#storytellingasresistance

[deanismysavior]

This is my story

Trigger warnings for manipulation, ptsd, anxiety, mental illness, paranoia, possible stalking, toxic relationships

Words included but not pertaining to the actual story: rape, assault, abuse

1. 

In my freshman year of college, all I wanted to do was make friends. It was the sole purpose I moved from my small town in Connecticut to New York for college. I wanted to meet new people, and fine, I’ll say it, I was naive. Growing up around the same people your entire life can affect your expectations of people, and as someone who was generally pretty optimistic about most things, I had a tendency of giving people the benefit of the doubt. I never should have done that. 

My freshman year of college was the first time I ever felt something as close to what I can only describe as post-traumatic stress, but I guess I should start from the beginning. There was a boy in my Art History class who approached me on the second day of our class. I’ll call him Stan. He told me that he’d gotten his schedule mixed up and that he’d missed the first class. Seeing my opportunity to make a new friend, I offered to send him my notes from the first class, and we exchanged phone numbers. I was so relieved I had found someone in my class to exchange numbers with since that was what every orientation leader and RA I’d talked to had suggested to do on the first day of classes. That day, he walked me back to my dorm (on the opposite side of the residential campus to his own). At the time, I didn’t think much of it. I thought he was just being friendly and nice. Once we’d reached my dorm, he stopped me. 

“Come here. Give me a hug,” he said.

Now, I’m not someone who’s in the habit of hugging strangers or even acquaintances. The request made me feel off, but I couldn’t quite place why I felt that way. Not knowing what else to do, and not wanting to be rude to who I hoped would become my new friend, I hugged him. It felt wrong. I can’t describe the feeling, but it wasn’t how a hug was supposed to feel. A hug is supposed to make you feel warm. I walked to my dorm feeling completely cold. 

Now I wasn’t stupid, I considered that this interaction may have been the boy’s showing romantic interest, but I didn’t have much experience with that sort of attention coming from boys at the time, and I didn’t want to overthink it. 

Things were okay with Stan for a little while. He walked me back to my dorm again the next class, but it was about a few weeks into the semester when things started to change. After not showing up to class one day, Stan texted me. 

Hey, would you be able to do me a favor and sign my name on the attendance sheet today? I don’t want it to count against me, and I don’t know how many absences I get. I just really couldn’t come today.

I was not a rule-breaker, and I’m still not. I expressed my discomfort at the situation. If I got caught, I didn’t know what the repercussions of that action would be, but I didn’t know what to do. He told me I didn’t have to, but that it would be really helpful if I did. I didn’t want to let down someone I had just made friends with. I didn’t recognize how this behavior was manipulative at the time. He told me how awesome I was and how much he appreciated me. 

I thought that this was a one-time occurance, but sure enough, a couple weeks later, he texted me about it again. I told him he should really start coming to class.

After that, Stan stopped walking me back to my dorm. On the days he did show up to class, he showed up halfway through, just to sign his name on the attendance sheet I was sure. He didn’t bring a notebook. Sometimes he would do homework for other classes when he sat there. It began to frustrate me how little he cared. I started ignoring his texts. 

When the midterm came around, he texted me again. He told me that he didn’t have a copy of the textbook and asked if he could borrow mine. I told him I was busy with my other midterms and that I needed to use my textbook to study from. I was even more annoyed now. How had he gone halfway through the semester without the textbook?

I decided then that I wanted to distance myself from Stan. He didn’t seem to have much interest in being my friend anymore anyway. Maybe he never did. He’d just seen some eager freshman at the start of her college career and decided she would be an easy target. 

After the midterm, he texted me again. He said he didn’t do as well as he’d hoped.

Maybe we can study together. I know you know your stuff.

I know my stuff because I go to class, I replied. 

He told me he was really going to apply himself in the second half of the semester and that he wanted to bring his grade up. He said he was going to be better about coming to class. Like a fool, I believed him.

It only took him a week to start asking me to sign his name on the attendance sheet again. This time, I stopped replying for good. I realized that he hadn’t changed, and that he had no intention to. I was disappointed, but I wasn’t surprised.

