if I didn't say that a large part of me is terrified of putting these stories out there. For many obvious, personal reasons, but there is a looming editing voice in my mind dying to defend myself already against any notion that this will be a ‘man-hating’ text, for lack of a better term.
In actuality, it will be full of great love and adoration for these men, you could say too much. And I won’t keep from you the times when I was too much (a phrase I detest but sometimes, could probably be said to be true of me.) There are many flaws and faults of my own that this work is helping me sift through and change, as well.
A big picture reason of why it kept happening again, in addition to me not getting the therapy I really needed to understand what the patterns were, was that I consciously tried each and every time to not put my past baggage on future relationships. I tried to acknowledge what I was bringing to the table, to allow them fresh opportunities- no matter what other women had said or red flags that appeared so quickly- not realizing that I wasn’t allowing myself to look clearly, to see lessons I was supposed to be learning, until I was already in a relationship with someone similar, caught in the cycle. I can tell myself a really convincing story.
This piece is feeling a bit all over the place, but at the same time intertwined, stay with me here.
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My childhood was charmed, and not largely remarkable; it’s very characteristic of a 90’s upper-middle-class, suburban, east coast, white experience. I was loved and cared for, I felt safe, we were fortunate.
I grew up in a town called Pasadena, MD, which I thought was the inspiration behind all of the popular songs about Pasadena. It was not. I was a free spirited child, albeit a fearful one in the quiet of my mind. There were so many particulars of the world around me that I loved, but I could also sense the danger in it. Both an innate fear, something passed through the bloodlines, and something learned.
Of the learned portion, a distinct source: a day after school when I went to my Aunt Melissa’s house, an episode of Inside Edition on the television. A story about a girl in the country who survived a break in, her whole family dead, a man who slit all their throats, including hers. She survived by walking over a mile, bleeding in the dark down her front, to the next house over. I didn’t sleep in my own bed for three years.
Wild, independent, hopelessly prone to an idyllic nature. My mother had longed for a daughter that she could dress up, pick out her clothes, fix her hair, but by age four I refused to let anyone do my hair but myself. I became insistent on self-reliance, adamant about not needing assistance and finding out how to do things on my own. Maybe I sensed that I would often be underestimated in my life and feel a pull to prove otherwise, or that I would need the tools to help myself through the things that lay ahead.
I was a lover of the land, spending time in our backyard with the cats, climbing trees, endlessly finding four leaf clovers, flouncing through the wooded forest behind our house. At my friend Jenny’s, we would pick crab apples, take trips to our woodland club house, climb the great, towering Magnolia in her yard again and again. At school, I remember recesses in elementary, sitting under the forsythia bushes waiting for Nick Hubert to come kiss me, which he did. My friends and I were crusaders against the boys who murdered the gypsy moth caterpillars when they descended in large quantities in the Spring. We’d march around them, steal the sticks they used to halve the wriggling bodies and rescue the captives, releasing them back into the trees.
Beyond my back fence at home were the open woods, and I loved them. You had to go down our street and around the row of fences to get to the different pathways that led in. Great tall trees, a stream running through, always this stray cat I would dote on with its newest litter of kittens. There were blackberry bushes behind our swing set that we would harvest with my mom, picking their bloated bodies at the end of Summer, bringing them home to make fresh Blackberry Crumble, my great-grandmother's recipe.
I have beautiful, light memories of my younger childhood. In the kitchen with the windows open to grassy air, eating turkey and butter sandwiches with chips on them next to my dad on weekend afternoons. Playing with my brothers outside in the yard with our neighborhood friends, making things up as we went along, staying out until the sun went down, sometimes after. In May, a large mound of mulch would be delivered onto our driveway, a particular smell I now associate with that home, along with the carwash my dad used, the taste of hose water, hot pavement cooling down on a July night. We weren’t supposed to play on the mulch, but of course we did, the rich, musty pile perfect for clambering.
I grew up as a girl whose favorite three movies for ten years were Garden State, The Notebook, and Moulin Rouge; whose favorite bands were Dashboard Confessional, Something Corporate, Avril Lavigne. A bleeding heart, helplessly romantic in a big way, I was a creature with a lot of sensitivity, feelings, and a lot of dreams. During recess in middle school, I preferred walking around the parking lot perimeter, singing to myself, and that’s where I met my best friend, Drew, who did the same. And for most of my existence, as I believed so fervently in the magic of the world, that beauty would come to me, that movie moments were real, I found that they did come into my life, most often through way of the magical people who brought them to me.
