This essay is featured in our 2020-2024 book. You can buy it in the shop.
“You got braver and braver, emboldened by my silence.And you were smart about it, careful to tread that line between playful teasing and bullying.”
“I know you don’t like me.”
I can still hear it. The knowing in your voice. Sneering. That tonal upper hand.
“I know you don’t like me, but I’m not going anywhere.”
And it was as strange to me then as it is now. I didn’t know what you meant. I didn’t know what it was to not like a grown up. I didn’t know that was a choice I had, and knowing who I was as a child, I doubt it would have even occurred to me.
You never told me not to tell anyone about our conversation, but somehow I knew. I had been bad, and telling someone that you’d seen right through me would mean they would, too. So I kept it to myself. Our little secret.
You got braver and braver after that. Emboldened by my silence.
And you were smart about it, careful to tread that line between playful teasing and bullying.
When you locked me in the bathroom and turned all the lights out: it was just a joke.
“In June this year, I told Dad. We were sitting in a pub and I said that I’d seen you, and I told him, trying to keep my voice light and nonchalant, what you had done.And I didn’t know, until that very moment, how badly I needed the words he said: “I had no idea.””
When you asked me if I’d ever heard the expression “put a sock in it”, and demonstrated by shoving a dirty sock down my throat until I gagged and my eyes watered: it was just a joke.
When you punched my beloved teddy bear over and over and over in front of my best friend, and I pretended to laugh along while I broke inside and fought back tears: it was just a joke.
Your relentless three-year campaign to teach me that I was difficult, too sensitive, and weak: it was just a joke.
It was just a joke, you said, and I believed you. Grown ups know best, after all. It took me so many years and hundreds of hours of patient therapy, to call it what it really was: abuse.
I don’t remember the day you left. Maybe my Dad finally sensed what you were doing to me. Maybe he got bored of you. Maybe you kicked and screamed and protested, or maybe you went quietly. One day you just weren’t there anymore.
Maybe I won, in the end, but the truth is that I’m not sure either of us did.
You went your way with wicked secrets and heartbreak, your failed efforts to wrench the man you loved from his daughter.
And I went my way with labels that made me despise myself: Needy, fragile, selfish, bad.
In June this year, I told Dad.
We were sitting in a pub and I said that I’d seen you, and I told him, trying to keep my voice light and nonchalant, what you had done.
And I didn’t know, until that very moment, how badly I needed the words he said:
“I had no idea.”
That bone-deep fear I’d harboured all these years, that he knew and he didn’t save me, was gone. And with it, so were you.
This is the first one!
Published tomorrow!