Day Eight: Someone Who Has Made Your Life Hell

Day 08: Someone who has made my life hell.

Okay, I hate this topic also. Seriously.

I suppose there is the obvious answer of everyone in middle school, especially the cunty girls. Or the neighborhood boys who were always jerks about everything and seemed to get off on making my life more difficult. But I think the person to take the cake is my crazy ex. To be nice, I will leave his name out of it and simply refer to him as Bitchell.

When I first met Bitchell, he was great. Instantly there was an attraction. It took a couple years for anything to happen between us, but when we started dating I was stoked. He was so attractive and funny. Hanging out with him was simple. I didn’t have to be smart or quick or guarded. I could just hang out. It was nice being with someone who wasn’t hyper secretive and openly cared about me. We both led totally separate lives and managed to come together and it seemed to really work at first.

We were total opposites. I was going to fake college, planning my transfer to a four-year university, I was working, and I was totally straight edge. He was jobless, not getting his education, and loved to party. I was fine going with him to parties and acting as the DD. Being able to be myself and laugh all night made the whole situation seem worth it. I thought I had met my match.

Then, he started taking a turn to crazy town. I am not sure how things progressed the way they did, but we went from being a happy couple to a totally dysfunctional couple in what, looking back on it, seems like minutes. I was raised by guys and grew up in a neighborhood with predominately males. Being around the opposite gender is comfortable for me. Most of my friends were and still are men. Bitchell did not like this fact. He became extremely jealous of my guy friends, thought all of them were trying to break us up, thought I was trying to hook with them. He reacted to this information by gathering a harem of random chicks to always be at his beckon call.

He would constantly rub his other girls in my face. Run to them any time we had a fight, portray me to seem crazy and irrational. On the other hand, he accused me of lying to him about who I was spending my birthday lunch with when he heard the waiter speaking to a different table. Heaven forbid I be in the same restaurant where men are allowed to eat. I was bombarded with questions and accusations of cheating and lying. If he had a single ounce of rationality, he would know that between school, work, taking care of my father, and dating him I had zero free time to cheat on him. I made the mistake of using this logic on him and was then accused of only being faithful because I didn’t have free time to be otherwise.

Multiple times I tried leaving the relationship. I knew he was dumb. I knew he was crazy. Then, in some twisted way he would win me back by driving past my parents’ house to see if I was home, or calling my phone 38 times a day (conservative estimation).

In a twist of fate I ended up living with him.

My father and I got into a petty fight and he told me if I didn’t like it I could move out. So, I grabbed a bag or two full of things and left. I did not want to burden my oldest brother by asking to stay with him; I knew his wife didn’t really want me there. I called Bitchell. The first night I stayed with him and he was very nice and supportive. The plan was to call my best friend and stay with her. Her parents had taken others in, I knew they loved me, I figured they would help me out. They didn’t. I stayed with my best friend only one night. My brother didn’t ask me to stay with him when we talked, so I stuck with my original assumption and did the only thing I could think of, I moved in with Bitchell.

Bitchell was living with his sister and brother-in-law at the time, so he and I shared a room. I kept telling him we were not together and insisted on sleeping on the floor at first. Eventually the comfort of the bed and his general craziness won me over and we, once again, became some semblance of a couple. Most of those nights were terrible and too personal to discuss here. To this day I still deal with the events that occurred during those months. I will always be scarred. Those nights have completed changed my sleeping patterns.

Living with Bitchell only exacerbated his insanity. To deal with his craziness and everything else in my life I decided to stop eating. My weight dropped more as I became more and more unhappy. Instead of eating on my lunch breaks, I chose to walk around for an hour, then I would go back to my active job and pretend I just had a very filling and satisfying meal. I would lie about what I ate and how much. I only ate around friends for show; even then I would mostly just pick at food or eat a plain salad without cheese, croutons, or dressing, just a squeeze of lemon wedge for flavor. Anytime I did eat a proper meal, I contemplated throwing it up. For once, I wanted to show someone on the outside, the way I felt on the inside.

Bitchell knew I was starving myself. He would watch me push my full plate of food away; defiantly saying I was full or had lost my appetite. He saw my body shrinking, saw me looking more and more gaunt. Yet, he continued with his psychosis.

When the lease he had with his sister expired, he and I got a two bedroom apartment together. I loved it. It was spacious and cute. I finally had my own space again. I was very firm with him that we were really not together anymore. He was never to enter my room without my permission, ever, especially at night. Of course, he only half respected these rules. He was smart enough to never try and crawl in bed with me, but he continued to treat me like his girlfriend. It was easier for me to pretend and go along with some of it.

Then I was allowed a few nights of freedom that led to one of the worst nights of my life. I met a guy through one of my girlfriends. I really liked this guy, he was attractive, older, straight edge (like me!), smart, nice, and seemingly mentally stable. Of course, I knew better than to tell Bitchell the great news, so I did the rational thing and lied to him. However, I under estimated his insanity. After an argument Bitchell grabbed my phone while my back was turned. I had forgotten to delete some text messages and he found out about the ‘other guy’. Bitchell fucking lost it! He punched a hole through my door, not in it but all the way through it, pushed me against my closet and started screaming at me. When I admitted I had been hanging out with other guy he became violent. For a few minutes, I thought he might actually kill me. His hands around my neck did not seem to have any inkling of letting go. He kept telling me he was going to kill me, it seemed logical to think he might.

That night I was trapped in my apartment for hours. He had my cell phone, he had my keys, he was obviously stronger than me, and he was faster than me. Every time I would bolt for an exit he would get there first and physically harm me in some way. When he eventually did allow me to leave, he made me promise not to go to the house of the ‘other guy’. I promised. Then I headed straight for ‘other guy’s’ house. It must have been two or three in the morning when I knocked on the door.

Eventually the ‘other guy’ and his roommates helped me get my phone back along with my keys and a bag or two of stuff. The boys made me call the cops. When the cops showed up Bitchell decided to toy with me and them. He continually called my phone, letting me know he could see me, but that I could not see him. The cops couldn’t do anything about someone they couldn’t find.

I filed a police report and promised the guys I would go to the courts.

I got a permanent protection order that doubles as a no contact order. The first judge I saw ordered me to move all of my things out of the apartment. She also order Bitchell to vacate while I there. Of course, in true Bitchell fashion he refused to leave and I was too scared to call the cops again, plus I had my brothers and the ‘other guy’ with me. I was just ready to be done with him.

A few months later I found out Bitchell had been evicted. Even though I broke the lease a collection company was coming after me for $2,000 worth of unpaid rent. My credit was better than his, so it made sense to ask me for the money. It took roughly two years to prove I was not legally responsible for any of the damages or unpaid rent. Within that time, Bitchell decided to email me an apology, and then he spent a night in jail and retaliated by portraying me as an obsessed nut job on his MySpace page.

Until recently, I hadn’t heard from him again. Then he decided to email me again, asking me a favor about some pictures of us on the Internet. I am still weirded out that he would go out of his way to find the pictures in which he is referring. I called the cops again. The issue went to court and was eventually settled out.

Even now, years after the initial incident I am still completely (and slightly irrationally) terrified of him. Receiving the email sent me into a string of panic attacks. Thinking about when I saw him in court for the first time in years makes me queasy. Constantly I am reminded of the ripple effect that relationship had on my life. I see the way it influences my current relationship and my possible relationships with others. Some ripples therapy might help. Other ripples have become more like unstoppable tidal waves, issues I will deal with for the rest of my life.