Thanks For The Flashback, Donald!

Some have called last night's debate "depressing".

It left me in too much shock to be depressed.  The last time I felt that way about an event in which I was not personally involved was on 11 September 2001.

Perhaps I will be depressed about it later.  That is, after living through the trauma I feel is coming over me.  

It started, I now realize, when Donald got just a little too close to Hillary.  That, in and of itself, was scary enough.  But the expression on his face:  Tell me it isn't that of a stalker!

That, and the way he paced around--and his body language and overall demeanor--practically spelled "abuser".

I know.  I was having flashbacks.  Everything gesture, every word of his, was a threat and would have been even if he hadn't thundered that he would put her in jail if he became President.

Abusers do that, a lot:  They make threats.  Just like Dominick threatened to destroy my life--and nearly did--after I told him I wanted no more to do with him.  I'm sure that if he reads this, he will threaten me again.  Or, perhaps, he won't even give me such a warning, and he will go ahead and do something to make my life hell.  As it is, I have recurring health problems as a result of his abuse and harassment. 

There was the e-mail in which he said that "living in a cardboard box will seem like paradise" unless I gave in to his demands.  And the one in which he bragged that he could tell everyone that I had sex with my students, and with children, and "everyone will believe it and not you because they know your (sic) a pervert" and a "completely worthless human being" who "did nothing to make my life better"

Funny that he was calling me a worthless pervert, and claiming I did nothing to enhance his life--before, and after, he begged me to stay with him.  And that he used to call me at all hours to complain about how people treated him, how they imputed all manner of sexual crimes to him, because of his sexuality--or, at least, the way they perceived it--after saying, the day before, that all I ever did "was listen" to him.  "Big deal!" he exclaimed.

Then when I brought him to court, he said the threats he made were "just talk" and "only words".  Hmm...How many abusers have said that?  "I didn't mean it," he whined.  But if he "didn't mean it", why did he?  Why did he say or do those things?  When I asked him that, he made more threats and claimed that I did worse, that other people did worse.  When, in another incident, I called him on his racism, he sent an e-mail to a bunch of people saying that he saw the white robe and hood in my closet the last time he was in my apartment.

Well, all right, Donald at least said "I apologize" before saying Bill did worse things and Hillary has hate in her heart and started the very lie (about Obama's birthplace) he spent years propagating.  That's more than Dominick ever did.  But both of them did the something else abusers are always doing:  blaming their own words and actions on the victim.  It's a clever way for perpetrators to portray themselves as victims without seeming to.

In short, The Donald is a petty, vicious bully, just like most abusers.  Just like Dominick.

Hey, Donald, thanks for the flashbacks.  I'm going to send you the bill from my therapist.  Oh, right:  You're going to make me pay for it.  Just like Dominick said I would pay.

I hear he's looking for a job.  Do you need anybody to help you on your campaign? Oh, right:  I caused him to be unemployed.  He couldn't have said it any better.

At least all he wanted to be was a cop.  Donald wants to be Abuser In Chief, I mean President.

Moving Through (And, Hopefully,Beyond) The Ruins

It was bound to happen, I guess.

A new friend of mine lives in the same neighborhood as Dominick.  On Saturday, I rode out there.  Really, unless I ride around the world and enter the back door (which is a temptation), there isn't another way to get there from my place.  Besides, if he could "pass through" my neighborhood and call to say, "I'm coming over now"--as he did several times before I took him to court--I can pass through his neighborhood if I'm minding my own business.

Anyway, you can probably guess what happened next.  I was a couple of blocks from the friend's house when a red SUV pulled up behind me.  A voice taunted me through the window, "Are you coming to visit me?"

Has he learned anything?  I could tell, just from the tone of his voice, that he is as arrogant, presumptuous, disrespectful and abusive as he ever was.  In other words, he's the same thug--coward--that he was when he slandered me to my employer, co-workers and other people, and when he called and texted me 11,518 times in two years after I said I didn't want him around me anymore.

After the things he did, there's simply no way I can have him anywhere near me.  Perhaps I'm supposed to be more forgiving, but I can't be.  I take that back:  I don't want to be.  He takes forgiveness, or anything that isn't retaliation, as a license to escalate his harassment and abuse. 

In short, I not only don't believe he's changed; I don't believe that he ever will change.  As long as he can continue living in the house in which he's lived since the day he was born, he'll have no reason to take responsibility for himself.  In his mind, no matter how he behaves, other people are wrong in the ways they respond to him.  Anyone who tries to hold him accountable for his words and actions is being "unfair"; anybody who tries more than once is an enemy who must be retaliated against.

In short, he hasn't grown up, and probably never will.  So, when he made his mock-invitation from his grandmother's van, I ignored him.  All I can do is to move through--and, hopefully, beyond--the wreckage he left in my life.