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There are other things about childhood we’ll get into later, but in terms of those flaws I mentioned.
I won’t hide that my personality is so stubborn, so persistent, can be so god damn fucking strong willed I will not let you leave an argument until we fix things. And in my relationships it didn’t feel like I wanted to fix the partners, themselves- I loved them all so deeply and rawly when we were together it ripped me apart. But I was bad at letting things die, at letting their illogical arguments and false claims go. I couldn’t fight back with strength, either; I puddled at the floor weeping miserably at their feet. An annoying, emotionally wounded thing they were supposed to deal with.
I won’t hide that during the fight where he threw box upon box of our things at me in our room, when all I could sob was why do you hate me so much, where my stubbornness meant that I blocked the door to try to keep him from leaving, wanting so badly to fix things and have him love me again, that maybe if I hadn’t tried to block the door, he wouldn’t have grabbed me forcefully and threw me across the room, onto the bed.
Or the one who pulled me out of the way of a another door, a hotel room, again my resolute personality they all loved at first, now insufferable to them. The tears they always looked on with disgust, never tended, never hugged away. I wanted the resolve, I wanted to be okay, I became so much more desperate for it as I was constantly denied it. It was Halloween, we were in California. When I tried to keep him from leaving he threw me across the starchy hotel floor, bruise blooming purple beneath the rugburn on my cheek. I wailed all night into the empty hotel bed alone, feeling pathetic. He slept in the car. It was a brief night away from where we were staying with his family, his Aunt who had definitely heard us fighting multiple nights already, who was going to notice this mark on my face, who was going to ask.
In the morning, I went out to the parking lot. I climbed in the car. We came up with a story of what we would tell his family happened to my face together. We drove away holding hands.
Long distance, infidelities in both directions. With each relationship, my ways of responding grew worse, as did my embarrassment at my inability to stay emotionally regulated. The men’s trend towards physical and psychological abuse became worse, too, and my already damaged brain being pushed to the edge so often, eventually, led to alcohol abuse as a means to cope with all my terrible feelings I didn’t even think I had a right to still be sad about. I felt lost inside them.
From the beginning, we were all at fault for establishing certain patterns. The first man would so frequently say something along the lines of We’re over, or I’m done, see you for no reason, for small reasons, for dumb reasons, that I began to ignore them, instead seeing it as another wall he was putting up that I could scale and surpass with my love. I didn’t take them seriously, and my efforts and patience would be rewarded only one or two days later, when he would come back to me in all his addictive affection- never apologizing, mind you, just professing his love and how much he needed me, how right we were together. The incredible relief, the sudden peace melting in my chest, the floating cloud of good graces I didn’t dare want to fall back down from, that I would let it pass, again and again and.
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I was taught to love in a way that, in my opinion, is a distinctly unhealthy one, for both partners.
An echo of mother’s voice in my head professes that, as referenced in the first piece, it’s both partners’ job to love not just 50/50, but 150% each. Although her sentiment and intentions were good, I think that my interpretation of this ideology was that I did not know how to love with boundaries, or a notion of caring for myself first, in order to be able to best love those people. I was taught to give unconditionally, to expend and deplete myself in hopes of… achieving the fairytale dream of being worthy and deserving of life long love?
This was good girl behavior manifesting itself another way in my life, too, and though half of my spirit rebels against it with fervency, there was people pleasing need instilled in me to be good, so good. Watch how good at love I can be, how great a girlfriend, I will give this my all, loving you is what I am meant to do. These were not conscious understandings I had at this time; I wasn’t looking at my behavior or psychological patterns at 22 the way that I can now. And at 22, and 26, and even still at 31, each time I found myself in relationships that would take full advantage of my well-intentioned ability to love. Men that I truly believed deserved a great grace in understanding their emotional complexities psyche, the wounds they also carried. (And don’t they? A question to dissolve another time.) I was deeply loving and investing in someone I genuinely thought would deserve it, receive it, and reciprocate.
