds need tending, all wounds need healing.
Because the truth is — relationships destroyed me. And relationships built me back up.
As humans, we are social beings not just because we live around one another, but more so because we hurt and heal in relation to each other. We are all victims of victims. We are all perpetrators of perpetrators. And love, therefore is not an emotion in itself but it is that healing in the safe space created between beings. Forgiveness is not a generous act but the humble understanding of how:
We all have the power to break and build each other. We are all the villains and heroes of each other stories. Whether we like it or not.
So can we learn to accept this reality? Can we learn how to catalyze our agency? Can we learn to have enough self-awareness? Can we learn to acknowledge all wounds?
But most importantly can we naturally and from within hold that sacred space for healing for someone? And in turn be held that space for as well? I sure hope so. I hope that so badly for everyone, every single person who is alive. Strangely even for him.
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Learn more about how this story had shaped the work I do here.
Thumbnail image credit: Photo by Lance Grandahl on Unsplash