It had been a few weeks since I’d talked to Stan. He would leave directly after class had ended, so I thought I’d shaken him off. I was relieved. Then, one day as I was walking back to my dorm, taking the walkway that went directly from the academic side of campus to the freshman dorm buildings, I ran into Stan, my lemonade and my lunch from our campus Au Bon Pain in my hand. I felt myself freeze.

He smiled at me and said hi, then he stopped me. 

“Hey, so I was thinking, would you want to get lunch sometime?” 

I felt the pit of my stomach sink, but Stan was close to six foot five inches, and he’d never technically done anything to me, right? I mean, maybe he didn’t even realize. I said sure, mostly so that the interaction would end and I could go back to my dorm and eat my lunch in peace.

I walked away, my heart racing. I had been alone in this enclosed walkway with this boy I barely knew, this boy who was older than I was, and much larger. I didn’t feel the tightness in my chest subside until I was safe on the other side of the turnstile into my dorm building. My mind started cycling through all of the possibilities. Was he asking me to lunch as a friend? But that didn’t make sense. He’d barely talked to me at all outside of texting me to help him out in class and he didn’t wait to talk to me after class anymore. Was he asking me to lunch to study? This was more plausible since it seemed like everything that he’d talked to me about all semester had been about his attendance or wanting help with notes or study materials. Was he asking me to lunch because he liked me? This was perhaps the most troubling option for me. He’d never once made me feel safe.

It was then that everything clicked for me. All the red flags I’d been ignoring. I realized how taken advantage of I’d been feeling the whole time, how one-sided this relationship had become. How one-sided I’d let it become. 

The next morning I told him I couldn’t make our lunch plans. He said that maybe we could reschedule. I said maybe some other time, but I knew that I didn’t mean it. 

In the following weeks, I started seeing Stan even more. I’d begun to notice that he started using the walkway to the freshman dorms more often, even though he wasn’t a freshman himself and on a couple occasions, I even saw him in the freshman dining hall. Why was an upperclassmen constantly hanging around an all-freshman dorm by himself? Maybe all of it was coincidence, but I began to feel paranoid, like he was purposely showing up in the places he knew I would be. It made my skin crawl. I ended up changing the way I walked home to my dorm, even though it took longer. The main walkway was far more crowded, so even if I did see him, I  would have backup if things turned south. It got to the point where I felt anxious in class, wondering if he would show up that day, and when he did, it became hard for me to concentrate, but more than that, I was afraid of going anywhere on campus by myself. I wouldn’t feel safe until I had the swipe-access-only turnstile of my dorm building between myself and the rest of the campus.

After I had taken some time avoiding Stan to the best of my abilities and ignoring his requests for me to sign him into class, he contacted me again, asking if I wanted to do the Museum Project with him. Our Art History professor had assigned us a paper that required us to travel into New York City to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art and write about one of the art pieces there. Luckily, I had already made plans to go with a few of my friends, and I told him as much. Traveling into one of the biggest cities in the United States with a guy I barely knew? I couldn’t even imagine what that would have been like.

After telling him no to the museum project and a few more failed attempts at asking me to sign the attendance sheet for him, I thought I had made it pretty clear where I stood with Stan, but by the time finals rolled around, he contacted me again asking me to study, and at this point, I’d had enough. I’m not proud of everything I said, but I am proud that I stood up for myself. I told him that at the beginning I’d wanted to help him because I thought we were friends, but that clearly he didn’t actually care about me and that he was only using me for help in class. I told him no, that I wasn’t there to save his ass. 

He came back at me, saying that he had tried to get to know me better when he’d asked me to lunch and to do the project, that he had gotten the book and been studying, and that he didn’t need anyone to save his grade in the class. His words made me second guess everything I’d been feeling. Did I even have any right to feel violated by him? I didn’t know. 

I decided to reach out to a friend and ask him what he thought of the situation. Was I overreacting? Was I being too cruel or too paranoid? 

“No, he knows he fucked up and now he’s trying to do damage control. Look at the way he’s taken every issue you brought up and pinned it back on you. He’s not taking any accountability for himself. If he’d really cared about preserving a friendship here, he would have apologized instead of blaming you. Don’t fall for it. He’s only trying to make you feel bad so that you apologize and he can feel better for his own shitty behavior.”

