The Tattoo That Marks 13 Years of Healing After Abuse

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Digg
• Gmail

“When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.” ~Maya Angelou

In June 2011, I got a Facebook friend request from a guy I vaguely knew from college. We’d never dated, never even been close, but I knew him by reputation. Charming. Vain. The kind of guy who always had someone.

He’d just been hired to teach at my school, where I was about to start my fifth year as a counselor. He framed the request as wanting to connect as colleagues, so I accepted.

When school started that August, he made it a point to show up at my office constantly, even though his classroom was nowhere near mine. Weeks of him asking me out.

I finally agreed to one drink. Not a date, I told myself.

That night, I planned to tell him I have herpes, figuring it would scare off someone so concerned with his image. Before I got the words out, he said it for me: “I know what you’re going to tell me. You have herpes.”

I was stunned. I’d shared my diagnosis with a few friends in college years earlier, and because he and I had overlapping social circles, I could only assume the information had eventually made its way to him. He never told me exactly how he knew.

And then, strangely, I felt relieved.

He knew, and he still wanted me.

Looking back, the red flag wasn’t simply that he knew. It was the way he used that knowledge. He could have let me tell him something deeply personal in my own time. Instead, he took the disclosure out of my hands.

At the time, though, I didn’t see it that way. I saw acceptance.

It felt like magic.

The Unraveling

We moved fast. By October, he’d left so much of his life at my place that, without either of us ever really deciding it, he’d basically moved in.

I was direct from the start about what I wanted, what I expected, and that if he ever wanted something else, I’d rather know than be lied to. For a while, it seemed like he heard me.

By the fall of 2012, he’d started his master’s program. That December, something happened that made the uneasiness I’d been feeling impossible to ignore.

During sex, he suddenly put his hands around my neck and began choking me. We’d never discussed it. I’d never expressed an interest in it. When I demanded to know why he thought I would want that, he said he thought I’d like it.

Something in me knew there was more to that answer.

Then came the nights he didn’t come home, even though he was living with me. No call. No text. The next day, he’d explain that he’d been studying with classmates.

I couldn’t prove he was cheating, but I became convinced he was.

When I got the flu that same month, the man who once nursed me through every cold suddenly wasn’t around.

There had been another moment I wouldn’t understand until later.

We were arguing one night, probably about whether he was cheating. I was standing at the kitchen sink doing dishes while he paced behind me, his voice getting louder.

“I’m going to take a walk before I do something I regret.”

My body registered those words before my mind did. Something about them felt wrong.

But then he did exactly what he said he was going to do. He left. He took a walk. When he came back, he’d cooled down. Nothing happened.

I told myself maybe that was healthy. He’d recognized that he was angry and removed himself from the situation rather than escalating it.

Years later, that is one of the moments I return to most.

At the time, I couldn’t see the warning inside the sentence. I was in love with him, and the feeling of being accepted by someone who already knew the thing I’d once feared would make me unlovable was overwhelmingly blinding.

So I explained away what my body had already noticed.

I finally told him to leave in January 2013.

What I Wasn’t Ready to See

I confronted him before I made him leave. He never admitted to cheating, and I never had proof. But by then, I trusted what his behavior was telling me.

There was an irony I couldn’t ignore. I had entered the relationship terrified that my STI would make me undesirable. I’d been vulnerable and honest about my sexual health from the beginning. Now I was with someone who knew my status and whose behavior left me wondering whether he was putting my sexual health at risk.

It took me longer than I’d like to admit to end things.

He was persuasive. Charismatic. Even his own fraternity brother had warned me: “Don’t date him. He’s a dog.”

When he still wouldn’t leave, I called two of his friends, including one who was also my friend, and asked for their help. They eventually convinced him to go. I put his belongings outside my door for him to collect.

I thought that was the end.

It wasn’t.

He kept showing up. If I didn’t respond to a text, he’d be at my door.

I mistook his refusal to let go for love.

I didn’t yet understand that someone can desperately want access to you without actually knowing how to love you.

The Second Chance I Shouldn’t Have Given

For the next few months, he kept baiting me with texts, calls, and showing up uninvited. In April 2013, I finally took the bait.

I offered him one last chance, an olive branch I now understand I never owed him. We went to a jazz festival together, one with a lineup I genuinely loved: India.Arie, Anthony Hamilton, artists whose music I’d play for years afterward without a hint of resentment.

For a few hours, standing in that crowd, it felt easy again.

On the drive home, I watched him text another woman, arranging to meet up after dropping me off.

I told him I was done.

When we got to my place, I asked for my key fob back. He wouldn’t give it to me.

I was frustrated, not violent, not dangerous, just done. I tapped his car’s bumper with my shoe to get his attention and demanded the fob again.

He hit me.

Closed fist, to the face.

Hard enough that the next thing I knew, I was on the ground.

What Happened After

I got up, ran for my apartment, and he followed. He pushed his way inside and immediately wanted to call his own father, like he needed a witness to explain himself before I could process what had just happened to my own body.

His dad’s reaction, when told what his son had done: “You are a monster.”

