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Lessons in Suffocation: Part 3
By Billy | February 24, 2009
Today I am going to wrap up and reflect on the previous two posts (post one) (post two) in a different voice / tense than before. This post will make more sense if you’ve read the two posts linked above.
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I neither regret things nor hate people. Doing so wouldn’t undo the events, unspend the time, unbruise the skin, or make me feel whole again. I am not “over” this. (Someday I will re-read this post and will be able to say otherwise. For now, I have to add this parenthetical comment for myself — to have some frame of reference. Today is February 24th, 2009.)
Were this situation never to have happened, I wouldn’t be exactly where I am today. I am 99% ecstatic with where I am, with the remaining 1% not ready to comprehend the importance of my past. Despite that, I am 100% IN LOVE WITH where I am. Idealistically, I know that I needed to walk the path I did in order to get where I’m going, but I’m still learning to internalize this. It still hurts. (I frequently whisper these three words to myself, to nobody, to the universe. I haven’t yet been able to express how much it still hurts.) And though it hurts, I am happy. (I say as tears stream down my face at this public computer) I will someday appreciate that my footprints lay exactly where they belong, though the complexity of events bringing about their final resting place will always be mysteriouly incomprehensible. I am exactly where I belong, and I always have been. There hasn’t been a second in my existence where I was not 100% on the exact path I belong on. I believe that all people are the same way.
Were I born in Seoul, Korea, in 1986 with the name Ah Ram Han, to a mother incapable of supporting me, were I adopted by that affluent American family, were I Her, I would have done the exact same things. We all do what we think we should and are capable of doing. It felt right for me to stay in that relationship, scream my lungs out, bang my head (literally) into those walls, and lie my parents about the reason I was in the ER. Similarly, it felt right for her to cling onto me, it felt logical to feel threatened by my speaking to other females, it felt appropriate to test my loyalty by asking me to hurt myself in front of her. If I were in her shoes, I’d be her! If you were in my shoes, you’d have kissed that asphault at 40 miles an hour.
I don’t believe in badness and I don’t believe in mistakes. I believe that badness is goodness that hasn’t played itself out enough for us to comprehend its wonderfulness. I am a pantheist (another post, another day) and I don’t believe god could be bad, and I don’t believe anything, including genocide, domestic abuse, etc., can exist outside of the realm of god. Mistakes are lessons necessary for growth. It is impossible to live without mistakes. How can something inevitable be accidental? “Mistake” implies a step in the wrong direction — “you did it wrong, take two!” No, no, no, no, no, NO. We grow like the process of micro-evolution (since some people don’t believe in evolution…? but most people accept microevolution, or else they wouldn’t be alright with getting vaccinated, for example) When little organisms are evolving, some of them are successful and others “fail.” Is that a genetic mistake or is it an important lesson? The organism as a whole is growing and adapting, though there are some natural setbacks. Similarly, we have evolved into the people we are. Our “mistakes” remove non-beneficial beliefs the same way getting eaten (or whatever) removes non-beneficial genes from the pool.
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The remainder of the night itself is not terribly exciting. I get in an ambulance, get a CT scan at the ER, get some staples in my skull. I took a cab back to MU, and spent about an hour walking around in a blanket trying to figure out how to get into my dorm building (I had never entered at night, and there were signs mentioning an alarm if the door opened after a certain time. I didn’t know how to get in at all!) Eventually a security guard let me in, I slept on a chair for a few hours since I didn’t have my keys, then an RA let me in to my room when a janitor found me sleeping near a vending machine. I scared the hell out of my roommate Caleb (this was my first night in the room!), and took the bus the next morning, then walked back to Her apartment…
Like I said before, I felt I had an obligation to fulfill. This was my chance to change someone’s life more than any else possibly could. She tells me she was worried, stayed up all night looking out the window, etc., but even then I didn’t believe it. She may have been telling the truth, I don’t know. I do know that she wouldn’t touch or look at me for the next 3 days, as I slept in the bathroom. I felt like a leper. (This is a bit of steam-of-consciousness. I’m opening doors I haven’t looked through for years.)
I guess that’s all I really have to talk about the night, in particular. I wish I could explain the inner workings of the mind of the Domestically Abused, but I don’t really know how to. Perhaps I was insane. Perhaps I was just dumb. It’s an amazing phenomenon. Physical and emotionally abusive relationships are SHOCKINGLY common among high school and college aged people. Do not be hesitant to speak out against these relationships and call them out for what they are in front of the abused. Let them know there are ways out and that they don’t deserve the conditions they are living with. My macroeconomics teacher had a really good piece of advice that I’d like to pass on to you. She identified this as a Sunken Cost
“It’s better to have wasted three years of your life, than to waste three years and one day of your life.”