Escalation

It was one thing to impugn my gender identity and to say that Dr. Marci Bowers had created a "Frankenstein" right after the surgery she performed on me.  Children who don't get their way are always calling people--including the adults who deny them what they want--names.  

But it's something else entirely to make false accusations against someone. It's something else again when those accusations include racism against someone who works as an educator and sexual crimes against a transgender person.

Such was the way in which Dominick's attacks against me escalated.  When I saw him, for the last time, in the court, he whined that he "never would have said those things" if he "knew that it would lead to this."

By "this", he meant being in that court--not the damage he did to me.  That was when I realized I'd been entirely too forgiving of, and merciful toward, him.

All he cared about was the ways in which the exposure of his deeds and words would inconvenience him.  When he begged for me to "forgive" him, he wasn't looking for absolution or making--implicitly or explicitly--a pact to make amends and be a better person than he'd been.  Oh, no.  All he wanted was to be "let off the hook" and, as he said, to have the opportunity to live his life. After all, he said, he's young and has "a lot of years ahead".

So what was he telling me?  That my life was over?  (Perhaps it is.) That his life is more important or valuable than mine? (Some would see it that way.) Or was he finally expressing, if not admitting, the disrespect--if not outright contempt--he always had for me?

Actually, I realized that he respects no one.  He has the sense of entitlement that, when I first started teaching, I saw only in very wealthy kids.  When he makes a mistake--no, when he hurts someone--he thinks it's the obligation of the people around him to cover up for him, and to help him "move on".

Now, in spite of everything I've experienced, I don't believe that most people are born wicked.  At the same time, most people have to be taught morality of some sort.  Whatever sense of right and wrong I have, I learned from my parents, grandparents, teachers and other adults in my life when I was growing up. It's also been refined by some experiences I've had.

Dominick spent even more time in Catholic school than I did.  And, I guess, there had to have been at least one or two people who inculcated him with some sense of moral judgment. Even if his circumstances were--in spite or because of all the time he spent in Catholic school--more dysfunctional than mine were, I still don't understand how he can say that making false accusations and othewise lying about me, or anyone, simply because he was angry is right.

Then again, he is an abuser, a predator.  I don't know what made him--or whether he was indeed born--that way.  All I know is that he would lie, manipulate and make any attempt to destroy the life of someone who was even more vulnerable to stereotypes and judgments than he is.

I know this:  Whatever he was born or made, he is a bully and a thug.  His "apologies" the last time I saw him were nothing more than attempts to save his own culo.

That, after his abuse tore away at something I always valued:  the notion that I could help someone become trustworthy by trusting him, that I could teach him that someone was indeed willing to love, support and forgive him when he "lost it" or made a lapse in judgment.

The thing is, people like Dominick don't become better people when you love and forgive them.  They simply see another way they can "get over" on you, if you're lucky, or to bully and harass you if you aren't.

Sometimes I wish I'd been more of a bitch--or, at least, someone who doesn't take any shit--when I was with him. Then, he wouldn't have done a lot of what he'd done, mainly becuase the relationship wouldn't have lasted nearly as long as it did.

How I Fell Into It

Someone, I forget who, once said that you are truly in prison when you get used to it.  I could say something like that about being in an abusive relationship with someone who’s transphobic.

If you’ve been in an abusive relationship—or if you have spent time around people who’ve been in such relationships—you know that one reason why people stay with abusive partners is that the abuse starts to seem normal. Actually, the person suffering the abuse doesn’t see it as such, at least early in the relationship, because it comes in almost innocuous ways at first.  It starts with the put-down or other insensitive remark that its target forgives or simply allows to go by.  The thing is, the first abusive remark or gesture doesn’t seem that much, if at all, worse than what the abused person has experienced before.

So, when someone says that if you break up with him, you’ll never find anyone else—or will find someone like him, only worse—because you’re too old, fat or ugly or trans, it’s not that much worse than what you’ve heard from other people.  In fact, you might—as I did—have already believed such things, at least subconsciously.  At least, that is what I felt when Dominick told me those things early in our relationship.  I let those remarks go, in part because he is a good bit younger than I am and, as I noticed, not particularly mature for his age.  Plus, he came from a family whose members always said mean and insulting things to each other “in the heat of the moment” or when they were “letting off steam”.

Also, because he is younger—and much better-looking than I expected from my first relationship in my life as a woman, which I began in middle age—I took it as a sign that, yes, I could “succeed” as a woman.  When I began my transition, I met some really scary—and sorry—males.  They saw me as a “chick with a dick” and imputed all sorts of sexual perversions to me.  They believed that I would do, and submit to, all sorts of things they would never demand of “the girl next door” or their boyfriends.  Also—I realized this almost immediately—some of them were trying not to admit to themselves that they were gay, or that they weren’t.

