How does one measure their life?
Perhaps they measure it by the joys. Maybe they measure it by their career success. I’d wager some even measure their lives by their regrets. Misery loves company. Hurt people, hurt people.
I won’t lie, I’ve been a hurt person. I’d be running away from the truth if I said that I didn’t spend many years measuring my life by my traumas. My confusion, my hurt, my guilt, my regret — every time I’ve fucked up or been gaslit into thinking I wasn’t allowed to feel the way I did, those things lived in my head rent-free. When I was a pre-teen, they manifested the side of me I’ve spent a lifetime trying to push away. I was being bullied at school for having buck teeth and looking younger than my peers. I was smaller than most of them, too, an easy target to pick on. At home and in life, however, my biggest bully was always my father. At school, I was scrappy. A boy pushed me; I punched him. Girls baited me with catty one-liners and snarky comments; I snapped back. I was always borderline mute in the face of authority, though. My dad’s anger had conditioned me to learn when to shut the Hell up. At home, I was just the kid who sat quietly with tears streaming down my face as my father unleashed his rage onto his children, for a long time.
Every time I’ve fucked up or been gaslit into thinking I wasn’t allowed to feel the way I did, those things lived inside my head rent-free.
I was exhausted by the time I reached high school. I’d already figured out numerous ways of harming myself that wouldn’t get me caught by my mother — I promise you; she was vigilant. I was always relatively good at being elusive as a teenager, because her senses when I was lying to her face were eerily well-oiled. I was in counseling again by the time I turned fifteen, a two-year jump since the last time I’d seen someone. My dad left me at that point. The distance helped me grow more into myself and gave me more confidence to stand up to him. I became more confident at school, and I finally made progress into a long journey of learning emotional regulation. But the distance from my siblings emphasized my loneliness. My older brother was kicked out of the house when he was fifteen and went to live with my aunt — an aunt that I am dearly close with, but my father couldn’t stand. He spent a lot of my childhood trying to keep my siblings and I at arm’s length from the family members he didn’t like. His reasons were often petty, if not outright problematic and prejudiced, and his behavior was a vice grip of control as he struggled to shape his children into some convoluted version of himself.
My sister, two years my junior, was isolated from our family. Her access to communication with almost everybody was cut off. She was allowed to speak to me over the phone. After a year or two of her living away from Connecticut, she was allowed to Facebook message me — initially with supervised and timed access. Eventually, she was given her iPod and access to connect with her family freely again. She was given her first real phone at seventeen.
My little sister is one of my best friends. We are stepsisters by marriage, but sisters by heart. I also spent a lot of time covering for her ass when she was a teenager. I moved into my dad’s house when she was sixteen and I was eighteen. Ever the loyal big sister, we giggled together and talked shit about the boys from school that she was talking to. She told me about the drama with her friends. I never snitched to our parents about the fact that she always carried a lighter in her pocket or that she’d sit with the boys my dad hated right on the front porch when our parents weren’t home. There’s more, but those secrets aren’t mine to tell — suffice to say, my duties as an older sister called a lot. At eighteen, you know you shouldn’t technically lie for your younger siblings. But I also knew my siblings didn’t get the freedom to make choices in any capacity. Their entire childhood was being dictated, just like mine was. I watched my stepmother and father try to dictate all of our futures, as well.
It was a miracle my sister and I didn’t lash out worse, to be quite frank. We might have even been justified, the same way we were in our quiet resentment of our parents. We simply shared our chagrin together. We understood each other. It helped us hope for an escape.
My father and stepmother would disagree that my sister and I turned out fine. I think we are fine. We have our baggage and problems, but honestly? Who the fuck doesn’t? They certainly call the kettle black as they sit fit. I’m a stripper, my sister a teenage mom, my older brother… well, I can’t even speak as to what he’s up to. I only see him every few years, since he’s basically a recluse living in the deep South. We are, for all intents and purposes, fine, though. We will all admit we aren’t the most emotionally balanced — but we are all well intentioned adults that take accountability for our mistakes and are letting ourselves learn. As a person who dreams of being a parent one day, I can’t imagine having any other goals for my children — and I look forward to teaching them how to open up to their errors and to take advantage of the lessons offered in hard situations.
We have our baggage and problems, but honestly? Who the fuck doesn’t?
It took us a long time to get here, however. It’s not easy to step up to plate and say I fucked up. It isn’t easy to stare into the mirror and know you’re looking at a version of yourself that kills you inside, because you’re hurting other people instead of yourself. We did that though and that’s why I like to say something my mom used to tell me in middle school: I didn’t have to hate myself just because my dad couldn’t realize he had an exceptional child in me. Except, he doesn’t have just one. He has four really fucking amazing kids and I hope someday he’s learned enough in his own life to truly count that blessing.
