20 years

I will write this as a deeply personal, emotionally honest essay about the unbearable weight of enduring abuse for twenty years, the way repeated violence can erode a person's sense of self, and the struggle to reclaim a life that was never deserved to be hurt. I will preserve the seriousness of what you described without portraying you as responsible for the abuse you experienced. Twenty Years in the Role of a Victim: The Unbearable Weight of Surviving Abuse # Twenty Years in the Role of a Victim: The Unbearable Weight of Surviving Abuse There are things a human being should never have to endure. There are wounds that cannot be measured by the colour of a bruise, the size of a lump on the head, or the number of nights spent crying in silence. Some wounds remain invisible to the world while slowly destroying the person who carries them. And there is a particular kind of suffering that comes from enduring abuse not for a few weeks, not for a year, but for twenty years of one's life. Twenty years. It is an almost unbearable amount of time to spend trying to survive the people who were supposed to love you. For twenty years, I experienced relationships with men who struggled with alcoholism and who subjected me to psychological, emotional, and sometimes physical abuse. My memories contain not only the disappointment of failed relationships but also the humiliating reality of being hurt by people who were supposed to be my partners. My first boyfriend left me with a lump on my head. Another man left my ribs bruised. There were curses, insults, cruel words, and moments when I was made to feel small, worthless, and undeserving of tenderness. These are not romantic memories. They are records of survival. And perhaps one of the most difficult things to explain to someone who has never experienced such a life is how a person can remain trapped in a cycle of suffering for so long. From the outside, people may ask: Why did you stay? Why did you choose men like that? Why didn't you leave earlier? Such questions can sound deceptively simple. They assume that leaving is always an uncomplicated act of will, that a person who is being hurt possesses an undamaged mind, an unshaken sense of self-worth, and an unlimited supply of courage. They overlook the psychological exhaustion that accumulates when affection becomes entangled with fear, when apologies follow cruelty, and when hope repeatedly persuades you to believe that perhaps, this time, things will be different. Sometimes, you do not recognise the prison because you entered it believing it was love. Sometimes, you keep trying because you remember the good moments and desperately want them to become permanent. Sometimes, you believe that if you are patient enough, gentle enough, understanding enough, or loving enough, you might finally reach the wounded human being beneath the anger and the alcohol. You begin to negotiate with your own suffering. You make excuses for what should never have been acceptable. You learn to minimise the pain because acknowledging its full magnitude would mean confronting a truth you are not yet ready to face. And slowly, without noticing the precise moment when it happens, you begin to organise your life around surviving someone else's behaviour. You become careful about what you say. You anticipate moods. You measure the atmosphere in a room before allowing yourself to relax. You learn that a peaceful evening can feel like a gift rather than the ordinary condition of a loving relationship. You may even begin to mistake the absence of violence for happiness. But the absence of violence is not love. Being insulted less frequently is not respect. Being hit only occasionally is not safety. Receiving an apology does not erase the fear that preceded it. And alcoholism, however destructive it may be for the person suffering from it, does not excuse the decision to abuse another human being. For years, I found myself in the position of the victim, a role I never consciously chose but one that became painfully familiar. The word *victim* itself carries a terrible weight. It describes something that happened to you, yet it can gradually begin to feel like a definition of who you are. You stop seeing the whole person you once were. You begin to see yourself through the accumulated experiences of humiliation, disappointment, and fear. You may wonder whether there is something fundamentally wrong with you. You may question your judgment, your attractiveness, your intelligence, or your ability to be loved. When people repeatedly treat you as though your feelings do not matter, it becomes difficult to remember that they do. When people repeatedly curse you, it becomes difficult to protect yourself from the possibility that their words might be true. When someone hurts your body, the physical pain may eventually subside, but the experience can leave behind questions that are much harder to answer: Why did someone who claimed to love me do this? Why did I tolerate it? Why was I unable to find a different kind of love? These questions can become an internal courtroom in which the abused person is both the accused and the judge. Yet there is something essential that must be said: **being abused is not evidence of being weak, foolish, or unworthy of love.