Drawing the Line

In 2017 I left my abusive marriage. It took everything from me and it took everything out of me. I had hit rock bottom and it felt so good compared to what I had been through. With every inch of my being I wanted out.

I remember the day I left him for good at Shadwell station in London. It had been raining and he had followed me to the station, crying. His eyes lifeless and black. My body aching and bruised – all I could think of was the pain I was in. Any ideas of him, of who he was, were beaten out of me. He was nothing now. A figment of my imagination that I had held on to for too long. A stranger suffering from some kind of neurosis that was no longer my problem. His mask had slipped. Nothing he said now made sense.

And there was so much relief watching him fade into the distance as the metro pulled away from the station.

This man called Umut – a financial analyst living in London – turned out, needless to say, not to be the man I thought he was. 

When the abuse started, I blamed it on his job but I know now I was lying to myself. Because I was scared. Because I wanted to prove to him that I was worth loving. I refused to believe what was in front of my eyes. I didn’t want it to be true. There was so much at stake.

But abusive people don’t change.

At first, things were normal. He appeared normal, We did normal couple stuff and fell in love but as our relationship progressed, I began to notice irrational patterns in his behaviour that didn’t add up. 

One moment he was complimenting me and the next, devaluing me. He was terribly jealous and then more and more controlling. He would dictate where I could sit when we went out, what I could wear, and where I could go. I was always and never doing something to incite his suspicion or jealousy or anger. And he repeatedly replaced my feelings and thoughts with his assumptions – convinced he knew me better than I knew myself. His arguments made less and less sense and when he was angry his eyes would go completely black and he would disappear into his anger. When he came to, he denied it happened. 

Beneath his seemingly normal exterior, I discovered that he was not only extremely insecure but also suffering from a personality disorder. Looking back now, I can see it clearly

The gaslighting, the abuse, his lack of trust in anyone, the paranoia, the irrationality, and the inability to empathize with anyone all made it clear that he was suffering from narcissistic personality disorder. 

And the thing about narcissistic personality disorder is that those suffering from it are very good at hiding this disorder from others. They have spent their whole life learning how to fit in by mimicking what society considers normal but the moment they get comfortable in relationships, their mask starts to slip. 

My Story

For me, it was all over when the escalation of his abuse nearly killed me. It got to the point where he could no longer control his disorder or his anger. A part of me felt that he knew that I knew who he really was and therefore he saw no reason to hide it. The verbal and physical abuse became constant.

And then one afternoon in London he grabbed me by the throat and viciously attacked me. The reason? I didn’t have a napkin in my bag when he asked for one. Because, in his words, ‘All normal women have napkins in their bags.’

He left me grateful that there was no internal bleeding. That I hadn’t suffered a concussion after being kicked by him and hitting my head on the concrete floor. That I wasn’t paralyzed or that my face hadn’t been cut up from nearly smashing into a mirror.

The attack left me in immense pain.  It was the worst attack yet. I was unable to walk and my back and arms were bruised yellow and blue. I was in complete shock and he ignored me until the day I left and he followed me to the station.

On the platform, he cried and told me that he was sorry. From his eyes and incoherent speech, for the first time I could clearly see that he was mentally unwell.

I stood away from him, detached, and said nothing. My mind hijacked by the pain shooting like fireworks throughout my body. 

Alone in my home and in my room far far away from him, I started to feel the extent of my trauma. In the darkness, I moved between deep waves of anxiety, grief, and nothingness. The intense burning sensation of the bruising made it difficult to think. 

The Wisdom Gained

The wisdom gained from this whole traumatic experience was knowing what love is not.  Love is not caring for someone unconditionally at the expense of yourself. Love is not believing that someone has the strength to see what is right and change. Love is not saving others from themselves. Love does not hurt.

Discovering I Wasn’t Alone

When I left him, I knew that he would find another victim soon enough. Not only that, but that he would tell stories about me to gain their sympathy. So I decided to blog and share the truth of my experience as a warning – knowing that all they needed was my name to find me. I wrote and waited. Sure enough, in about two months, the reader map on the backend of WordPress began to ping and it was pinging in the UK. Two women reached out to me. One with whom I agreed to meet up with online so that we could talk. I was curious to see how his pattern played out and I wasn’t surprised to find out that our experiences were similar.

The Book: Attempting the Impossible

As part of my healing, I wrote a book about my experience. It was my way of taking back my story from my abuser and grounding the truth. In celebration of my milestone of not only having survived this but also finding myself thriving in ways I never thought possible, If you would like to receive a copy of the book, please send me an email through the contact form.

A Commitment to Transformation

You can’t change others. You can only change yourself.

The gift of hitting rock bottom is clarity. I knew exactly what I didn’t want. And I learned the value of embracing my fears instead of running away from them. 

And by doing this I discovered that I was so much more than what I was holding on to. That I had everything I needed right then to begin rebuilding my life on a more solid foundation. All I needed was the courage to align myself with my deepest values, to do the next right thing and to trust the process.

Transformation lies in the direction of your fears. Believe in yourself.