 

Dominick was somewhat akin to them in that he didn’t want to deal with his own life, and his true desires, on their own terms.  Sometimes he would claim to be bisexual, other times gay, depending on what would work best for the occasion.  When I first knew him, he wanted me to “stick” him.  I politely explained that I couldn’t get an erection unless I stopped taking hormones for a few months.  (At that point, I’d been taking them for almost two years.)  When he realized that I wasn’t going to do that, he used to find things he needed a “he-man” or “alpha male” to help him with and make a point of telling people we met that I was a man who was taking hormones.

What I didn’t realize—or, actually, want to admit to myself—was that he’d never given up the dream that one night I would meet him somewhere for dinner (which I would pay for, of course) and announce that I was going to revert to my old name and life and support him in style.  I realized that as the time drew near for my surgery.  When I first scheduled it, he voiced support and even promised to accompany me to it.  But, he found other commitments, other things that had to be done.  For example, the house in which he’d lived his entire life, and looked as if it had never been remodeled in the sixty years it had been in his family, simply had to be redone.  That meant, of course, that he would have to work during the summer.  (He was a special education paraprofessional.)  All right, I said, do what you need to do.

When the summer session ended that August, I was home, recuperating from my surgery.  Millie, who lived across the street from me, stopped by every day and Tami, who lived up the street, came by a couple of times a week.  They bought groceries, helped me with my laundry, changed cat litter and did other things that my inability to lift prevented me from doing.  They even made a few meals for me.

Where was Dominick?  In Aruba.  He “needed” the vacation, he insisted.

Oh--did I mention that the last time I went to his house before my surgery, he blew smoke in my face?  Whenever I talked to him about his two-pack-a-day habit, he took it as an affront.  Now, I must say that he didn’t smoke in my apartment:  I explained that my landlady, who had young children, lived directly above me and one of the conditions of my renting the apartment was that nobody smoked while in it.  But, when I was at his house, he asserted his “right”—which, of course, he had—to puff away.  “My grandmother’s been smoking all of her life,” he’d insist.  So was everyone else in his family.  But, I insisted, if he had any respect for me as a person, he wouldn’t smoke in my presence.  I could just as well have asked him to give up sex with men.

I told him I didn’t want to see or hear from him anymore.  Then I stopped returning his calls and e-mails.  I figured he would get tired of that, as he gives up on almost anything that requires any effort on his part.  But, somehow, he found the energy to escalate his abuse and harassment.  He started leaving “tranny” jokes and the frankly transphobic dialogue from South Park on my voice mail.  After I didn’t respond, he left messages, e-mails and comments on this blog from phone numbers and addresses that weren’t his own and couldn’t be traced.  The early ones said that I’m not a woman and was trying to avoid the “fact” that I’m a gay man.  At least, those accusations were ridiculous:  He said my Adam’s Apple (which I’ve never had) or some other thing gave me away. 

I igonored his voice messages and e-mails and didn’t publish his comments.  Now, after a few months of being ignored, most people would get the message.  But, in this sense, Dominick wasn’t most people:  The more I ignored him, the more he escalated his harassment.  And the harassment turned into stalking, threats and false rumors and other lies about me. When he couldn’t find a more pointed insult or more creative way to bother me, he’d leave simply yell, “Fuckin’ bitch” into my voice-mail—from some number that couldn’t be traced, of course.

Now, you might think that his words and actions were inconsequential, as he didn’t resort to any physical violence.  I understand; that is what I thought—or, at least, told myself.  But he found other ways to escalate his verbal and psychological abuse, and it’s cost me in a lot of different ways.  I’ll talk more about those things in a future post.

Where The Serenity Prayer Falls Short

By now, most people--including those who have neither set foot in a twelve-step meeting nor know anyone who has--know some version of the Serenity Prayer:


"God, grant me the serenity to acccept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."


What most people don't realize is that Bill W didn't write it.  Instead, it is a somewhat revised form of Reinhold Niebuhr's prayer.  And more than a few people claim that he got the idea for the prayer, if not the prayer itself, from other theologians such as St. Thomas Aquinas.


But I digress.  I do indeed try to change what I can.  And I am not trying as much to change what I can't, at least when it comes to relationships with people.  For example, I haven't quite given up hope that some people who no longer want to be part of my life will change their minds, but I have accepted that they may not.  And there are some whom I simply don't care to include in my life again. That's where the complications begin.


Of course, if neither they nor I want to be part of each other's lives, there's no problem.   But it's not so easy when you don't want someone in your life, but that person does (or will) not accept that.  What, exactly, does one do--legally, and without physical violence--to rid one's self of someone who, to put it bluntly, will not go away.


It's not as cute and charming as it seems.  The reason I don't want that person in my life is that including that person would mean succumbing to the coercion and threats I've experienced for saying "no."  Plus, this person has caused me harm, not to mention such inconveniences as having to find another job and place to live.  The police have told me, in essence, there's nothing they can do (translation: they don't want to be bothered) unless that person kills or maims me.


So...Am I supposed to be serene and accept this person into my life?