I’m glad I reached out. If I hadn’t, I probably would have caved. 

When I showed up for the final, I sat in the seat I always did, all the way over to the right in the first row. When Stan walked into the final, he sat down two rows from me, and about two minutes later, got up from his seat, and switched to the seat directly behind me. I can’t be sure of his intention, but my best guess was that he was trying to shake me, trying to get me back for not helping him; either that, or he was attempting to cheat off me. I want you all to know that I got an A on that final exam.

Though it’s gotten much better since my first semester of my freshman year ended, I still flinch whenever I see someone that reminds me of him. My heart still quickens its pace, and I still feel that nervousness in the pit of my stomach that makes me want to sweat. 

The worst part is that I don’t know if my actions were warranted. I knew that Stan certainly wasn’t the type of person I wanted to be friends with, but I didn’t know whether or not he was actually dangerous. A part of me still feels like maybe I overreacted, that maybe I should never have been scared in the first place, that maybe he’s actually a great guy, and I just didn’t give him enough of a chance. These are all things I tell myself constantly, but the truth is that I’ll never know. 

In September of 2018, I had the first day of my Greek and Roman History class. Stan was in that class. It was still difficult for me to be around him. I still didn’t feel safe, but this had been a class I had been looking forward to for months. I had to sit with the choice that I either had to drop the class that I loved, or I had to stay in it with this constant reminder of my trauma sitting halfway across the room. I convinced myself that I was strong and that I wouldn’t let him win. I stayed. 

Stan didn’t talk to me at all that semester. 

2. 

In the second half of my sophomore year, I started dating my first girlfriend. We were best friends before we had started dating, and though some of our mutual friends found it hard to adjust to our being together initially, they were, for the most part, supportive. I thought that because we had always gotten along and communicated well as friends that it would be the same when we were together, but it wasn’t. 

Now I won’t get into personal details about her, because I still want to respect her privacy, but there were problems I knew that we would face going into things. I just didn’t know how severe these issues would be. I thought I knew what to expect and that I could handle it, but that wasn’t how things turned out. 

Things were okay for a little while and I was happy exploring these new experiences, but it became clear pretty quickly that we weren’t on the same page. She needed to take things slow, which I was okay with. I made a conscious effort to respect her boundaries and I always tried to make sure that she felt comfortable and safe. She told me she wasn’t much for PDA. Again, I had figured that this would be fine with me since we wanted to keep things under the radar to begin with. We ran in a lot of the same circles and were involved in the same clubs, so we had both agreed that we didn’t want this relationship to affect our professionalism. She told me that she needed space sometimes. Being a natural introvert, I understood this need and tried my best to be mindful of her time.

It soon became apparent that these needs were much more confusing and complicated than I had at first envisioned. Her need to take things slow had morphed into a need to essentially never develop much of a physical relationship at all. Any time it seemed that I wanted to be close to her, she seemed cold toward the idea. Though I am not outwardly the most touchy-feely person, when it comes to the people I am close to, physical affection, as simple as just hugging or hand-holding is important to my bond with them. Her rejection of these things led me to experience these feelings of being unwanted. It was something that was important to me, but I respected her boundaries, and I wanted to make it work, so I compromised. 

Though she had said she wasn’t into PDA, it seemed like the only times that she would ever be physically affectionate were when we were out with our friends, and myself, starved for this attention, took it where I could get it. This left me feeling confused as to where her boundary was. She’d made it pretty clear at the outset that she didn’t want to be coupley in public, but then did the exact opposite thing. She would snuggle up to me and act protective if anyone else tried to sit next to me instead. She began telling people outside of our friend group about our relationship. It wasn’t that I was embarrassed of her or that I didn’t want her to tell her friends, but it was something that we had mutually agreed upon, and here she was, going back on her word. She hadn’t even had the decency to talk to me about it beforehand or renegotiate the terms we had set. Soon, there were people I didn’t even know who now knew that I was queer when I wasn’t even out to my family yet. I was frustrated. When I tried to bring it up to her, she made me feel guilty for trying to hide our relationship. I talked about it to one of our mutual friends and she told me that my girlfriend just wanted to show me off because she was proud to be with me and that I was making a bigger deal out of it than it was. They both made me feel like I was unwarranted in my frustration, and so I let it slide. I found myself again sacrificing my own needs and sense of comfort for what she wanted. 