For the last two decades of my life, I believed I was loving in the most ultimate and complete way. I empathize with people so strongly, and because I believed myself to be an emotionally complex person worthy of being fully understood in all her nuances, that is exactly the type of love, listening, and acceptance I tried to give completely in all my partnerships.
I remembered learning in college of Aristotle’s notion that there was a way to be good at living. My girlfriend and I at the time spoke of each other in high regards in this realm. For similar, yet different reasons, through creativity, questioning, exploration, generous humanity, equal parts health and hedonism, in how we appreciated the natural world and intelligence and art, we endearingly believed at our young 19 years old we had a lot figured out. I recalled also feeling that interpersonal, specifically romantic, relationships were something I was destined to understand and excel at. I saw my emotional sensitivity and ability to connect with others as indicative of that, and yet.
I was using all the wrong tools. The self-reflective and self-analytical side of me was still asking- What part of this is me, what am I doing to create this climate? How am I perpetuating the cycle, the pattern? And more severely, by the third relationship, really questioning- It must be somehow my fault if, I’m the common denominator, right? But it was very difficult to find all these answers on my own, as self aware and introspective I was being.
There were still behaviors and ways of being treated that I was experiencing that were absolutely the reactive choices of my partner. But there were ways that I contributed, not just in the type of person I am and the aspects about my personality that pushed back against the blockades they set up, but in the behaviors and flags that I was dismissing, and how much I willed myself to overlook reality for the notion of the fantasy I was sure was always just a bit further down the road.
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It’s doubly tricky, these types of relationships, because amidst the different cycles of agonizing pain, catatonia, depletion, and fear, wrapped up and woven through every part of it is also a beautiful life. When I was entirely too hopeful and naive, too trusting, too much in love with the world, and with them- it was, on the upswings, a hyper-bright and magical place where the wounds and flickers of evil subsided. It felt like living in the sun, it felt holy. In the few moments when I indulge myself, I mourn for that girl, that she couldn’t stay as soft as she wanted to be.
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Things that try to keep me from writing this book:
All the types of guilt; my problems are not that bad; an echo of my aforementioned best friend cautioning me, with loving frankness, no one wants to hear another privileged white girl whining about her easy but sad life, a somewhat beneficial filter I’ve kept in mind at all times. I am hypersensitive. But I am an ever present student, and there are more words, there are many people, who could challenge me on things I am saying and I will listen. Especially when it comes to privilege, to comparisons and perspective. I was born with many wonderful things that innumerable people are not, and there are devastating, far worse circumstances than mine.
But I know that this mentality also didn’t help me in terms of the healing that I needed to, the self acknowledgement and love that I needed to give to that wounded part of me. To acknowledge that things can be traumatic and not be the most horrifying traumas in this world, but that the repercussions of them are real and important. That I needed to first be able to name the things that happened to me, in order to treat them and tend to them and heal them, so that I could show up for my family, my friends, my future lovers, and not bring more negativity into their life because I couldn’t deal with mine. To intelligently assess and thus de-perpetuate a cycle, things that are not always visible, wounds that live in the mind and the undercurrent of energy, the little sparks in us that feel it. To cleanse and process and let go of my demons as much as possible so that one day, I can be a stronger, healthier, more balanced partner, community member, contribution to the world.
Denying my own acceptance of these stories and their reality for me, squashing them down with fear and anxiety and smallness and guilt and shame and avoidance tactics (and again, why the fuck did I wait so long to get therapy?) I was not helping anyone. Since I’ve started writing, there are connections absolutely spilling out of the woodwork, and I try to remind myself how much I could have used these stories when I was in those situations, and how much I want to share for the people who still are.
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A brief anecdote to make further sense of it for you.
I was watching a movie at 34 in which a female partner was being abused by the soon to be father of her child. Mostly verbal, but one night, a neighbor saw them fighting physically, saw the boyfriend hit her, blatantly.
The neighbor struck the man in the back with a golf club and accidentally killed him.
The abused girlfriend’s reaction was panic, loss, defense of her partner, even though earlier he had not only hit her, but tried to push her down the stairs to kill the baby inside her.
This is what it feels like:
they may try to kill you but they also make you feel like you need them to survive.
-S
Thank you for coming back to read this next Scarlette Experience. Upgraid to paid (just $5 a month) for access to direct excerpts from Scarlette: A Memoir, as well as before the edits material, journal photos, soundtracks, and other behind the scenes media.