Essays from The Shadows
Volume Two
There are many things I will overlook. There are things I will make allowances for. I don’t mind if we don’t share the same taste in music. I don’t insist that you have the same political views. It is not even necessary for you to speak the same language.
I do need you to be honest. To have integrity. To not say one thing and do another. I especially need you not to harm me. In fact, I insist on it.
I cannot continue to be in a relationship with anyone who is deceitful, or who operates out of a place of deceit. If your ego is more important than my safety or reputation, I would consider you no longer trustworthy.
If you refuse to see the bigger picture, Never consider context and insist you are right despite all evidence to the contrary. If you force me to behave in a certain way because you deem it correct.
If I spoke 90 thousand words to you and the only words you ever censored were the ones that gently took issue with you, then I think that tells me everything I need to know.
This is no longer a good relationship. This is not somewhere I should be. This has a culture that is no longer healthy for me. This makes me feel more abused than supported.
I choose to end this relationship.
This is not how I expect any friends of mine to behave. I choose to end it. I choose to walk away. That way, you can do me no more harm.
I have left the survivors site I belonged to.
I asked if I could help in any way. Make myself useful. Empty the bins, answer the phones, make the tea. I was asked if I would like to join the staff. After much thought, I said yes. I learnt my duties and carried them out as instructed.
I continued to be myself. I spent hours being supportive of other survivors. Listening to disclosure and hearing the hurt. The same person I had always been.
Someone took umbrage with my language and my refusal to defer to authority. I was terminated, effective immediately.
In that world, you are not allowed to question or debate with authority that can get you banned.
In that world, questioning authority could get you banned. Discussing authority could get you banned. Feeling things about authority could get you banned.
So I left.
Because, and this may surprise you to learn, as a survivor I am not especially comfortable with being judged, silenced, controlled or made to feel bad about myself.
I do not object to them firing me. It is for them to decide who represents them. We simply reached very different conclusions about what a healthy community should look like.
I still think the charges were, at best, trumped-up. I hate to use that phrase in the current climate, but there we are.
There is only one thing that hurt so deeply that I can no longer bear to be there. In their considered opinion I was unsuitable.
For a place that gave me so much validation that was an especially harsh word to hear.
Because the belonging to something is everything to a boy who had no home.
We are done.
Essays From The Shadows ~ Volume Three will be published in the autumn.