Two words kept cropping up on my social media pages yesterday. Courageous and brave. Hmm. Those are words I’d associate with ‘The Last Fighting Tommy’, Harry Patch and Oskar Schindler who saved 1100 Jews from death in World War two. All I did was to share my story about how domestic violence affected me, that’s all. ‘This is what it looks like’ was written because I felt I had a story to tell, having the day before found some old photos of the effects of violence towards me, and because I wondered if it might help anyone, maybe just one person, who had been through what I had.
I don’t feel brave having written about it. Unless something changes dramatically, I am unlikely to work again. I’m unemployed – don’t worry: I’m not on benefits, not even a number on a list – and pretty well unemployable so I don’t feel the need to deny my past, even the bits with warts on. I have no one I feel the need to impress on a fancy CV and, as I get older, I am gripped by a need to be honest and truthful, obsessively so. I will never know whether failed job applications – I’ve had a few – were down to being honest, like openly referring to my clinical depression, my symptoms of ADHD or whether I simply wasn’t what a prospective employer wanted in exchange for a few coppers above the national minimum wage. But then, who cares? The more honest and truthful I am, the happier I feel, regardless of the consequences.
The violence meted out to me did leave some mental scars, but less than you might imagine. It’s true that I didn’t exactly advertise the fact that a former partner literally beat me black and blue and I didn’t wander round my office of my local holding court and telling people about it. I suspect it made my mental health, and specifically my anxiety levels, permanently worse, but for all that I definitely came out the other side. The hardest part was in understanding if the violence was somehow my fault, that I deserved it.
I know I was not the most reliable boyfriend. I could be thoughtless, ignorant, uncaring; moving from one relationship to another. I’m not proud of that. But I was never abusive, never mind violent. You would need to be in possession of a sick mind to wilfully attack and injure someone you must have loved, or at least liked, at some point. I never hung around long enough to find out whether this applied to my assailant, but a third party did inform me that it did. In which case, I look forward to an explanation, a full apology and a voluntary cash settlement to the value, at today’s prices, of the house I owned and lost. I don’t really want any of that. 32 years has passed by. If someone can live with that for all those years, I suspect they can carry it to their grave. Or maybe make a donation to Refuge.
I’m very grateful for all the nice comments. They mean a lot. I’m well over the violence, even if it still makes little sense. I’m also very aware that it still goes on today, perhaps more so than ever, and it happens more frequently to women than men. Domestic violence is a crime in which the assailant can hold all the cards, enjoy the power that goes with it. The victim will often be the one to walk away and lose everything or to be trapped in an abusive relationship. For the abuser, it can be a power trip. “You tell the police about me and I’ll make your life hell.” I didn’t tell the police because in truth I never thought about doing it. And anyway, would they believe a relatively fit, six foot tall man alleging he’d been beaten by such a nice woman? “What did you to to HER, because she says…” and so on.
Courageous and brave? Honest and truthful is how I’d put it, a man at the end of a working life with no one left to impress with a story to tell, that’s all.
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