Shooting the Messenger

Your partner dumps you when you make it abundantly clear that there is no room in the relationship for a piece of home-made porn with the ex-partner with whom he claimed he’d had no contact for six months when you met. It has now been a year, but he wants to hang on to it – and all of the text messages they ever exchanged – as ‘insurance’ in case she should decide to make an allegation of sexual assault against him. You have tried to live with it – he seems so  perfect on so many other levels – but the feelings of insufficiency, paranoia and inadequate jealousy in you that its being there promotes won’t go away.

And you didn’t like it when you saw the lady in question’s mobile number displayed on the notice board in his living room a month ago. Alarm bells rang, and he reacted badly when you told him you were scared by shutting you out.

He promised to get rid of the material, but when you asked about it a second time, he shut down on you again and made a jibe about you putting conditions on the relationship. When you told him that you felt you were worth more, and wouldn’t stand for it in the relationship, he walked away, his last comment being, “This situation could be a gift.” You subscribe to nonviolence, so you suppress the urge to headbutt him. It is two days after your Stepfather’s funeral and seven days prior to Christmas Day.

What do you do?

I wondered at the time whether this predicament was on a par with the AIBU epithet espoused by indignant Mumsnetters; but something ached in my soul and seemed to say, “You put your hand up for this.”

I had. I had let it be known to the Universe that I was ready to tackle and move on from the paralysing chill that had run through me since childhood about Men.

Awful overhearings through the walls during childhood indicated, or so it seemed, that you must have one of these – no matter how despicable. As a woman, you were a vessel, a depository; you must make yourself look pretty and keep your mouth shut tight. You Must Have A Man or you had no self-worth, no value in the world.

I hated men; but I hated women more. They let men get away with it.

Having been some time in recovery for drink and drug addiction, I was cycling home from work as a fine-art decorator when men racing each other on stolen mopeds coincided with me in such a way as to result in an induced coma, a month in hospital and a life changed forever through a brain injury which was classified as “severe traumatic”. I still knew which day of the week it was and could tie my shoelaces; my coping mechanisms and some inhibitions were, however, largely absent in the first few years that followed.

People at the time judged and gossiped; I cycled everywhere and swore profusely; I self-harmed less severely because my nociceptors had changed after the brain injury. The agony between my ears, however, worsened as my brain settled over the year or two following the injury.

After my son was born the relationship between his father and I dragged on for almost a year, but finding out that I was pregnant had only postponed the inevitable; we weren’t getting on; the incompatibilities grew and roared more over time. When my son was nearly six I had decided, in a bid to rescue myself from chubby anonymity through isolation (my son has autism) and invisibility (no sense of self since brain-injury) by joining a local gym and, so far, hadn’t made much use of it.

The sex-addicted specimen whose dismissal begins this narrative had approached me through a mutual support group, and I was skinny and miserable, trying not to relapse into active bulimia. I needed a boost in self-esteem and along he came.

He seemed lovely and, indeed, I fell for the narrative that he had fallen on hard times due to other people’s efforts and excesses, and saw a certain nobility in his privileged-background-but-handyman-renting-houseboat circumstances. I soon found out that the junk that he called home was a dilapidated canal boat moored in a marina outside Staines, and was as squalid as his mind.

After he had gone, I experienced the most profound pain, and I was crippled by it for a while. It wasn’t until I tried to cancel the gym membership that the lesson began to show: I hadn’t been a member for a full year, and therefore couldn’t cancel for about three months. Driven to lose more weight and hate myself ‘well’ or less undesirable to myself, I set off and did classes.

Over time, I realised the lesson: that, unless I got some self-esteem, which is my job, these schmucks would keep appearing. I was sick of dating Piltdown Man in various incarnations since adolescence, and now I saw my way forward.

Exercising regularly enabled me to begin to eat with some impunity; though it was early days since active bulimia, calories began to cross over from being the enemy to being fuel. There was a certain spring in my step, and when a fitness coach in a local rec chatted me up, I took up Boxing lessons. This swelled my enthusiasm further and, together with cycling regularly, I was aware of a difference in my demeanour – a calm, confident jocularity had replaced the old self-loathing apologetic faltering.

I began to discover that endorphins can give me a sense of self that I had never hitherto imagined. Attempts to qualify as a fitness coach have been thwarted over the years by Local Authority incompetence to grant my son’s legal right to an education, and now the need to stay closely observant of the school since it changed ownership a year ago. However, the old specimen’s assertion, on leaving, that the situation might actually have been a gift turns out to be true.

Not that I will ever admit it to his face. I am grateful hardly to see him now. My life has changed so much.