And somewhere in the shock, I remembered another sentence.

I’m going to take a walk before I do something I regret.

This time, I understood the warning.

I made him leave. I called 911. A friend took me to the emergency room, where I reported the assault.

Months of court delays followed: continuances, a lawyer stalling, him violating the restraining order more than once. Eventually, he was found guilty of misdemeanor domestic violence.

What stayed with me longest wasn’t the case.

It was the shame.

I’m a counselor. How did I miss the signs?

I was also ashamed because I had already done the work. From 2010 to 2011, I had invested so much in myself. I had spent the money. Gone to counseling. Asked hard questions. Learned to love myself.

How could I have worked so hard to find myself, only to lose myself again?

The Truth I Needed to Hear

Here’s what I know now that I didn’t know then: I didn’t miss all of the warning signs.

Sometimes I saw them. Sometimes I felt them in my body before I understood them with my mind.

And then I explained them away.

Rose-colored glasses are real. It is genuinely hard to see clearly when you’re in love, no matter how much training or insight you have in every other area of your life.

I had a strength, an ability to see the good in people, to believe people can change, that I used every day in my career to help teenagers. That same strength, turned inward without boundaries, helped me create explanations for behavior my gut was already questioning.

It let me go back, months later, to a story that had already told me its ending.

None of that makes it my fault.

Kicking a bumper is not an offense punishable by a fist to the face. Full stop.

If you take nothing else from this, take that sentence and read it again. An argument, a raised voice, a broken expectation, or something you did that your partner didn’t like does not make you responsible for their choice to become violent. Conflict is not permission for violence.

But I also had to learn that losing myself again did not erase the work I had done before.

It didn’t mean I had failed at self-love. It meant I was human. It meant I had entered a relationship believing I could love someone without abandoning myself, and I didn’t realize I was disappearing until I was already gone.

That realization hurt.

I was disappointed in myself. I was embarrassed by how much I had invested in becoming stronger, only to find myself back in a place of confusion and shame.

But I also knew something important: if I had rebuilt myself once, I could rebuild myself again.

Bulletproof

I didn’t let that year define me. I ran, literally.

Trail running and hiking became non-negotiable parts of my week, the way I regulated my nervous system so I could still show up steady for the students who needed me.

I also went back into counseling myself, almost immediately. Not eventually, not once I’d “figured it out on my own,” but right away.

I needed a professional to help me understand what had happened, why I’d missed what I missed, and how to rebuild trust in my own judgment.

It sucked.

It was hard.

There were days when healing felt less like rising and more like dragging myself across the floor. I had to grieve the relationship, the version of myself I had lost, and the belief that doing the work once meant I would never struggle again.

Slowly, with movement and with support, the wound became something I could carry without it carrying me.

And then something else happened.

I grew.

I became an even stronger woman, a brighter light than I had been before. Not because the abuse made me stronger. It didn’t. What happened to me was not a gift.

The gift was what I learned about myself afterward: what I wanted from life, what I wanted from people, what I wanted from experiences, and what I would and would not accept in relationships.

Sometimes the hardest seasons give you a perspective you could not have gained any other way. Not because suffering is required for wisdom, but because living longer, loving more, and surviving what you never thought you would survive can teach you things you could not understand before.

This past Saturday, thirteen years after that night at the jazz festival, I finally got the tattoo I’d been thinking about for all those years.

Just under my left clavicle, closest to my heart, are the words Bulletproof Soul.

The words come from Sade’s song “Bullet Proof Soul,” from her 1992 album Love Deluxe. I first heard the song when I was twelve, too young to understand it. At thirty-three, after everything that had happened, I understood it completely.

It became the soundtrack to putting myself back together. I played it on repeat while I ran, mile after mile, regulating my nervous system and learning how to trust myself again.

So when I finally put Bulletproof Soul on my skin, it wasn’t to memorialize what happened to me. It was to mark what I built afterward: the runs, the trails, the counseling sessions, the years of learning and unlearning, losing myself and finding myself again.

The tattoo didn’t hurt going in. It doesn’t hurt now. Most days, I forget it’s even there, which feels like exactly the point.

It’s not a wound anymore. It’s just part of me now, the way strength becomes part of you through everything you build afterward.

If you’re in the thick of your own hard lesson right now, still bleeding, still asking how you missed the signs: you didn’t fail. You were human, in love, doing the best you could with what you knew.

And if you once reached a place where you felt enlightened, whole, or deeply connected to yourself, only to find yourself in the dumps again, that does not mean you are back at the beginning.

You can rise again.

It may suck. It may be hard. But it can also become a blessing, not because what happened was good, but because you may learn more about yourself and gain a clearer perspective on what you want from your life, your relationships, your experiences, and the people you choose to let close to you.

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

And if you didn’t, if it took you a second chance to learn it, like it did me, that doesn’t disqualify you from healing.

You can heal. You can rebuild. You can become an even brighter version of yourself.

Not because what happened to you was a gift.

Because what you discovered in yourself was.

You just have to survive it first.

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Digg
• Gmail

Get in the conversation! Click here to leave a comment on the site.