With the topic of domestic violence running rampant in this country at the moment, I feel that it is my time to speak out on the matter. The timing of it is appropriate, given what is going on in my personal life. I have read opinions on both sides of the fence, and several accounts of those that have experienced violence at the hand of a spouse or significant other, only to stay trapped in a relationship that put them at risk. People that haven’t gone through these situations always seems to ask, “Why do they stay? Why not immediately leave or call the police?” Usually, the answer they get is the mask of deep underlying issues.

I don’t have an addictive personality. I don’t ever feel the need to perpetuate any sort of behavior over and over when it comes to substances such as alcohol or cigarettes. However, I will admit to something that I absolutely struggled with the past 4 years and that is inability to get myself away from damaging situations in terms of my relationships. I did what several other victims of domestic violence did; that being making the excuse of love, or unable to cope with the guilt and shame of being in a failed marriage. I didn’t want to get my spouse in trouble, which also comes up as a reason for staying. All of these things come together in the form of an addiction to a toxic relationship. I don’t know if I would go far enough to call it a disease like alcoholism but it definitely should be considered a social disorder, in my opinion. To this day, after I have learned horrible thing after horrible thing about my spouse’s actions to go along with the physical abuse I endured, I STILL find myself thinking fondly of her, worrying about her, wanting to take care of her…its a daily struggle. The peaks and valleys of this relationship have torn my heart apart. I feel better in terms of coping with the knowledge that this is the end, but I am one of the lucky ones that finally saw things clearly, found some self worth and courage, and decided to try and have a future instead of accepting this as being normal and acceptable.

The only time I ever had a chance to extract myself is when I made the decision to call the p0lice and go public with what had happened. Not so much to get help from others, but to hold myself accountable. Make myself look in the mirror and say this is not right and now the pressure is on me to get the hell out of here before something even worse happens. Well, something worse did happen and because I couldn’t pull the trigger and separate after this incident, I suffered tremendously and my daughter was exposed to my wife’s issues. Children will always love you, always accept what you tell them, and are incapable of defending themselves from adults that are out of control. I almost feel like being in these situations renders capable adults helpless to a child like state. I am so ashamed that I let my daughter see someone be violent towards her father. She must have been terrified. But, she still loved, still forgave, still processed what she saw and accepted the excuses we told her. Who was I trying to convince, me, or her?

I know anyone reading this that has been in an abusive relationship, whether it be physical or emotional, will understand how frustrating and hopeless it is to be treated like this by someone you are in love with. I always thought it would get better, that she would get professional help and counseling. I could never hit back because that was who I loved, and thought loved me. I could only try and shield myself. The worst time that my wife beat me, she destroyed several keepsakes from our wedding, hurled heavy photo frames straight through the wall, and destroyed furniture by smashing them over and over into a bed post, and grabbed my hair and demanded that I get punched in the face “like a man”. This all happened because she saw me going through her phone while she was cheating on me. The next day, I bought her a brand new car. I can’t count the times I found her talking to another “man” by looking at her phone, and just meekly crawling into bed with her and staring up at the ceiling to wonder what was wrong with me. Something really was wrong with me, but it wasn’t anything that I was doing towards her. It was my inability to get out of this situation, get help, realize I deserved better….This problem is almost hopeless until it gets to its breaking point. Don’t let yourself be what breaks first.

“To enjoy the things we ought, and to hate the things we ought, has the greatest bearing on excellence of character.”

A lot of people talk about hatred with contempt in their voice. Like they say its a wasted emotion, or that it consumes those that feel it to the point where they are useless to themselves and to those around them. In the society that I have grown up in, I suppose I hear this kind of assessment because of one simple fact: the majority of its population has never had a reason to truly hate another living being. I’m not referring to the brainwashed fanatics that grow up being spoon fed some bullshit rhetoric from their parents or religion. True hatred is not taught, it is learned. It occurs when you start to feel a spark deep inside yourself once someone has intentionally harmed you. That spark simmers and can eventually catch fire, causing you to act upon it by harming this other person right back. This is called revenge. Sometimes, it is absolutely justifiable. It is unnatural for a person to go out of their way to attempt to destroy another person. I would like to think these sort of pathetic individuals are a minority in this country. I hope that I am right.

I have come a long way in my battle with post traumatic stress disorder. Or whatever you would like to call it. I no longer wake up and immediately have my thoughts drift to this person that intentionally tried to ruin my life and ruin my family. That is a progress that I had long sought. It was horrible having those awful thoughts pop into my mind as soon as I opened my eyes. Most days, I was lucky to make it out of the shower in the mornings before the demons came back.

