“Mostly when people write about the trauma of gender violence, it's described as one awful, exceptional event or relationship, as though you suddenly fell into the water, but what if you’re swimming through it your whole life? ”

Rebecca Solnit, "Recollections of My Non-Existence" 

 

I have a shelter now, though that wasn’t always the case. I spent most of last year the way many of us are spending our lives now: trapped in an apartment in a constant state of fear. For me, the threat came from inside the house. I walked on eggshells around him from day one, cooking and cleaning and doing everything I could to make the one-bedroom apartment feel like my own. It hadn’t begun that way, of course: In the beginning he was kind and charming, overly confident that it would all work out. I had just graduated from college, and when he suggested moving in together, it seemed like the perfect antidote to my lack of direction, a sort of storybook romance. It was seamless for the first few weeks, but once our families had met and the lease was signed, once our lives were too entwined for either one of us to escape, he changed. I thought at first that he was morphing into a different person, though I realize now that the charm was a cover; his true self was cruel, more horror than romance. I left him and returned, then left and returned again. 

 

When he was away on an errand, I would sit in my same little corner, waiting for his return with bile rising in my stomach. If the dog barked, he screamed at me. If the house wasn’t spotless, he called me worthless. When I went out with friends, he called the police to report me missing, determined to know where I was at all times. When I was with him in public, I never took my eyes off him, had to respectfully wait for his permission to speak, because to speak to a stranger equated to cheating on him. It didn’t matter whether it was a waitress, an acquaintance, or a passenger on the train: He kept me within a bubble where he could mediate every interaction I had with the outside world. Every time this barrier was removed, he saw it as a threat. It was a mark of how worn down I was that I never questioned this. I hated the person I had become, the person I had let him turn me into. I worried that this was my true self and became trapped in the idea that we deserved each other, if only to spare the rest of the world our evil. Now I see the ways he manipulated me, and realize how he set me up to blame myself. 

 

Virginia Woolf understood the inherent threat in a lack of space, the fear that women experienced while writing furtively in drawing rooms, constantly looking over their shoulders to make sure the coast was clear. In her essay, “A Room of One’s Own”, she argues that without their own space, women were not free to create. The inhibitions of the material world weighed on their right to self-expression. Her focus was not on domestic violence, but the everyday demands of the household which left little time for anything else, and a lack of privacy, which constrained women’s creativity. In abusive situations, the pressure is increased. “I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out,” Woolf writes, “and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in.” Indeed, it’s a circle of hell familiar to many, but one that can’t be fully explained if you haven’t been there. Woolf’s “locking in”, in this case, is a metaphor for the adherence to gender roles, but her words resonate even in a different context. Back then, I still wrote, though none of it was good. I kept scattered diary entries, deleted paragraphs he might disapprove of, hid bits and pieces of poetry in journals and along the bottom of mundane documents, hiding my most intimate thoughts in folders labelled “cover letters” and “winter college essays.” When I read these over now, I see that a painful desperation permeates every word. The one coherent metaphor is that of a selkie, “who burned her own pelt to remain on the land.” I blamed myself for staying, and pushed friends and family further away.