CAPTAIN'S BLOG
(Friendly reminder: These posts help me feel better, and are a way for me to deal with the difficulty of what has happened. Otherwise, I'd really go crazy. Silence is where real pain lurks.) Anyone who hurts another just so that they themselves can avoid hurt is the greatest coward of all. Aggressive neutrality is the province of the morally weak and intellectual cowards. The audacity that one might assert that they care about someone other than themselves while they stand by and let someone suffer because of the awful actions of another are complicit in those actions. The Bystander Effect is not restricted to someone being beaten on the street - as I've seen first hand, it is alive and well in social structures as well. This is one of those times where I think Canadian societies' tendency of apathy towards the emotional turmoil of others is a moral failing of the highest order. Americans are brave enough to take chances, be wrong, and apologize and make amends when they are wrong - some Canadians just sit on their hands, content to ignore the plights of others unless we're occupying their land or whatever other useless placation is in the mind of the population at the time.
To everyone who stood by uselessly while Aria destroyed my life and my brain, thanks for your help. What could've been an unpleasant breakup was turned into an excruciating suffer fest. The lie of omission is still a lie - the victim of that omission still feels betrayed. You played your role in her game by doing nothing and communicating nothing. By not reaching out, by not trying to stop her, by not trying to help her see what she was doing to me, by not communicating to me any sort of regret expressed or felt on her part - something which I think is a strange thing to not express given what she's done to me and others. There is still time - there is always time to try and fix things, to challenge the status quo, despite the Canadian allergy to doing so. I hope she suffers for what she did to me forever, and I hope she is forever haunted by knowing that she hurt someone who trusted her more than anyone else in the world. Hopefully someday, she experiences that same loss. And hopefully, she doesn't make it through this like I will make it through this - as a better person than I was before. Fuck you Aria - you are a human wasteland, an embarassment to society, and your close friends - my ex-friends - are the finest example of the hopelessness of a socially apathetic society of watchers one could ever hope for. You all make a great team of self-deceivers and enablers. I disabled my Facebook account because even the slightest reference to you or anything about you fills me with anxiety like I have never experienced. And that is your fault - you did this to me. May you someday experience that same feeling, and may it last 100 times longer and stronger for you than it did for me. May it haunt your dreams like it has haunted mine, may it make you jump whenever your phone makes any noise, may it make you afraid whenever you hear someone at the front door or even out on the street, may it make you anxious every time you hear footsteps like mine, may it make you wince whenever you think of all the times I was kind to you and showed you love and defended you to my friends and family, may it make you lose your train of thought whenever a random memory comes careening into your mind. Where is this thing? Did she steal it? What else did she steal that I can't remember? These are the things that I can't shake from my head - fears that the woman I trusted more than anyone else in my lifetime put there and reinforced on purpose. Maybe she expects she'll be able to just apologize and have it all go away like she does with her friends. I don't think I can do that. The things she said and did are unforgivable. I couldn't write a fictional character so evil... until now that I've experienced one firsthand. Remember what you did to Riley? My best friend and our lover? I'll never forget that pouring sound. Or how hard it was to convince you that it was a bad idea. I am ashamed to have ever loved you, to have ever defended you. Everyone was right about you - you're self-justifying to a dangerous fault. And for the record: my dom dumped me because I called her too late. The rest of the story is one of my favourites to tell, so many people already know it. Sorry to ruin your attempt at further harming my character - yes, I've made some irresponsible choices, yes I sometimes follow my hormones better than my brain, but I'm not capable of anything anywhere near as dangerous as what I've seen you do first hand. Sure, sometimes I take risks and harm myself - but you harm others. For two months now - I think yesterdayish was the two month anniversary - you have haunted every waking moment of my life. Only my time with Marion is when thoughts of the awful things you did and said fade away into the background. And I am healing - slowly, thanks to the poison that runs through my blood for you, but I am healing. Someday, I will not care about you. But until then, a certain part of my brain is dedicated to hating you. Not of my own