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Living and Leaving an Abusive Relationship

July 30, 2014 Anonymous Leave a comment

Living and Leaving an Abusive Relationship

Everyone wonders why the abusee stays. I wondered for several years after the conclusion of my relationship… why did I stay those 3 years, my college years? The simple answer may sound banal: I loved him. The convoluted answer is that love was worth fighting for, no matter the costs.

I thought that I could fix him, that I was the only one who could or would understand him. And for a long time, that made me feel special and important. But sometime between the belittling insults, the punching and shoving, the time he spit in my face, the time he dragged me across the carpet and threw me out the door in the middle of the night, and the time he cancelled my cross-country airline ticket home without my knowledge, leaving me stranded, penniless, and hopeless in the JFK Airport, I stopped feeling special.

The end started at that exact ticket counter. Andrew and I had spent four painful days in Manhattan visiting his sister, an NYU sophomore at the time. Our return flight to California was scheduled to leave early Tuesday morning. After nearly a week of yelling at each other, we both figured it was finally over, but despite my better judgment, I agreed to share a cab with Andrew to the airport. We hopped into a cab at 4 am with the plan of beating early rush-hour traffic and checking in early for our flight. The cab ride was particularly painful because after four days of fighting, we couldn’t even make eye contact. All I wanted to do was get home and away from him. Something in me told me that this was it: all I needed to was to get home and then I would be safe, with my family and friends there to help me through whatever storm was brewing.

We arrived at the airport with several hours to spare before we were allowed to check our baggage and print our boarding passes. I piled my suitcase, backpack, and purse into a makeshift cushion and tried my best to nap after the exhausting previous days. I was so close. I didn’t even need to sit next to Andrew on the flight. I could make it home on my own, without him, as long as I had my belongings and my plane ticket. I slipped into a light sleep for an hour or so before it was finally time to drag myself and my things to the ticket counter.

The airline employee at the ticket and baggage check-in counter asked for our ticket confirmation number and our IDs. He typed in our information, checked and double-checked his computer screen, handed Andrew his printed boarding pass, and looked up at me sympathetically, “I have one flight reservation for Andrew, but it appears the other ticket on the reservation, the one for you, miss, has been cancelled.” My knees buckled, my mouth dropped open, and tears immediately flooded my eyes. I looked at Andrew, pleading for an explanation, for his help. Andrew had booked our tickets, and sometime in the previous few days, he had intentionally cancelled mine. After days of arguing and fighting, he was exerting his final act of control over me, this time financially.

Andrew stared expressionless at the airline employee, “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I didn’t cancel that ticket.” I looked him straight in the eyes and whispered, “You motherfucker.” The one-way, last minute ticket from NYC back home was $800, and I was a broke college student. The employee said, “Sir, it states right here that only her ticket has been cancelled. You cancelled it.” Andrew shrugged his shoulders and grabbed his boarding pass and his baggage. “Well, I better make it through security,” he smirked at me. “Good luck.” And he walked off toward the TSA security line.

I ran after him, not even bothering with my things still parked at the ticket counter. Grabbing his arm, I pleaded, “What are you doing? You’re leaving me here?! How am I going to get home?! Andrew, I need to get home.” I started to beg, my voice shaking, along with my hands. He had complete control over me and my ability to get home. “Andrew, please. I can’t pay for that ticket. My credit card can’t even accept that charge. Please.” The passengers waiting in line to pass through security stared at me and whispered to each other. I looked delusional and crazed. I was panicked, and Andrew was smiling. He was enjoying this. He loved the manipulation.

By this time, I was on my knees sobbing. He looked down at me condescendingly and replied with a smile, “You have that Coach purse I gave you for Valentine’s. Sell that. It’s gotta be worth three to four hundred dollars, easy. You’re half-way there already.” He shook me from his arm and headed off again in the direction of the security line.

Looking back, why didn’t I call my family back at home for help? There was a way to get out of this: all I had to do was use my phone. But that’s the scary thing about abuse. I was so afraid and so wrapped up in Andrew’s manipulative game that I felt completely isolated. He was my one and only confidant. You’re supposed to be able to rely on your partner when things get rough, right? But what the fuck do you do when the person you love is the person who will openly humiliate you in public, just to see you suffer?

Somehow ignoring the surrounding crowd, I picked myself off the floor and walked back to the ticket counter and back to my belongings. The airline employee was fully aware of my pleading attempt get Andrew to help me. I looked at the employee, hoping that there was some magic button on his computer that would reverse Andrew’s manipulative trick and restore my reservation on that flight home. “Please, sir. I have no money. He cancelled my flight. I need to get home.” And this man somehow knew that I was telling the truth and that I was hopeless. That I was forced to stand in front of an audience of airline passengers and employees, pleading for help on my knees to a guy that was getting a rise out of the whole dramatic scene. And somehow that airline employee knew something was wrong. He sighed, “Okay, miss. I can restore your seat.” He typed some commands into his machine and printed my boarding ticket with a concerned expression.

I inhaled deeply and thanked him repeatedly. I wanted to hug him. To this day, I wish I had recorded his name in my memory. He was a stranger who might have risked his job by taking a chance on a young woman who, in that moment, clearly could not help herself.

It took another three months after this incident in the airport to finally leave Andrew.

Revisiting the entries of my journal from those last few months, I now realize how I omitted all the specific events involving physical, emotional, or mental abuse. Maybe writing them down forced me to face them, made the feelings real. What I did write was, “When am I going to be enough? When am I going to be worthy of me?” It took three years to lose my self-confidence and my self-worth, and it’s taken me just as long to gain it back. Now, I know that I am worth more.