When I say I spent so much time measuring my life in trauma, I mean it in the sense that I lived out my days recounting all of the times I wanted to die because my father made me feel like a blip in existence. I measured my life in the ways I’d been scared and hurt in my life, especially by the men who said they would protect me. It first led to me hurting myself — although I was prone to the occasional lash out or meltdown as a teenager. I was bipolar then, too, although it would be nine years until I learned that for myself. It would eventually all tie into the ways I could hurt others, however, without ever even lifting a finger.
My insecurities and uncertainties in myself led to me clinging to people, despite their attempts to shake me off or hurt my soul. My second ever serious boyfriend was an arduous piece of shit who abused me in ways I don’t like to repeat out loud, unless I am in the safe space of the people who care about me. That relationship eventually taught me to say fuck you to hurting myself or allowing myself to be someone else’s punching bag. I thought I was ready to take on the world after I fought that person to stay out of my life and won. I rushed into my next relationship and subsequent engagement with what I still consider to be one of the great loves of my young life.
My now ex-husband was a dream compared to the hell my ex-boyfriend put me through, at first. He spoiled me, bought me flowers, and spent hours having long conversations with me. He bought me my very first ever diamond jewelry — my engagement ring, a half-carat solitaire. In hindsight, both because I’ve worked in jewelry and because our marriage failed anyway, I feel bad to this day for how much he spent on that ring — it wasn’t worth nearly as much as he got nicked for. Back then, my ex-husband was a little more gullible. He’d admit it, too.
The first major red flag in our relationship was that we fundamentally disagreed on a lot of things. I’ll just come right out and say, I’m not even entirely sure what our game plan was when it came to handling those problems. He wanted our future children to go to Catholic school and be raised in the Church. I was adamantly against that, having been baptized as a non-denominational Christian at eighteen. He was fairly conservative and didn’t really believe that strongly in mental health. He was also raised very traditionally — while he lived a hard life that I cannot fathom, he was raised to believe men did the “hard” work while women did the housework. He also could not afford to live on his own, so we relied on my money for a while. Yet, he would come home and complain the house wasn’t clean and that my job wasn’t a real job, so the house should be clean. In his head, I spent my nights simply sitting pretty and flirting with random men all night. He discounted my stories of the sexual harassment and assault, as well as the hours I spent tirelessly perfecting my ability to pole dance.
He initially thought my job was sexy — he would come watch me dance and throw dollar bills onto my stage. He loved that he got jealous watching me lean towards other men at the stage, just to be the one who got to hold me in bed later and talk about life. When he was disallowed from coming to see me at my job by my manager, that ended. He has told me since then that he lashed out because of his concern over my safety at work and resentment rooted in the shame caused by jokes made by his coworkers in the military. I don’t know if that’s really the whole story, but I do know that he clearly was not expressing those things — and when he did, his anger was misplaced in me and my decision to keep my job, not at the people who wouldn’t allow me to safely or unabashedly do it.
His anger was misplaced in me and my decision to keep my job, not at the people who wouldn’t allow me to safely or unabashedly do it.
As someone who didn’t want to tolerate behavior I perceived as hurtful, I lashed out. I would “jokingly” slap him around the same way my dad would my brothers and cousins. I now realize that was a sad attempt at establishing some form of dominance over my relationship. It was a need to feel in control of the narrative and trajectory of the relationship in ways I didn’t have any say in before. Eventually when my ex’s drinking began to drive a bigger rift in our relationship, it came to a head. One night, as he hurled insults at me in front of every person we called friends, I hauled off and slapped him in the face. For a while I didn’t remember, I just remember being so blinded in rage and hatred because yet again, I felt failed, especially because his response was to use his 200-pound frame to shove my then 118-pound self hard against a brick wall. This time, I failed to see that it was both of us — two opposing fronts that only seemed to create clouds at best and hurricanes at worst. He was the one who quietly steeped in his resentment. I was the one who became bold and brash about it, not wanting to create another narrative where I ended up losing autonomy over my life and body, yet again.
Around 2019, he volunteered to deploy on a Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU). We married and things seemed okay for a few months following. Then one day, he began the conversation about my job again — except he wanted me to be done with it by the time he returned home from his seven-month deployment. He then gave me an ultimatum that I needed to sign a post-nuptial agreement, or he would annul our marriage. I signed the agreement, remembering the tears in my eyes flowing freely as I had walked back to the car to grab the ID I’d forgotten inside. I didn’t know why he was suddenly demanding this or why he felt so strongly about it that he decided to force my hand.