At first the space didn’t bother me so much. I had my own friends and my own work to do, but it got to the point where it seemed like the only time she wanted to spend with me was when we were around other people. She’d be perfectly content to invite me out with all of her friends, but when I suggested we spend time together alone, she’d tell me she was exhausted or tired or stressed and that she needed space. I would have understood if it didn’t feel like she made time for everyone except me. When it came to her priorities, I always seemed to come in dead last. 

It didn’t get really bad until the summer. We didn’t live in the same state, so naturally we didn’t get to see each other too often, but I did make two trips up to see her. When I suggested that she come down to see me, she told me that she didn’t have the money or the means to transport herself (she couldn’t drive and she was always broke). That same summer, she took a bus to New Jersey to go to Bookcon and she traveled all the way into New York City just for a job interview. Throughout the summer though, I texted her a lot. I would tell her how much I missed her and I would always be the one who was reaching out. She would go days without replying to me, sometimes even weeks. Her excuse was always that she was busy working. It felt like I was begging her for attention. That past year, I had grown my confidence so much, but I’d never felt as worthless as I did that summer.

When she got back to school that year, she didn’t even tell me. I had to find out from a friend that she was back on campus. She apologized to me, but after that day, I barely saw her for the next few weeks. I got so sick of it, I confronted her about it. I told her that if she wanted to stay together that I had to be a priority to her. When I said this, she looked at her calendar sheepishly and told me that she could make time to go out with me a week out from then. 

I’d like to say that the reason we broke up is that I finally stood up for myself and realized that I’d had enough, but I can’t say that. That wasn’t the reason at all. I won’t get into the details here, because that isn’t the world’s business, but I told her that I didn’t see a point in continuing a relationship where that was never on the table. It was unceremonious. Like I said, she was my best friend, so at the time, I was devastated. A few days after that, we met up again to talk about it, and I ended things more finally that time. I guess it hadn’t sunk in for her that we were really breaking up. 

We tried to be friends for a little while after that, but it proved difficult for me. The more time I spent away from the situation, the more I realized that there were parts of this relationship that were completely not okay, but I’d let it slide because I cared about her. I had never thought my best friend would be capable of hurting me like that. In fact, it hadn’t been until a few weeks prior, before our breakup, when a few of our mutual friends had sat me down and talked to me about it that I even allowed myself to acknowledge how toxic that relationship had become. They told me that what happened in the relationship I had with her wasn’t normal. It was my first relationship and I hadn’t known any different. 

Things didn’t really come to a head until I snapped. At that time, I was still hanging out with that group of friends and I was walking back to my dorm with them. For a month, my ex had been making snarky, passive aggressive comments about our book club, a club that I was on the executive board of, because we had to make decisions about the club and how to run it that didn’t align with what she had apparently wanted out of this club. It had annoyed me at the time, but I had a lot of other things going on then and I didn’t want to create more problems, so I didn’t say anything, but that day, I was talking excitedly about the club and how I’d suggested this new book that I really wanted to read. I was explaining the premise to her and why I thought it would be a great pick for the month of October (it was The Institute by Stephen King), and she told me that she didn’t really want to read another book written by a white male author. Out of context, this might not have bothered me so much, but with the breakup and all of the negative things that she had already said about the club that I was really excited to be a part of (it had just started running the previous spring and so I was elected to their first official eboard), it just felt like another way in which she was trying to undervalue my own opinions and put the attention back on herself. I told her that I didn’t think the club was all about her. She did not take that well. That was the moment I think that I realized I had all of this unresolved anger and frustration towards the situation and I really started to realize how much it felt like she always made whatever I had to say feel less important than what she wanted to say. 

She texted me later to say that she didn’t appreciate the hostility and that I was being “really mean.” I was frustrated, and I told her that I wanted some space, but she kept digging at how mean I was being, and so I tried to explain my side of things. I told her that I felt like I was finally standing up for myself and that the things she was saying were really hurtful too. I told her how she did these kinds of things all the time and she never seemed to realize the way that her words affected people. I guess saying all of that at once was too much. 

