Anonymous
“I think you might be bipolar,” a phrase that came up so casually I cannot even remember the context. Throughout the course of the past 3 years, my ex-boyfriend has said far too many things of this nature to belittle me and my emotions. Not only did they hurt me, but they mirrored the microaggressions that are far too easy for white men in modern-day America.
When I was 14-years-old, I made the mistake of falling for the tricks of toxic masculinity that have come to define the dating pool of high school boys. Although there were many warning signs, I allowed myself to be continuously manipulated for almost 2 years.
The relationship began only a week after he was broken up with by his previous girlfriend, a fact I did not realize would be so hurtful to her until after I had broken up with him. Even worse, he made me keep it a secret from my family because he did not want to tell his parents. I was needlessly constantly on edge for a full year because of this secret, which became clearly needless as we became “official” with extreme ease.
Additionally, we began texting constantly, leaving me with almost no alone time. Whenever I wanted some time apart or to go out with my friends, he made me feel guilty for not always wanting to be with him and criticized my closest friends systematically. This type of manipulation peaked with times when I was forced to stay up all night texting about some meaningless specific, and if I said I was tired the next morning, he would make self-deprecating remarks that I would have to address until I learned to simply not voice certain feelings.
Sadly, this was just the beginning. As the relationship progressed, consensual activities turned into things I was pressured into and sometimes, just nonconsensual. Although I am definitely prone to PDA, I was pushed towards constant contact, even to the point of being groped in public despite my constant rejections of these advancements.
All of this culminated in several events of spontaneous sobbing until I finally realized I needed to put an end to the relationship, a feat that took 3 attempts and led to a physically and emotionally threatening episode of his outside of my school. As I began to tell my story, boys avoided me and girls told me how much better they would have handled the situation, all while he continued to publicly attack me and look for ways to pick fights with me.
While the plot events of this situation may seem bad enough, the worst part was that I completely lost my sense of self. I began questioning every part of my reality and being and shaping my decisions based on his thoughts. Most of the clothes I wore were to please him and accent the parts of my body that he made comments on.
However, once I was out of the relationship I learned things about myself and society that have given me much more strength and perspective than I ever had. First of all, I realized even more so how pervasive sexism is and how important fighting it is, even if it makes me somewhat of a social outcast. I became increasingly aware of how society has made me crave male attention and judge myself from the perspective of how desirable I would be to men. Acknowledging this fact has made me much more comfortable in my own skin and allowed me to eat and dress for myself.
More importantly, I was able to better understand how racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of discrimination are able to hide in the form of microaggressions. Periodically, he would say something like “one day soon white people are going to be a minority,” to which I would respond “so?” and brush off as a random thought he must have had. Upon reflection, I have realized this is just one of the many ways people of privilege have been getting away with expressing disdain towards those different from them.
As I contemplate the details of all these events, I find myself placing the blame solely on my side for not noticing the warnings or for allowing certain things to happen, but there is no point in that. All I can do, or we can do as people, is learn from what I went through, act differently to fight these things, and tell my story for others to hopefully learn from as well.