Look Behind You

by Sibel Hodge

This is the life I’ve chosen, and sometimes you just have to put up with things, don’t you?

No one really knows someone else—not until they live with the person.

If I can feel pain, it means I’m still alive.

I stare at the sky and think about all the little things that add up, and before you know it, you’re stuck. Trapped. Your confidence and self-esteem have withered away, but the very person you want to get away from is the one you rely on most. And you don’t know when it happened. Can’t pinpoint an exact day, week, or month, because it’s a gradual, subtle process. It creeps up on you slowly. So slowly that you don’t realise you’re bending, breaking, and becoming a different person. A woman who’s not happy, not living her own life, but the life her husband wants instead.

Maybe it was because I loved him, even if things weren’t perfect. I tried to be what he wanted me to be, and the urge to please was like a cancerous disease ingrained deep in my soul. He wasn’t all bad either. We’d had plenty of times in between when he was loving and caring.

Why does anyone stay in a relationship that deep down they know isn’t right? You don’t know why until it happens to you. It’s easy to fool yourself. To stuff things under the surface where they can’t hurt you. To persuade yourself it’s all just normal. Make excuses. There’s a fine line between craziness and love.

If he’d been violent, maybe I would’ve left the first time he hit me. But he wasn’t. Unlike bruises and broken bones, it was something invisible.

No, I couldn’t really put a name to what he was. How do you sum it up in just one word? As I say, it’s just the little things. And a lot of pressure and time to get to the point where you finally blow.

eventually I stopped telling her stuff, which made me even lonelier. There was no point in moaning. She couldn’t change things; only I could, and I was obviously too weak to try.

So I hid it from her. From everyone—or so I thought. Because I’d always seen myself as a failure and didn’t want everyone to know I was failing at my marriage, too.

He never hit her, but who needs fists when words can slice through you like a scalpel? Physical wounds can heal, can’t they? But it takes a long time to recover from having your self-confidence and self-esteem crushed to nothing. I watched him smother the life right out of her, day by day.’

We didn’t have to walk round on eggshells all the time.

There was no more trying to anticipate his moods that controlled the whole family. I think my childhood really began the day we moved out.’

theory that given two possible answers for the same thing, the simpler one is usually correct.

how do you determine whether something is simple or not? It’s all subjective.

I don’t believe the idea that simplicity equals truth.’

I agree, because it’s just easier to go along with him.

‘Words and actions can bruise deeper than any fist. Scars aren’t always on the outside, are they?’

when you want something so much, it’s easy to lie to yourself.

But I couldn’t do it anymore. Existing but not living.