I was sad when he left for deployment initially. I was married to him and despite our toxicity, we did love each other very much. He’d hugged me tight and whispered sweet things into my hair, before pulling away to join his unit. I cried. I thought I needed him more than I really did. As the first month passed, I realized I was happier without him. After about three months of him being gone, we got into a fight during one of the few times we were able to speak to each other. He ended his argument with, “Emma, I’m used to being disappointed by you” and when I questioned him further, he simply blamed it on my job, as well as a host of other things he had never brought up, and then abruptly signed off.
That night, everything changed. I did something I spent the next four months regretting and trying to forget by ending my relationship and jumping into a carousel of partying and dating around. I was drunk and fucked up in a major way that night and instead of owning my fuck ups, I tried to shove them into a box in a deep dark corner where I could forget that I was capable of being an awful person, too. My ex-husband and I legally became separated and despite our half-assed attempt at fixing our relationship, we were still too busy trying to figure out how to find ourselves as individuals and it was impossible to find our relationship in the midst of all of that.
It’s been almost three years since we legally separated. I’ve learned so much in the past few years. I’ve spent so much time thinking about how I would do things differently.
All of the time I had to live with myself and by myself gave me time to think about who I was and who I wanted to be. I began to forgive instead of clinging to the traumas that shaped the trajectory of my life. I forgave myself, the hardest part. It’s easy to cover up and make excuses for your behavior. Forgiving yourself is a much more complex process because in order to forgive yourself, you have to allow yourself to understand the feelings behind taking accountability. I learned how to measure my life, not by what I thought I should measure it by, such as love or pain. I work tirelessly to remember I am not composed of my worst moments, and I am not a product of those that have hurt me. If I let myself fall into those patterns again, nobody would be objectifying me more than I would be myself. It would be the ultimate form of disrespecting myself.
I am not composed of my worst moments, and I am not a product of those that have hurt me.
How do I measure my life now?
I measure it in moments. My trauma still pushes the buttons inside my head that trigger moments of weakness. I don’t let it dictate who I am though. I won’t act like I don’t still fuck up. My fuck ups are smaller, now, more controlled, and I’m quicker to think on it and fundamentally understand where I screwed up. I’m grateful to be surrounded by people who are learning and growing in their own ways, who have the patience to help me understand perspective. Every moment is defined for me since I started healing myself.
My moments are not defined by productivity or a projected version of happiness and contentment. My moments are defined by how I choose to respond to the world around me. I take steps back and breath. I refocus my energy to the important things — listening and not being on edge. I’ve rewired my brain to understand that criticism is not worth being defensive over.
In order to forgive yourself, you have to allow yourself to understand the feelings behind taking accountability.
I am not perfect at these things. I don’t want to sit here writing to pat myself on the back like I’ve earned some sort of award for becoming a semi-balanced human being. I still lash out sometimes, but it is moments, not days, for me to truly understand I messed up and quickly own up to the bad moments before they fester and turn into an infection that kills the things that bring joy to my life. I am human; I am still very much capable of saying and doing hurtful things.
But when people say I’m setting a boundary or I can’t trust you to listen to me during these conversations, it sets me straight. It makes me remember that pushing those buttons, especially with people I care about and want to be the best I can be for, just makes me an asshole in that moment. Maybe not forever — but being an asshole for a minute is all it takes to ruin a good friendship for life.
I have had a mantra in my life and have watered it, tended to it, allowed it to take root in my head:
I cannot control the world around me; I only control my perception of it and my response to it.
A new mantra I’ve picked up though, especially in the last year is:
I can control my perspective of the world around me, but I cannot control others’.
I used to strive to always be right and argue until I was blue in the face. I still do, sometimes, but definitely not with the same rampant and uncontrolled vigor as I used to.
My life is now measured by moments because I learned how to take my perspective and fill the gaps with those of the people around me, without invalidating myself. I have learned I don’t need to make myself smaller to fit my ideas and sense of the world in with other peoples’. I also don’t need to make other peoples’ ideas and perspectives smaller to fit with mine — as long as we aren’t hurting each other in any way, our perspectives can fit together, just pieces of a greater puzzle to the confounding mystery that is life and human existence.
We are all people trying to learn how to be people at the end of the day. We learn from different things; we learn at different rates. Some people learn quickly, some never at all.
