Scared of No
April 1, 2024
Writer: Anonymous
Editor: Haley Brettschneider
Writing about this terror is my only form of expression because even I, a person who loves to talk about her feelings and life experiences, can’t find the courage to fully open up about how you ripped me to shreds. A large portion of me doesn’t want to admit what I endured, because admitting it insinuates reality. All I want to do is neglect the idea that I am your victim. But one thing that I do know, is that the horror, pain, and weakness you placed on me is real. The way you yelled at me until I didn’t recognize myself was real. The way you made my dad cry once he found out not even half of the damage you had done to me was real.
…
At one point in our relationship, your bed was the safest place I knew. I loved the warmth, the comfort, the shelter. But similar to every other piece of myself, you took advantage of that feeling and tore it away from me. A place where I once felt so protected became a place that I feared the most.
Don’t think I forgot about the way you would wake me up so that you could use me as your object. I remember the fear in my body when I would find the strength to say no, because I knew that meant I was provoking a fight. Saying no made me a “bad partner.” Burned into my brain is the way that you would repeatedly ridicule me for twenty minutes before I changed my answer from no to yes. The action of succumbing to you was sometimes easier than saying no- I wouldn’t have to deal with the hours of fighting subsequent to saying such a simple two letter word. After pressuring me into switching my answer, you would finish, tell me you loved me, and everytime I would say “I love you too,” another piece of my heart would break off.
You morphed me into an unrecognizable person: a person who was mean to her parents, a person who didn’t hang out with friends, a person who hated the way she looked. I glance back at myself when I was trapped by you, and am filled with anger. How could I, a person with such a backbone, allow myself to be repeatedly slashed open. How could I, a person with such strength, feel so weak to the point where I couldn’t say no.
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I will never forget the therapy session in which I finally let my guard down and told my therapist about your harmful actions. She is such a graceful, gentle human who remains calm within every one of our meetings. However on this specific day, I saw a genuine sense of anger seep through her skin. I felt validated, I felt a new sense of protection, and I finally realized that I wasn’t the monster that you made me out to be.
She asked me a specific question that day. A question that struck me in a manner that drained the color from my life. When she asked me if I wanted to pursue legal action against you, we both sat together as I cried. Cried because the innocence I had once known was torn away, cried because I was lost, and cried because I was scared.
It was in this exact hour that I told her I would prefer you dead rather than alive. You broke me in such irreparable ways that the only way I could imagine finding peace again was to have you lifeless. Let that sink in. Think about the fact that even months later of freeing myself from you, I still sometimes look away from the mirror when I am nude. On occasion, the body that I see in the mirror isn’t the body that has helped me recover from different ailments, it’s not the body that has carried me through all my years of life. It is the body that you held under your weight when you realized that your physical stature could dominate mine.
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So thank you. Thank you for making me scared of something as simple as no. Thank you for shattering such a pure sector of me because, surprisingly, it has taught me how to hold more strength than you could ever dream of possessing. A piece of hesitation will always lie under my skin, but I will no longer let it dictate my ways of life. You might’ve temporarily torn me down, but the growth I’ve learned leaves you in a shadow, far from reaching my progress. I will no longer turn to view the darkness of the shadow, I will only focus on the light that lies ahead.