Photo by Sara Slattery

Home, Travel

My Time in Greece: A Tragicomedy

July 11, 2014 Stephanie Cangro Leave a comment

There are three times in my life that I’ve found myself sleeping in the street—the first two were spent camping out for SNL tickets (Kanye and Mr. J. Timberlake, respectively). The third time was… different.

Picture it: Athens, March 2008. My friends and I had been studying abroad in different European cities, but our spring breaks lined up perfectly; we planned to spend the time touring the city and hopping around the Cyclades. Money was tight, but we had enough for semi-decent hostels, ferry tickets, museum entries, and beach days. We were excited, though perhaps a little naïve (despite living in countries with foreign languages, this would be the first time any of us encountered an entirely different alphabet). But when we landed in Athens our first night, our enthusiastic faces clearly didn’t make an impression on the hostel’s clerk—it was far too late, according to Greek time, for check-in. We were told to come back in the morning. Looking back, this should have been our first hint that the trip would be a near-disaster.

With no idea of where to go, or what to do, we started wandering around, eventually finding a touristy-looking café in the middle of a town square. We had to order something before the staff would let us sit, so we tried in vain to understand the menu. Honestly, I’m not even sure we did—I think that the staff just took pity on us after a really long time and brought us some coffee. By this point it was getting to be super late, maybe about 2 am, so we settled at tables outside and took turns sleeping. Some stray dogs wondered over (they’re all over Athens) and sniffed around us, but generally left us alone. One golden mutt curled up under a neighboring table.

Hours later, as the sun began to come up, the café staff kicked us out—it was understandable, but we still had nowhere to go. We started walking again and our new dog friend tagged along, clearly getting a kick out of showing us his (her?) favorite places (an empty fountain, a specific corner, and an alley). Finally, it was time to check in. This would be the last time I would ever sleep on the street, but it’s still not the rock bottom of the story.

The next few days were a blur—I remember seeing the Parthenon and touring the Acropolis, but soon enough we were on our way to our first island, Mykonos. We were all sleep-deprived at this point, but ready for some sun and blue water.

Instead, Mykonos was freezing. We had booked two rooms in the cutest hostel on the island—think those adorable white huts—but ended up huddled together in just one for warmth. Because going to the beach was out of the question, we spent our days touring the island, trying to find any place we could stay indoors without being bothered—more often than not, this meant the island’s sole Starbucks. A few days passed like this. Tempers were definitely running high, but we were all still trying to make the best of the situation, assuming that things would be better at our next destination, Santorini.

Except we never made it there.

When the day finally came to pick up our ferry tickets, we were in for a surprise: because this was Greece—the land of democracy, muses, outrageous leopard print clothing, and doing completely illogical things on total whims—our ferry was going to head to the neighboring island of Syros instead, and we’d have to switch ships once we got there. Okay, not a big deal, right?

Wrong. (Are you sensing the theme here?)

Let’s just skip over the part where the hostel owner’s son took a detour through a drug deal while driving us to the port (we didn’t want to be there, but whatever, we survived). Eventually, we made it to Syros just fine. But—wait for it—soon found out that we weren’t going to be leaving anytime soon. Apparently, during our 90 minutes trip, the winds had escalated and all ferries had been cancelled. Great.

Nowhere to go. Nowhere to sleep. Again. Except now we’re all about to kill each other.

Desperate, we hightailed it to the closest internet café (this was pre–international smartphone data plans, folks) and began searching for hostels. But Syros, as we soon learned, is basically the business center of the Greek Isles. It’s a place where people really only go for work, so our only options were Greek alternatives to the Holiday Inn—comparatively cheap, but still more expensive than we had hoped. Resigned, we pooled our money together and checked into the cheapest option.

With nowhere to go, nothing to see, and barely any money left to spend, we spent the next few days at the pier, hanging out with seagulls and checking with the ferry office nearly every hour. Finally, after three days, we became desperate: there was a single ferry leaving that evening to head back to Athens—the first to leave at all since we’d arrived—and we resignedly purchased tickets. From the ridiculously crowded boat, we called ahead to our next Athenian hostel (the plan had always been to stay in Athens the night before our return flights) and advanced our arrival by two days.

Impossibly, once back in Athens, our situation only grew worse—the next hostel was a new level of gross. I’m pretty sure we all cried ourselves to sleep the first night: I definitely refused to touch the blanket that had been provided, opting instead to wrap my legs inside of my sweatshirt. In the morning, after being frustrated with having to pay for shower water (cold water, mind you, not hot), we left to wander the city again.

Slowly, a new realization came upon us: if you’ve seen one Greek statue, you’ve seen them all. So instead of revisiting the tourist hotspots we had already seen, we hunted out English movie theatres, book stores, and small restaurants. We fell into a pattern of seeing double-features at an old, cheap theatre and reading silently while camped out in yet another Starbucks.

Looking back now, nearly six years later, I’m almost glad it happened the way it did. It’s quite possibly the last extreme experience I’ll ever have without a smartphone to save me. If the trip hadn’t turned out horribly, I wouldn’t have discovered my appreciation for Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities was one of the only English-language books we could find—Twilight was the other) or have pushed myself that far out of my comfort zone. Moreover, the experience of the trip definitely made our friendships stronger—without the typical creature comforts we were used to, each of us was forced to confront the best and worst of each other.

And, to be honest, I just really love telling this story and knowing that I was made stronger for the experience.

Photo by Gali Levi-McClure