free will, but it's there, churning away. I hate you with all the power I can muster, with the fiery passion of a thousand suns, with the same energy that I once devoted to loving and fearing you. You can try to leave this in the past all you want. But you know what you did - to me, to us, and how you lied to everyone else to cover up after yourself. You are a coward, and although it hurts so much I can barely stand it, I am glad you finally showed me your true colours, and that I was smart enough and emotionally intelligent enough to know that I could have never married you. Had I been brave enough at that time, I would have ended things when you asked me to marry you - I never thought I would feel the way I did when you put that ring on my finger. Not freedom, not happiness, not joy, not love - but fear. Fear for the future, trapped in the present, and sadness at the past. But I still felt so alone in this world - and I was worried I would be alone forever. You were with me at the start, but then you went away one day in April, and you never came back, leaving only your skin of evil behind. I wanted us to be friends for the rest of our lives - but I don't know if I can ever forgive you. Sometimes I imagine what your apology might be like - but then I realize that I will never get an apology from you, because you still think what you did was justified. Well it wasn't - I know that, you know that, Marion knows that, RE knows that, the landlady knows that, Bruce knows that, my doctor knows that - anyone who hasn't bought your lies at a wholesale discount knows that. And sure, you've fooled people in the short term. But here's the thing: I'm crazy now, but I won't be forever. I know how to enjoy life, even if I don't know how to make money doing it - and now I have the best partner ever to enjoy my life with. But as a smart man once said, if you're spending all of your time being angry and frustrated in the present and ruminating about the past (I'm sure you can compartmentalize that one away - but for how long?) and worrying about the future, then you will miss your life. And I hope for nothing more for you than that. And you will - at the very least, you missed out on a life with me on your arm. Someone who really loved you, not in a self serving way, but honestly and truthfully. You'll never see my smiling face again, never see me laughing in joy again, never watch a movie or TV show with me again, never go to Kent's Beach again (much to everyone's relief), never see my new hair, never see how awesome I look in your clothes. The time we were together I thought you were getting better. But in retrospect, I was wrong - you were getting worse. Your self-awareness went from being not bad, to being zero. You went from being rational often, to being rational never. You went from being angry from time to time, to throwing glasses and shouting at people on the street and putting isopropyl in water glasses. And did a great man not once say, above all else, to thine own self, be true? I'd love to say that I'm done with thinking about you - but the truth is, I'm not. I'll probably be haunted by you at times for my whole life. Such is the nature of Complex-PTSD. Of loving someone who, when it really mattered, loved only herself. May your next partner be either as innocent as I - that you might further torture yourself by knowing you will hurt them just like you hurt me - or may they be as evil as you, that they might show you what it means to hurt by the hand of someone you loved. But hopefully, you will die alone, so that you have no one else to hurt but yourself. But isn't that exactly it? Life is too short to enact this kind of suffering on another. Our time too precious - our memories too transient. How could you let this happen, and how could you keep this up? I try to think about other things, so desperately, but I am slammed back into the past by the tiniest memory or association. What if I died tomorrow? How would you feel then? If you died tomorrow, I admit, I would only feel relief for a long time. At least then I knew that the haunting spectre of your memory could only be just that - a memory, instead of something that could spring up at any moment. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to write a love letter to someone who really deserves the love I am capable of. A woman who really understands and appreciates not just how precious our time together is, but also who is just as hurt as I by the emotional terrorism of people like you. You are both very special people to me - but it turns out that I was right, and only one of you deserves my attention. Someday soon, you will occupy none of my attention. Until then, I hope you can feel how much I hate you for what you did to me, and I sincerely hope you suffer like I have until you find it in yourself to apologize. This rant is brought to you by anxiety, PTSD, ADHD, and a grieving brain.
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AuthorChristina Hitchens is a trans female writer living in BC, Canada. She loves computers, animals, and a good argument. Archives
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