Lives in Hiding, Emotional Abuse, the Closet, and Other Concerns
By: Tima Loku
Tags: Relationships, LGBTQ, Mental Health, Women, Creative Non Fiction

The Reconnection

I was pleasantly surprised when Dinu decided to contact me again. I thought I had lost a friend for good but then here she was after five years, telling me that she was stupid and scared. Please forgive her.

Five years and many arguments after, her boyfriend had sat her down and told her she might be bisexual and finally gave her “permission” to talk to me.

As expected, after telling her of her sexual orientation, he also suggested a threesome to help her make sure that she’s bisexual.

So you stopped her from owning a part of her sexuality out of fear and then after many fights and disappointments told her it’s ok? Why did you need her to be 100% straight in the first place?

Why did you feel threatened by someone who lived at least a thousand miles away and only chatted with your girlfriend roughly once a month?

Why do you still casually joke and shame her for her attraction to women? Call her a lesbian and think it’s a derogatory term?

Can you even claim to love her?

The New Personality

As much as I was happy to reconnect with a “lost” friend, I was met with a changed version of the former friend.

The confusion our talk created was so much that I had to google signs of emotional abuse just to remind myself what it is. The details of our conversation went as below.

She tells me that he finally felt secure enough in her love for him.

My question is, what did she have to sacrifice to get there? The answer lies in her current state of being — it seems she had to break herself down to prove her devotion.

She tells me she has developed depression and an anxiety disorder. She has suicidal thoughts. She tells me she’s broken. She uses the identity of broken without question.



She tells me her boyfriend is amazing because he’s fixing her. Fixing? Broken? The friend I used to know did not speak this way about herself. Not even once.



If no hugely traumatic occurred in the past few years, then how could there be such a change in self-perception?

She asks me if I find her pretty. The person I used to know didn’t ask questions like “am I pretty?”. What kind of question is that? Maybe she should have asked these questions when she was supposed to be in her insecure adolescent phase.

She was similarly feeling unsure and lost about other aspects of her life.

What happened? Where did her self-esteem go?

In addition, she has developed a high emotional reactivity that wasn’t there before:

She was super quick to assume I don’t like her as a person anymore when I didn’t feed validating answers to all her insecure questions. She even imagined I hate her. She got a little angry, all in the span of one conversation. She showed jealousy over other people in my life, lacked boundaries, asked questions that are too familiar for someone who just reappeared in my life out of nowhere.

I could no longer recognize this person. She wasn’t like this before. Has she been emotionally abused? As far as I know, emotionally abused people tend to develop emotional instability as a result of the abuse.

Emotional abuse can even impact friendships because emotionally abused people often worry about how people truly see them and if they truly like them. — Sherry Gordon, Very Well Mind

Am I seeing things that are not there? I am sure that Dinu has changed but can I know for sure that there is something off about her relationship as well?

Is she suffering because of her boyfriend or are they suffering together because she can’t integrate the part of herself that likes other women into her current reality?

Then again, I remember that she wasn’t trying to disown her sexual attraction to women all those years prior to confiding in him.