Can I Get a Witness?

Let’s just say I’ve been on hiatus. The truth is that I’m not sure where this blog supposed to go.

Also, the more honest I am, the less say I have in telling my words where to go. I channel thoughts and inspiration and watch it manifest on the page. (This is a really pretentious way of saying I have no idea what I’m doing.)

I’ve been wrestling lately with why I started this in the first place. This blog began as a divorce memoir I was working on in the dark days of 2020, when I was reflecting on what it took for me to burn down my life and build it up again from scratch. My only goal was to write the truth. At that time, I really believed I knew a couple of things. I had put away a destructive relationship, matured and moved on. And what I wrote was the truth. But it wasn’t the whole story: I had leapt from my marriage right into an abusive relationship and my dormant alcoholism was gathering strength around me like a storm. And for as self-aware as I was trying to be, I wasn’t aware of either thing.

That’s one of the things that has been the hardest for me to deal with. How can I be in what was so obviously a cruel and abusive relationship without realizing it? This ain’t my first rodeo. Or my second rodeo. Or my third. Let’s just say I’m fully versed in rodeos at this point. Some things are only apparent in retrospect. The mind and the heart are such good experts at protecting us that it tells us comforting stories about what we’re experiencing, and we believe them because the alternative feels impossible to face sometimes.

So my new, more focused goal here now is to write the truth as I know it, when I know it.

It makes sense that when I was able to have some perspective, I wanted to come clean about it. But that’s not the whole story either. The blog post I wrote about sexual assault and the harassment that followed ruffled feathers. It ended relationships. It exposed fissures in my life that preferred to remain hidden. And I felt vindicated, but I also felt bad about it. So, I’ve been asking myself why I did it and wrestling with the answer for a long, long time.

Was I being vindictive?

Yes. Do you know the rage that comes from hearing your story told by the person who abused you? To have him take the copyright to my story? And for him to become the victim of my rape? I do.