I hope you're all doing well out there. It's been a busy couple weeks for me, namely due to work obligations as well as leisure time spent with my new friends from PFLAG. For today's post however, I wanted to open up about something that's been circling around in my head ever since checking out the latest DC animated series, My Adventures With Superman. That being, my own personal experience with an emotionally abusive and toxic relationship.
Now right off the bat, I wanna open with a disclaimer: I commend this series for taking the iconic characters of Clark Kent, Lois Lane, and Jimmy Olsen, and doing something new and interesting with them. These people feel like real human beings this time around, with refreshing new designs and sharp writing for all of them. The following post is in no way going to be bashing the series, because I personally find it to be a breath of fresh air and a welcomed addition to the DC animated lineup. It just so happens that the angle they took with Lois in particular has stirred up a ton of personally held trauma from my last relationship, and so I can't bear to watch the show in its entirety, but that is by no means the fault of the writers. If you haven't already, go and watch My Adventures With Superman if you're able. You won't regret it.
That being said, let's talk trauma. I mentioned this in my very first post on this blog, but between 2020 and 2023, I was in a long-distance relationship with a woman that I met on World of Warcraft. We had a lot in common, an uncanny amount of things in fact, ranging from fantasy to hidden object games. And for the first year of our relationship, it was idyllic! Though in hindsight, there were early warning signs that I was, at the time, much too naïve to pick up on. She had a habit of taking something I'd said, then drawing the incorrect meaning from it, usually in a negative way that I definitely did not intend. For those not in the know, this is a form of gaslighting, one of several that wound up manifesting in our relationship. The most prominent examples I can think of, drawing from my own experiences, are as follows:
I complained one day that customers at my job, that being Kroger, were crowding around me and taking product off my cart that I hadn't put out yet. Not only had my then-partner been keeping track of the number of times I complained about this exact thing, but she then proceeded to make it all about her by proclaiming that she saw nothing wrong with what the customers were doing, but that if it'd make me feel better, she'd simply wait patiently for retailer workers in her area to put out the product she wanted if it wasn't out yet. And that if they took too long, she'd go out searching for another store. That alarming escalation was all her doing, and it ended with her telling me to stop it because she "didn't mean to turn it into a whole thing".
She once sent me a "Goths In Ungothly Places" video, to which I responded by saying "you know your subculture is chill and doesn't take itself too seriously when you can make amazing content like this". To which she responded that this was a little mean of me to say, because "there's cool people in all subcultures". This having transpired roughly a week after we held an entire conversation about goth versus emo, where she took no issue with decrying the emo subculture as being sad and depressing for the sake of attention and self-pity, while praising goth as being mature and beautiful and deep.
She made frequent mention of all the places she wanted to show me in her home state of WA, all the plans she had for us when we'd finally meet up, and so on. Yet every time I tried to get an actual meeting going, there would always be some excuse as to why we couldn't. One day I excitedly suggested meeting up at a state between WA and GA, only for her to make a big drama spectacle about how heartbroken she was that I'd forgotten how we'd already talked about that very thing a while back, resulting in us getting absolutely nowhere with it. And yet she continued to hold those plans over my head, even going so far as to make extensive notes and records of them. Between our first meeting online and my eventual breakup with her, we never met once in person.
One time while in World of Warcraft, we were roleplaying as a pair of Forsaken priests. Her character asked mine about his relationship with fel (evil) magic, to which my character remarked that there was no place for healing magic in fel practice, therefore he did not practice it. She later had her character remark that mine had shown a disdain for people like her, because her character had been a fel practitioner in the past. This was not at all what my priest had said, yet that didn't stop her from acting like it was.
In January of 2021, our house was hit by a barrage of power surges which fried a lot of our devices, my computer's transformer included. This resulted in frequent crashes, to which my then-girlfriend jokingly remarked that I needed to be more careful of which porn sites I visited. I became instantly flustered and panicky as a result of past trauma regarding my parents' reaction to me looking at naked ladies, to which I explained my past with porn and how her remark upset me. For those who don't know, my helicopter parents punished me hard for my relatively tame search history, resulting in an association of sex with shame. The topic came up again over a year later during one of our Bob's Burgers streams, during which I elaborated upon my past with porn and sexuality - only for her to accuse me of lying before, saying that I'd claimed not to have watched any porn when I was younger because I was afraid to. That wasn't at all what I said but it resulted in drama that could so easily have been avoided in a healthier relationship.
