One is that I can live my life fearlessly. I still feel a little uncomfortable when I say that my relationship with my ex had been abusive. The problem, I guess, is that most of the abuses I dealt with in the course of our 13 years together were the covert and insidious kind. And that s why I feel a little funny about the whole thing. When I picture abuse, I still tend to think in terms of black eyes and arguments of the sort that make the neighbors call the police.
Domestic violence is the picture most people have.
People who experience those things, I tell myself, have really been abused. In fact, I considered the definition of abuse so unrelated to what I had actually experienced with my ex that more than six months passed after our breakup before the realization that I had been abused broke through. Some people never get it. This is not to say that I didn t know something was wrong all along. Much of the time I spent with my ex was invested in trying to figure out why he could be so mean and why I insisted that I loved him in spite of that.