Later, a couple of my friends called me to tell me that my ex had had a lapse in her mental health. Again, I don’t want to get into specifics here because that’s not my business to tell, but they told me that I shouldn’t have laid into her so hard and that I couldn’t talk to her like that. I had finally felt like I had given a voice to the feelings I’d been suppressing for months, and now I was being told to be quiet. It seemed like I was being blamed for the decline in her mental health when all I was trying to do was express my own frustrations. Now, I just felt even less heard and even more frustrated. 

I acknowledge that the way I handled things here was probably not the best, but as I said before, I was frustrated. I had felt like when I’d tried to address problems like this in the past, my ex had ignored me or explained away the problems I was having. I’m not here to say that you shouldn’t be sensitive to someone’s mental health, but I hadn’t known the extent of things. If I had, I might have acted differently. That being said, even if someone is struggling with their mental health, it isn’t an excuse not to take accountability, and it’s definitely not fair to blame it on someone else either. 

About a month after our breakup, the day after my birthday, my ex-girlfriend called me and told me that she was outside my dorm and asked if I could come down. She said she had something for me. I thought it was odd, but I wanted to make sure she was okay, so I went. She handed me a package she had wrapped in newspaper and told me, “Happy Birthday.” 

I hadn’t spoken to her much in the past few weeks and I felt uncomfortable accepting the gift, but I couldn’t just refuse it when she was standing there, tears streaming down her face, so I took it back up to my dorm room, where slowly, I tore back the newspaper wrapping. Inside was a copy of Paulo Coehlo’s “The Alchemist,” a book we had to read for our Popular Literature course, but she had written over the title. Inside, she had made blackout poetry, inserted her own typed-out poems, pasted pictures of us, and had drawn inside the book. At the end was an emotional letter saying how much she had messed up and that she hadn’t realized what she had until she’d lost me. She said she wanted to try to make things work again.

I didn’t know what to make of this. Maybe this would have been cute if it was something she’d done while we were together, but it just ended up feeling like a mockery. In the six months we were together, she had never once done anything for me. She only wanted to put the effort in when she realized that she had to in order to keep me. 

 I knew that I didn’t want to get back together, but now I had to close a door I thought was already shut. I texted her the following day that we should probably meet and talk about this. Going into that meeting, I wanted to make it clear that I didn’t want to get back together, that I was hurt and that I was still healing. When I arrived at her dorm that day, I sat down and took a breath.

“I don’t think that I should be with anyone right now,” I told her. “I lost a lot of myself in this relationship and I’m still trying to get myself back again. It’s going to take time for me to get back to a place where I’m feeling okay again and I’m probably going to need some space.”

I tried my best to get my point across without making her feel like shit. She had just poured her heart out to me on the page after all, and I didn’t want to be a complete asshole, but she took my words and twisted them, like she always seemed to do. She told me how she had prepared a whole speech for me about how she was going to try more and communicate better and how she was ready to change everything for me.

“But that’s all moot now,” she said with tears in her eyes.

I was trying not to actively roll my eyes at this. You’re not supposed to let on that you don’t believe someone, not even for a second when they say something like that. She kept trying to tell me that all of the things she had said when we first broke up weren’t really true and that she’d worked through them during her time back home (which was all of a matter of five days). She said she’d realized that those things were never really a problem for her but that she’d used them as an excuse to blame the failing of the relationship on that instead of on herself. I think this was only probably half true.

“But it’s okay,” she said, “because you’re still not ready.” I don’t think she understood how condescending she sounded. Somehow, it was still because of me that the relationship was ending. 

 She then started congratulating herself on how selfless she was being, about how good it felt to put me before her. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to laugh or if I was utterly repulsed by that statement.

At the end of everything, she seemed to come to the conclusion that I just wasn’t ready yet. She said she was going to wait for me. I knew then that she had never heard me, and that she’d never seen me either. 

The next weekend, she texted me while she was drunk at a party. I told her she shouldn’t be texting me. 

A month later, I get a text from her. She tells me she wants to give me back the bottle I’d left in her dorm room and I say okay and that I need to give her her sweatshirt back anyway. We meet halfway between our dorms. “Just so you know,” she says, “I started seeing someone.”