** Responsibility for abuse belongs to the person who commits it. The circumstances that make leaving difficult do not transfer that responsibility to the person being harmed. I can acknowledge that I remained in destructive relationships without condemning myself for the violence other people chose to inflict upon me. I can examine the patterns that kept repeating without accepting the idea that I deserved what happened. I can grieve the years I lost without turning that grief into another weapon against myself. Because there is another tragedy hidden inside twenty years of abuse: the years spent blaming yourself for someone else's cruelty can become an extension of the abuse itself. And then there are the moments when the suffering becomes so overwhelming that life itself begins to seem impossible. I experienced thoughts about ending my life. There is a profound loneliness in reaching such a point, in feeling that the pain has become too large for the heart to contain. When suffering continues for years, a person may begin to struggle to imagine a future that is not simply another repetition of the past. Exhaustion can become so deep that the idea of continuing to exist feels harder than the idea of disappearing. But those thoughts do not mean that a person's life has no value. They reveal how desperately that person needs the suffering to change. Sometimes, the desire to end one's life is intertwined with the desire to end the circumstances that have made living feel unbearable. It is a desperate longing for relief, for silence after years of emotional noise, for a place where the body no longer has to brace itself against another person's anger. No one should have to reach such a point because they have been deprived of safety, tenderness, and respect. I wish I could return to the woman I was twenty years ago and tell her that she did not have to earn kindness. That she was not responsible for curing the alcoholism of the men she loved. That she did not need to endure cruelty to prove the sincerity of her affection. That compassion does not require self-destruction, and that loving someone does not mean surrendering the right to be safe. I would tell her that she was allowed to leave. She was allowed to be angry. She was allowed to stop forgiving. She was allowed to choose herself without having to provide an elaborate explanation to anyone. Most importantly, I would tell her that the violence she experienced was not a reflection of her worth. I cannot recover the twenty years that have passed. I cannot erase the lump on my head, the bruising of my ribs, the insults, or the moments when despair became almost impossible to bear. I cannot rewrite the past into a story in which every man treated me gently and every relationship became a refuge. But perhaps healing begins when I stop demanding that my past become different before I allow my future to change. Perhaps it begins when I recognise that I am more than the sum of the things that happened to me. I am more than the woman who was hurt by her first boyfriend. More than the woman whose ribs were bruised by another man. More than the woman who endured curses and humiliation. More than the woman who sometimes wondered whether she could continue living. I am also the person who survived those experiences. The person who can speak about them now. The person who can look at the pattern and begin to understand that it does not have to continue forever. Survival is not always a triumphant story. It does not necessarily involve a dramatic departure, a sudden transformation, or a moment when every wound miraculously closes. Sometimes survival is simply reaching a day when you finally admit that what happened to you was abuse. Sometimes it is allowing yourself to feel anger instead of shame. Sometimes it is asking for help, establishing a boundary, or refusing to return to a relationship that has repeatedly harmed you. Sometimes survival is learning that peace does not have to be earned through suffering. And sometimes the greatest act of courage is not enduring one more terrible day but deciding that you no longer wish to endure the same terrible life. Twenty years is a long time to live in the shadow of other people's destructive behaviour. It is long enough to become exhausted, to lose hope, to forget the sound of your own unafraid voice. It is long enough to grieve the person you might have been if love had not repeatedly arrived carrying the threat of pain. I grieve those years. I grieve the younger version of myself who hoped that love could repair everything. I grieve the moments when I accepted too little because I had become accustomed to receiving less than I deserved. I grieve the energy spent trying to understand men whose behaviour was hurting me, while neglecting the question of what I needed in order to feel safe. But I do not want grief to become another prison. I do not want the role of the victim to become the final chapter of my identity. I want to recognise what happened without allowing it to dictate everything that happens next. I want to reclaim the right to make choices that are not governed by fear, to experience affection without anticipating humiliation, and to understand that tenderness is not a rare privilege bestowed upon a fortunate few. It is a basic human need. After twenty years, perhaps the most difficult task is learning that life can be something other than survival. That a relationship can be peaceful without being empty. That love can be gentle without being weak. That solitude can be safer than companionship that destroys you. That the absence of a man does not necessarily represent a failure, and that the presence of one does not automatically mean you are loved. I may never be able to recover every part of myself that was lost during those years. Healing does not promise that the past will disappear. But I can begin to build a life in which the past no longer has the authority to determine what I deserve. I was hurt. I was humiliated. I was frightened. I was pushed to moments of profound despair. But I was never deserving of abuse. And I do not have to spend the rest of my life proving how much pain I can endure. **Twenty years of being hurt do not mean I must remain a victim forever. They mean I have spent far too long without the safety and love I needed. And whatever time remains to me, I want it to belong to a different story: not a story in which suffering defines me, but one in which I finally learn to live without having to survive someone else.**