Months before the day I actually moved forward with taking my life back, I would daydream as I would drive. The daydreams would kick in as I passed by apartment complexes.
Could I find one for me and the kids? Could I afford it? Would we be okay there? Will that one work? Is it too far? Is that one close enough to their school? Their friends? The only life they’ve ever known?
This went on for months. Every drive, wondering. Every drive, because we have an abundance of apartment complexes. And every drive, because things were not getting better. If anything, they were spiraling downward.
They spiraled until they detonated.
Those daydreams were moments of promise in what had become a very chaotic state. The chaos gave me no room to think. Because my head was filled with the insanity of my abuser, the survival mode I was constantly in and the tasks that every adult and parent needs to click off.
I needed space but I didn’t know it yet. Once I got it, it was the single most important gift the universe ever gave me — even though I didn’t realize its importance beforehand.
Space, from my abuser, allowed me to think. To realize what I had been accepting. To digest the insanity and flush it out of my environment (I actually sprayed the entire house with orange oil and burned a little sage).
The space was more important than any statistic, any piece of advice or any offer of support from anyone because it was this new, free frontier that had always been so clogged with chaos — a phenomenon I described previously.
What I’m trying to say here, and maybe too delicately, is that even the best advice from loved ones and friends and experts fell to my side. Even knowing, in an academic way, what was happening didn’t move me. Understanding and accepting a situation you never asked to be in is something that takes time. It’s not a switch.
Even when I got the space I needed, I didn’t immediately know I had made the right decision. I had to settle into that space and allow it to surround me.
Why is this so important? Because it might help the people on the outside, the spectators to abuse, to better understand how to approach or what to provide a survivor.
Space.
To talk.
To think.
To figure things out.
To learn.
To grow.
To discover.
To unpack.
To cry.
To rage.
To heal.
To recognize progress.
Every one of those things will be new experiences to someone leaving an abusive relationship. Space is freeing. And freedom feels different, even if the actual event has been experienced previously.
Like, of course a survivor has cried before. But, they’ve never had the space to cry like they need to. They’ve talked before, but not with the words or thoughts they’ve been waiting to use. It’s why any separation from an abuser is valuable, recognizing that leaving may come in baby steps instead of a sprint.
A survivor has been crowded, for some time, in a way that someone can only understand if they’ve survived it.
Any space created between a survivor and abuser gives that survivor precious space between the ears. If they start there, embracing this new foreign space, they may soon be able to make “the leave” and embrace a greater space on their own.
A safe space. It takes some getting used to.