Restoring What They Took: The Small Things Matter Too

Once upon a time, I was a dumb girl who dated a married man. 

Dumb isn’t the right word — I was an autistic girl with undiagnosed Borderline Personality Disorder, obliviously trauma bonding and repeating the patterns of her childhood. 

But because I wasn’t educated about myself — I didn’t even have names for these things back then — I just came to the easiest conclusion: dumb, worthless, unlovable, better off dead.  

It was the fact I felt unlovable that I even lacked the self respect to avoid such an obviously doomed situation as a married man. 

But let me rewind and give you a glimpse through the rose-colored glasses in which that girl saw the world. 

In general, she believed evil was rare and incomprehensible. 

Because malice wasn’t in her heart, that made her vulnerable to receiving it from others who she met with love. 

Raised as the scapegoat child to two sociopaths, she knew her parents were mentally ill, but she thought they must be rare, as people like them were never in television or the movies, and only a few of her friends were able to admit that they came from similarly fraught backgrounds. 

She knew she was mentally ill too--therapists diagnosed her with chronic depression, body dysmorphia, and cPTSD by that time.

This man said he came from a perfect family and had a perfect bill of mental health--no problems ever in life. 

Yes, his parents divorced, but so did most parents. 

Yes, his father was a chronic cheater, but, mysteriously, so were most men. 

Yes, he was a registered sex offender (public urination, he said), and yes, he had past charges for stalking exes (they were crazy, he said--anyway, I didn't find any of this out until I was in court getting a restraining order).

Otherwise, his family was perfect, he said. 

And he was the perfect man. 

At work, he was beloved: he was the hilarious and kind coworker that everyone, myself included, smiled to greet on a shift. 

He was married with a child, but everyone at work knew his marriage to be an OPEN RELATIONSHIP. 

He regularly slept with coworkers. 

This made it seem as if I wasn’t doing anything morally wrong. 

But I felt in my heart it was still wrong, because I knew the truth: I wasn’t just sleeping with that man. 

I LOVED HIM. 

And I paid the price for that love by repeating the wounds of my childhood.

In the end, I found myself betrayed and shattered, feeling as unlovable, physically abused, emotionally wrecked, and psychologically isolated as I’d felt growing up with parents who hated me. 

In the end, I had to grieve him like he was dead, just like I did with my family. And I had to get a no-contact restraining order and years of therapy, just like I did with my family. 

But this essay isn’t about those monumental and intangible things he took from me. 

It’s about one small, tangible thing.