In late 2022, after my ex had developed stomach ulcers as a result of way too much internal stress, I gently encouraged her to give therapy a try because she herself had admitted that her mother and I were the only people she had confided in for years. She was hesitant at first, saying she just needed to spend more time in nature to heal, and I did say at first that we'd do things her way in the beginning - but that I also wasn't sure what good that would do, since to me it felt like she was running away from her problems, which she did have a history of doing; burying her emotions and so forth. She responded by getting angry with me for "not having her back", agreeing to see a therapist only because I encouraged her to, and then made it my responsibility to explain exactly what she was seeing this therapist for, accusing me of thinking something was "wrong" with her that needed fixing. Contextually, I was just one of about five people around her that suggested she seek therapy for her troubles, including her own mother.
These are some of the most prominent examples of gaslighting and manipulation that I can think of, which occurred during that three-year span. But the thing that really struck me, and to better relate this to the depiction of Lois Lane in My Adventures, was the control tactics used by my ex as a result of her own trauma. December 17th, 2021 was the real turning point in our relationship; it was the day that Spider-Man: No Way Home was released in theaters, and I went on opening night. I was open and vocal with my then-partner about wanting to go, and she took no issue with it... until she later saw on my Facebook post immediately after seeing the movie, that the theater was packed. This caused her to accuse me of breaking a promise I'd made to her (that being, I'd keep safe from spreading COVID-19 in my house), proclaim that she couldn't trust me anymore, and that she'd leave it up to me to decide if we were going to break up or not. All of this, over me going to see a movie. Mind you, at this time I was fully vaccinated, kept my distance from the large crowds, sat in the middle of several empty seats toward the front during the film, washed my hands before heading home, and even wore a mask at the showing. All of this having transpired after she herself had encouraged me not to get vaccinated in the first place! And the real biting irony is that despite me going out to the movies, the Renaissance Festival, and other social outings, to date I have never once caught COVID-19. She, meanwhile, caught the virus several times, despite being much more strict with her own measures.
That incident, however, left a profoundly negative impact on me. I was so traumatized that whenever I wasn't working, I was holing myself up in the house, going out only to nature parks. This rather predictably resulted in deep depression, as anyone who knows me will tell you I'm a very extroverted and outgoing type of person. Eventually I brought all of this to my girlfriend's attention, and expressed how her reaction to my going out to the movies resulted in this behavior. Rather than empathizing or even attempting to understand my position, she responded by denying any responsibility for this situation and even shamed me for it. In her own words, "I'm hurt and resentful that you'd think of me like that. I thought you knew me better. All our in-jokes, all our stories, I thought you knew me better."
Cut to the present day, however, and things have changed drastically. It's been almost two months since I wrote my breakup letter to her, blocked her on everything, and moved on with my life, and I've felt positively weightless ever since. However, my recovery is still very much a work in progress, and often times I still find myself trying to rationalize that none of this was my fault and that I did the right thing by dumping her. This certainly wasn't helped by the angle that DC has taken with their new interpretation of Lois Lane, whose language toward Clark Kent upon deducing his true identity reminds me just a little too much of my ex's. I wanna reiterate, however, that I don't think this is a bad thing, or that Lois herself is a bad person or poorly written character. Quite the contrary, this version rocks! She's become so much more interesting than any past iteration of the character and I say, more power to DC for this bold new direction. But I ultimately can't bear to watch the show anymore, thanks not to the series' writing staff, but to the aforementioned trauma which inspired this post in the first place.
That having been said, if any of these horror stories remind you of someone you know, or even a situation that you yourself are in, I highly encourage you to seek a professional therapist. It may well be something much deeper and darker than you may realize in the moment. But you're stronger than you may think, and believe you me, you can persevere and overcome whatever it is you're going through. Much love,
~R.B.
Comments
Post a Comment