I honestly didn’t know why she told me. I didn’t want to know. It felt like apathy. It also felt like a punch to the gut. I told her I was happy for her, because that’s what you’re supposed to do. I wasn’t. I was angry. I was so goddamn angry. 

For months, she had been trying to construct ways to get me back, and now she was trying to make me jealous. I just wanted it to be over. That was the day I decided to stop talking to her completely. 

The following month, I decided that I wanted to post something on Instagram about the summation of my year. I wanted to talk about how hard that year had been for me, but that I was proud that I had made it out on top and that things were looking up for me. As I was scrolling through my feed the following day, I saw that my ex-girlfriend had posted something too. This post seemed to be in direct response to mine, about how she had really messed up this year and that she had lost people that were important to her. The only reason I could think that she would have posted something like that was to get other people to flock to her and give her attention and to get my attention. Four months after we had broken up, and it still seemed like she was hell-bent on dragging me back into her drama. I muted her on all of my social media. 

It felt like every time I was trying to make progress towards getting over the situation, she would try to find some kind of way to come back into my life and make me miss her and care about her again. I would have maybe understood if it actually seemed like she cared about how I was feeling at all, but she didn’t. As always, the language and the tactics she used were all about her. 

Things were quiet for a few months, and I was feeling really good, probably the best I’d felt in years. I finally felt like I had re-built a support system at school (a lot of my friends were mutual friends with my ex and most of them had elected to stay in her friend group), and I was feeling like I was coming down off of some of my anger. I guess my ex thought that it was only a matter of time before my walls would wear down, because she tried speaking with me again. When I was standing and waiting for a friend in the student center, she asked me if I was waiting to have dinner with someone, and I replied saying, “Yes.” It struck me as odd because outside of professional situations, I hadn’t spoken to her in months, and even then I’d tried my best to avoid engaging with her directly as much as possible. I think she was trying to invite me to lunch with my old friend group, but I shook it off and continued to carry on. A few weeks later, she tried to start up a conversation with me like nothing had ever happened. I couldn’t leave without looking rude, and maybe I let my guard down a little bit, but I think she mistook my being polite for my forgiving her behavior over the past few months. 

In mid April, after the self-isolation started, I got a text from her saying that she was “checking in” and that she hoped that my family wasn’t driving me too crazy right now. I chose to ignore it.

In early May, she reached out to me again, this time with a much longer message. She said that she was tired of being angry about “relationship stuff.” She said, “I miss my best friend, and I would like her back.” She said she was looking at old pictures of us and that she “started sobbing.” She said that she “wanted to make the first move” in case I had been hesitant to do so. I’m not sure if she was really that delusional about the reality of the situation or if she was just making one more desperate grab at getting me back. Maybe it was both. 

There was a time when I might have thought this was sweet, but I know better now. I’ve learned to recognize that she tries to use my emotions against me and that she’s been doing it the entire time, whether she was conscious of it or not. She would only show me affection when she saw I was paying more attention to someone else than I was to her. This was no different. Now she was trying to tell me how sad she was so that I’d feel bad for being angry and resentful towards her, but there was nowhere in her message that she wanted to own up to any of her behaviors and all of her purposes in wanting to “reignite” our friendship seemed to be entirely self-serving. I don’t know, maybe I was too disillusioned by that point to care. I chose to ignore that text too. 

3.

I’m not trying to say that I played the right cards in all of these instances. In fact, I think there are a lot of ways I could have probably dealt with these situations better, but these situations took a lot out of me, and I only had so much bandwidth with which to deal with them. 

We talk a lot in our society about rape, about abuse, about harassment, but what about the stories that don’t quite fit in those categories, the ones that fall through the cracks? Why don’t we ever talk about manipulative behavior and how it can cause just as much trauma. I’m not trying to equate any of these things, because I’ll never understand what another person’s experience would be like, but I can speak to the lasting effects these situations have had on me. 

I still experience anxiety and a physical reaction any time I see a taller male figure wearing a baseball cap. Some days it’s better than others, but there are times that I get completely taken off guard and I jump. It’s hard to explain to my friends why I pause and go quiet on the walkway sometimes.