I beat them. And when they tried to come back recently, I faced my fears and fought back. I walk a fine line between my hatred and my tranquility. I have great hopes and excitement for my future, and sometimes I believe my greatest revenge against those that hurt me is by living a eventful and productive life. Then there are days when I think if the opportunity arose, I would give this person the beating they so justly deserve. Its a fine line, and I’m taking it day by day. I am getting a lot better though. Whatever you want to pinpoint as the reason, be it the breaking point, where I am at in my life now, or finally seeing that ray of hope peak through the gloom. I am better. I saw the signs yesterday, that normally would have been painful reminders, some horrible coincidence planted to revel in my misery. Instead I shrugged my shoulders, and walked towards my happiness.

You are my ray of sunshine, on a cloudy day.

We all have two lives. The second one starts when we realize we only have one.

I went on a run last night. When I started, there was a cloud cover over the entire sky, and there was a lot of chain lightening bolts shooting down. Maybe that should have been enough to deter me or at least make me pause to stop and think this over, but it didn’t. It began to lightly drizzle about a mile and a half in. By the time I got to mile 2, the deluge really began. It started pouring so heavy that I couldn’t see 50 feet in front of me. It somehow seemed to rain harder that last mile back to my house. It was so hot that day, that even being soaked to the skin with constant rain water didn’t make me feel cold or even chilled. It was actually a really invigorating feeling. Just through yourself through a curtain of rain, like a waterfall following you down the road.
I thought about things going on in my life and the decisions that are in front of me. They are hard ones. But they are mine alone to make. No one is going to come into my life and suddenly grant me clarity about what I have to do. To even look for that kind of way out, is to be a coward. When you start to strip away the layers of your choices, the things that certainly influence our decisions, you can finally focus on the task at hand. This task is all that matters, and there should be no strings attached to it, getting pulled by outside influences. Because then its not really your choice, it became someone else’s meddling. People look for easy ways out of things, and if no easy path presents itself, they do nothing. Status quo. That is what I thought about during my run, that wasn’t like any other run I have ever been on before.

Recognize your own worth and you won’t be drawn to people who don’t see it.

A really bad trait I realized about myself recently was that I glorified way too many things early in life. I put so many things and so many people and so many “ideas” of things on a pedestal that it led to some pretty unrealistic behaviors. This is not referring to dreams or goals, its more like not seeing things for what they really were. It also led to me not being satisfied in certain scenarios when I should have been a lot more patient. There is a lot to appreciate about almost any spot on the globe, and where you live and work every day is no different. Stare too long at a map and you start to lose site of what you see on your way to work every day. The same can be said about certain people. Don’t idolize people, give to them what they give to you. Walk hand in hand, don’t chase. Some really nice people won’t ever catch your eye if your mind is clouded by some fantasy. The future won’t have all the right doors open if you’re locked into some made up character from your past, praising people that never deserved it from you in the first place. I did this with the wrong people, and now looking back I realize some really nice friends fell through the cracks while I just walked on oblivious. I hope that I put the breaks on this kind of behavior and can see things clearly.

We were headed north from Edmonton, and had just decided to go to Yellowknife the night prior. It was after another night of sleeping in the car, this time in the parking lot of a Tim Hortons/random hotel. Literally it was like we pulled out my laptop and said “where do we want to go on the top of the world”. Some might say that’s reckless and random. I’ll call it freedom.
We saw a dead guy on the side of the road underneath a bison crossing sign, just north of the town of High Level on the Mackenzie Highway. He was just sprawled, head almost laying a few inches into the highway. We had seen some shady looking people recently, an infamous Machete lookalike, so we just called Canada’s version of 911 and got the fuck out of there. I’m sorry this person ended up like that on such a desolate stretch of road. That’s the only dead body I’ve ever seen.
At that point we had been to more of Canada than most Canadians. Looking at a map and seeing how far from Florida we were was something unfathomable. Like I couldn’t stare at it too long because it just didn’t seem real. This was the last drivable stretch of wilderness in North America and damn did it feel fresh and relieving to be on that road. None of my problems were on my mind and it felt good to be free.

It’s exactly a year since we drove up North. I just remember a mix of emotions as we headed up from the beach. I had taken a cup of sand and water from the gulf with the intent of dumping it into the Arctic Ocean. Kind of like dumping out my problems out into something so vast that none of them would matter anymore. I’ll say this: while I was on that voyage, none of those problems mattered. I didn’t think about any of them. No phone, no internet, no distractions. Just the road in front of me and all the time in the world to reflect on my life, without the pressure of everything that had gone wrong recently. Without this time away I doubt I could have figured out what I needed to do as a person and therefore handle things that had unfolded, and little to my knowledge at the time, get a whole lot worse. At least I was able to cast some existing ones into the cold void and come home with some answers.