Work in Progress
Note: This post discusses sensitive topics.
Can you undo what has been done?
How do you fit new narratives where there wasn’t space before? Nothing seems to add up, and I’ve never been good with numbers.
Whenever I tried reading “All About Love: New Visions” by bell hooks, I got stuck.
…It was love’s absence that let me know how much love mattered…To this day I cannot remember when that feeling of being loved left me. I just know that one day I was no longer precious…Grief and sadness overwhelmed me. I did not know what I had done wrong. And nothing I tried made it right.
I was gobsmacked. This was just the first. page. Is everything I know about love a lie? And is this saying I don’t know what love is?
At school, I was a run-of-the-mill overachiever—hardworking, determined, and precociously goofy. But with West African parents to answer to at home, I remained obedient. Obedient is an understatement. I was a straight-up snitch. And I learned it at home.
I did what my parents wanted me to do at school, so no one worried about me at home. And I mean: no. one. worried. about. me. — what I liked, how I felt, what I wanted. All I knew was going to school, and church, and having no desires of my own.
None of the versions of myself could exist without each other, like Russian nesting dolls. I was undeniably the boisterous teenager laughing with classmates, but back at my house, I felt neglected. It became mine to internalize.
This set the perfect backdrop for entering a relationship with a covert abuser. I always knew something was radically wrong with my partnership. Constant contact, promises of marriage, and grandiose gifts within the early weeks made my stomach turn, but I wanted to believe this was the devotion he was telling me it was. For the first time, I felt chosen…until I didn’t. The person I once perceived disappeared slowly, but all at once. While in public, he praised me. Behind closed doors, the mask dissolved. I make little sense of the violence or how I reacted to the slow boil of coercive control. I didn’t introduce the cycle of abuse. He did, and it altered my brain chemistry until I became addicted to the pain and love bombing.
I remember it in exact detail, and yet I can’t recall the order it happened in, or if it happened in general. It’s been a year since I escaped and I am still holding the guilty shame of my reactions to abuse. But I have to move past this hurt and move it into something new. I accept it happened. And it happened to me. I’m learning to name the signs of this in others. I’m learning how to protect myself.
Embracing a love ethic means that we utilize all the dimensions of love—“care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect, and knowledge”—in our everyday lives. We can successfully do this only by cultivating awareness. Being aware enables us to critically examine our actions to see what is needed so that we can give care, be responsible, show respect, and indicate a willingness to learn. . . .
To me, a work in progress is actually deeply political. It is political to misstep, and continue to put one foot in front of the other instead of falling on the ground and complaining about that fall for the rest of your life.
Maya Angelou famously says, “I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.”
I know better. I’m doing better. I’m a work in progress.
Are you?