I don’t care HOW MUCH you have invested in your current relationship — I don’t care if you have a picket fence, a dog and two cats, a boat, or just that you’re high school sweet hearts and this person deserves someone good. If you are being abused, you need to get out of there. Furthermore, you have the right to go to the police in many cases.
One of the things most disturbing to me when I look back is my escape plan options. I frequently left her house, speeding off with the intent to drive my car into one particularly large tree at the bottom of a huge hill. I had selected this tree in a time of relative calm, because I knew I would be looking for a location to self terminate someday, and wouldn’t want to half-assed suicide attempt (again). Sometimes I think I just wanted to scare myself, and other times I don’t know why I turned away, but (clearly) I never followed through with this. Usually, I’d instead keep speeding past the tree with the new intent on never returning. I spent hours of my life looking for places to run away to; to resettle, and hours on top of that actually running (not to mention hours spent shamefully driving home after changing my mind). Why I mention these things is to offer insight into what was going on in my mind — and perhaps is happening in abused people across the world. I felt like I had NO viable options where I was. I had failed my friends and assumed they didn’t want me back. I had abandoned my family and felt that I could never repair that void. I had thrown my academics (for my standards) down the drain, quit my afterschool activities, applied and attended a college completely opposed to my real intentions. I felt like my ONLY lifeline was this one person, the thing keeping me alive was the thing killing me.
I don’t know the best way to do it, since I know I filtered countless counterexamples to my beliefs out, but never ever stop reminding people in these situations that they have you as a place to fall back on. “There is a place to go beyond this terrible relationship, you can live without them and thrive. It’s never too late to resume the life you had before — a more knowledgable, stronger, and capable person than before.”
Hmm. I hope this serves as a bit of helpful insight for someone, at least it serves as a bit of catharsis for me. Thanks for reading. I love you all!
Namaste!
Topics: Nonfiction, Philosophy, This is my life |
3 Responses to “Lessons in Suffocation: Part 3”
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March 2nd, 2009 at 5:05 pm
First, your writing style is excellent.
Second, I disagree with this entire statement,
Were I born in Seoul, Korea, in 1986 with the name Ah Ram Han, to a mother incapable of supporting me, were I adopted by that affluent American family, were I Alison O’Brien, I would have done the exact same things.
Except for
were I Alison O’Brien,
I am of the opinion that even put in the same experiences, we all can and may react differently, unless we are, in fact, the same person. Surroundings only half a person make, in my opinion.
Great reading.
March 3rd, 2009 at 2:02 am
1. Even though you are not 100% in love with yourself, I AM!!! and I think you should know that you bring so much joy and love and happiness to everyone around you!
2. I wish I could see the goodness in this horrible story as well as you do. I read it and my heart breaks and I wish I could change time. But then I know that changing that might change you from becoming the RevRu I know and love. I love you, the universe loves you!
I wish… I wish lessons in suffocation were never necessary. I wish these lessons were never dreamed of in our society, that people would not be able to comprehend hurting another human being. I wish you loved yourself as much as I love you. (But I suppose you could say quite the same to me…)
Sorry this is rambly!
With all the love of the universe,
Alicia McCormick
March 3rd, 2009 at 3:20 pm
Brian,
I completely agree with you — the thing is that if we experienced ALL the exact same experiences, we WOULD be the same people. I mean this down to the ridiculously infinitesimally experiences, like if we had the same parents and they took the exact same number of breaths while we were developing in mom’s womb, etc. No differently than the fact that I can’t choose whether Mahayana or Theravada Buddhism calls to me more, I can’t say that any of the wills of other people are in their own control. Their choices, yes, but not their wills. It makes it difficult to reconcile the fact that I was wronged with this philosophy, and it makes it difficult to know when and how to stand up for myself with regards to the event, but it is a major way for me to understand things right now.
Felicity-Alicia, as I told your boyfriend, I don’t believe in badness. Don’t wish these “bad” things didn’t happen, but hope and encourage. Make them into good things, conquer them. Let them destroy you physically and show them that you are more than just your body. Show society that you are something different, show them that you are not alone. When you tell me, “I wish you loved yourself as much as I love you,” think about the sincerity in those thoughts. If only I could see it through your eyes, you think, then I’d understand. But I do! I KNOW that your love for me is equal to mine for you, and I KNOW that my desire for you to see it matches mine for you, and all the sudden I UNDERSTAND how much I am lovely. I just forget that now and then. I encourage you to try the same thing — use mine or JJ’s or your sister’s or anyone’s love for you as an example.