YOU ARE NOT ALONE - A companion online community discussion board for The Mental Illness Happy Hour podcast with Paul Gilmartin

Writing helps me deal with my feelings. During this moment I wrote about, I was stuck in the car with my boyfriend (now my ex) who was verbally and emotionally abusive (at least during that car ride, he was also physically abusive at other times). He had gotten a ticket when we went to the beach which he blamed me for because I was a cunt (this was his sole reasoning), and then he went into me about how much his life sucked, how much he hated living where we were, how much he hated his friends there and how much he hated me and how it was all my fault. It was the first time I ever dissociated. And it came so suddenly after a very nice day at the beach. I ended up crying for a while after writing this so I guess it was cathartic.


Dissociate
my soul is numb
suffocating next to your barbed wire
unable to find the freedom I see outside
trees passing as fast as your words
the road, the car, your voice-- my prison

strangled exhalations
my throat longs for loving words
we spoke on the calmer shores of Montauk
when speed was replaced with song

your words accuse and abuse
as you eagerly tear me apart
like something unloved and unwanted
and pull out all my insufficiencies
all my many imagined wrongs
like wolves teeth
gnashing and grinding me down

more object than human
a sounding board
for all your displaced dreams
and missed long-gone changes
oh, the things I must have done to you

I would let myself fall
out of this fast moving car
to crash on pavement
softer than your tone
but I can only stare at the sky
and drop out of my body

You did an awesome job with being direct. As a fellow female who understands the displaced anger receiver, I enjoyed the "oh, the things I must have done to you" line. It really got in there and seemed to help you take back ownership. Awesome that you recognized it was this guy's issue and moved on.