As much as I don’t like the fact, my relationship with my ex still affects my everyday life too. As I tried to enter a new relationship not too long ago, I realized that the emotional trauma I was carrying from the poor communication of that relationship negatively affected the way that I interacted with this new person. I was nervous that it would be the same thing all over again. 

With this situation, the lasting effects are certainly worse. I was much closer to my ex than I was to Stan, so moving on from the situation has been a much more arduous, drawn out process. It also doesn’t help that I’m still forced to, at least in some capacity, keep contact with her. Up until recently, she was in two of my classes. She’s still friends with a lot of my friends, which has forced me to become more distant from them as a result, but nonetheless, I still end up seeing her more often because of it. She is currently a part of the same club I am on eboard for, so blocking her number from my phone isn’t really an option I have. This constant exposure has definitely had a negative impact on me, as it affects the way that I perform in that group setting. It makes it hard to be present sometimes in a club that used to feel like a safe space to me. It makes me sad that I lost that feeling, but the club is too important for me to give up.

Most recently though, the lasting impact of the relationship affected my eboard position in a way I wasn’t expecting. I am in charge of the Public Relations for this club, and so I maintain and oversee everything that happens with our social media. One of the girls from the club approached me with the idea that we should make a TikTok account for our club, and I had to go through the very uncomfortable process of explaining that one of the most popular social media apps right now was one of my biggest triggers. When I would get to spend time alone with my ex, I wanted it to be quality time and I wanted to talk to her, but she always seemed uncomfortable with silence and needed a way to fill it. Even though I didn’t particularly care for them, she’d always start watching TikTok videos when we were alone together, which frustrated me immensely. Now, any time I see them, it takes me back to that feeling of being unwanted and not being a priority. This made my job as the chair of Public Relations extremely difficult, as I didn’t want to prevent my club from the publicity that jumping on a trend like TikTok could garner us. I decided it was in my best interest to delegate this. I told the girl that while I think it would be a good idea for the club, I couldn’t be the person to run it. 

In situations like these, there is no real way to get the kind of physical distance that one needs in order to fully heal, and it’s hard to find support when there are not a lot of resources being offered for students when their cases aren’t severe enough to require university intervention. Counseling is always a good option, and I was actually scheduled to begin seeing a counselor when the pandemic hit. I had to cancel that appointment, however, because I am an out-of-state student and I can’t travel to the school in order to make the appointments. As of right now, the university has only adapted its health services to a phone triage system, meaning that there are no formal counseling  services available to all students whilst we’ve seen the highest uptick in mental-health related crises in years. Even during a normal semester though, counseling can only work internally; it can help me to work through my emotional baggage, but it can’t act as a prevention to situations like this occurring again. It is only doing damage control. 

I will say here that I am now fairing with these situations much better, and I am actively seeking help to unlearn my own behaviors and better process these emotions, but my point still stands. 

My point is that we are not taught how to read these red flags. We’re not really ever told about when a friend is asking too much from you or how to recognize if a relationship is becoming toxic without it becoming abusive. Too often I think we seem to conflate these as the same thing, that being taken advantage of automatically means that an assault occurred or that toxicity in a relationship only rears its head when there is constant fighting. These are misconceptions. I wish that someone had told me enough to be able to recognize when I needed to get help, but we are not able to learn about these things from school or friends or the media. Too often, the only way we learn to recognize these red flags is from experience. 

In Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire says, “Concern for humanization leads at once to the recognition of dehumanization, not only as an ontological possibility but as an historical reality” (Freire 43). I’d argue that’s exactly what is happening here, an allowance for dehumanization to occur. In not addressing manipulative behaviors as detrimental and writing them off as products of a person’s personality or their primary motivations (oh, maybe he’s just into you) (that’s just how she is) (they can’t help it, it’s a product of their mental illness), it not only enables these behaviors to persist, it also acts in speaking over the voices of the people who are affected by these behaviors and attempts to minimize the weight of their experiences. It’s not a mistake when people who have been manipulated say that they feel “used.” It is in this very act of using someone else that that person no longer becomes a person to you, but an object, and a means at attaining your own goals. People that show cycles of manipulative behavior dehumanize the people around them to serve their own purposes, but in ignoring these actions, we too become bystanders in this act of dehumanization. 

Works Cited

Freire, Paulo, et al. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.