Acts of Desperation

by Megan Nolan

Mediating your own victimhood is just part of being a woman. Using it or denying it, hating it or loving it, and all of these at once. Being a victim is boring for everyone involved. It is boring for me to present myself through experiences which are instrumentalised constantly as narrative devices in soap operas and tabloids. Is this why I am so ashamed of talking about certain events, or of finding them interesting? This is part of the horror of being hurt generically. Your experiences are so common that they become impossible to speak about in an interesting way.

That the pain was private made it better – I made them torture me, without their consent.

Many nights I spent doubled up on the bathroom floor. I didn’t lock myself in to protect myself from him. I did it when I had begged him to forgive me, answer me, acknowledge me, and he would not.

Inside me things were boiling and rupturing and sprouting, and twenty feet away he sat looking out the window, calmly smoking, with a book resting on his lap, an indefinite horizon of stillness, silence.

How lucky I have been that so much of my pain is from fearing the loss of what I already have, instead of suffering the absence entirely,

I hate my weakness, what I severed of myself and gave to him, but love it too, love it still. I do not take it back. I love the girl who did those things. I love the girl because I feel sorry for her, and understand her.