An attack followed up with complete capitulation. In these two meetings the template for our “relationship”—for lack of a better word—had been defined. My “mentor” had me in his grasp, he was never going to let go, and I knew it.
BY NO MEANS was it an everyday thing—in fact, far from it.
Although he said he tried, Graham never managed to arrange things so that he was my hockey coach and thus was denied the opportunity to control me every day. Since there was no reason for the two of us to ever be seen together, Graham had to pull on different strings to abuse me. Sure, we had the cover of training sessions and general mentoring, but that was still somewhat unusual and would be better kept secret. It would always be easier to hide what was going on if nobody ever saw us together anywhere except at the hockey rink. Secrecy was the key, and he hammered that home to me time and time again.
Oddly, this made it easier for him to control me. I was a teenager questioning who I was, I was sexually confused, and he had become the most important person in my life, my mentor, the only person I could talk to about the things that were important to me. At the same time, I feared that our secret would be discovered, meaning that I had to comply with his every wish. The daily distance between us made things worse for a very simple reason: the easiest way for him to control me was to withhold from me the thing that I now needed most—him.
I was trapped. I wanted to run away from him and never see him again. Yet, at the same time, he was the one thing in life that I needed the most in the face of personal crisis—his support, his mentoring, his interest, his understanding. In the bizarre world of abuse, I couldn’t get away from my abuser because he had positioned himself as my one and only savior. I wanted to run away from him so badly, but the only place I wanted to run to was right back to him. So all I ended up doing was running in place.
Get away from him. Run away, now! This isn’t you, this isn’t who you are. You’re a boy, a young man, with so much ahead of you. You don’t need him. This will all just go away. Just stop this, stop it now. You can do this.
Except he knows who I really am. He knows I need this. He knows the real me. He is just like me and can see right through me. He isn’t making me do anything, I am. He can help you. He’s making me a better me, a stronger me. He’s showing me who I really am. Stop hating him, he’s helping you.
It was so hard, so mentally and physically exhausting, so futile. It yielded nothing but more pain and weakness as over time both my body and my mind became worn down from the struggle between the need to escape and the need to be with him. All that all you can do is stop, breathless, in exactly the same place you started.
I found myself desperate for his ongoing understanding and approval, all the time not knowing what was going on at his end. I frantically asked myself: What is he doing? Is he helping anybody else? Is he still helping me? Am I still his chosen one? Those were the days before cell phones, email, texts, even answering machines in homes, so absent direct contact, there was no contact. The isolation from him in the midst of my isolation from everything else while living in his reality was unbearable.
Because we met infrequently (usually after several weeks, a month maybe, sometimes more frequently, sometimes less so, as when he went away in the summer), there was a certain level of anticipation and excitement about reconnecting, discussing current events, hearing about what he’d been doing for me and what new insights he might have into positional goaltending. He knew exactly how to play me. At the same time, while always hoping that the next time would be different, I also knew deep down what was expected of me.
I rationalized everything by choosing to see Graham as he wanted me to see him: a lonely man looking out for my interests who just happened to be gay, a man who needed me as much as I needed him. I convinced myself that Graham must have been torn up inside and that he would never do anything to hurt me, that any pain I was in was just because I was selfish, that he needed support, that he needed love, that I needed to give love back to him.
“You’re a very special young man. You mean so much to me. I see so much of me in you.”
All the while, I had to carry on in the outside world as if nothing was happening. I sat in an English class covering the major themes in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment while my teacher, Harry Pauls, compared Raskolnikov to the Übermensch in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He joked to our class that a Nietzschean society of supermen “would look like a group of perfect Gilhoolys.” I smiled and looked down, knowing, unlike the rest of them, the opposite to be true and that Socrates’ statement at his own trial, that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” could be turned on its head to mean far more to me than it ever could to Raskolnikov.
The longer the abuse went on, the more difficult it became, because I knew that if our secret ever got out I would have nowhere to go, nobody to turn to. My inner dialogue became oppressive as I would constantly debate with myself, negotiate with myself, justify myself.
A one-off experience with him might be understandable to others as something he forced on me, but then again who would believe me? A longer-term series of meetings where it happened again and again and again? First, nobody would ever believe that a longer-term series of meetings hadn’t been consensual. Second, do I even know whether or not it’s consensual? Who am I?
Beyond that, it was a different time, a less enlightened time, a time before “not that there’s anything wrong with that” was in the cultural lexicon and understood by the masses. I was, to my deep personal regret, afraid of the stigma of being gay that I would have faced had I been “outed” for my relationship with him. I feared being caught, being labeled as something I didn’t think I was—but didn’t know for sure. I feared being seen as something that at the time was seen by many uninformed people (including me) as bad or wrong. I was afraid my dreams would evaporate if my secret got out, that anybody who knew me would shun me, that I would be isolated even by those who were, though not close, still very much a part of my life.
Of course I should end it with him, right? But where would that leave me? Where would telling somebody about Graham leave me? More alone than ever before, that’s where. More dependent on him than ever before.
The only viable alternatives that I could see to consenting to what Graham wanted were ones that further isolated me and that would take me back not to where I had been before I met him, but to a place far behind that, a place with no future, no dreams, no support, a place where I would be all alone, misunderstood, and lost. I wanted out, but at the same time I needed him more than ever. Graham’s genius was identifying me as somebody who could be trapped. He knew that I would comply with his wishes because he had left me with no options, and he knew his secret would be safe with me because he understood how isolated I was and how dependent on him I had become.
But a victim doesn’t just comply and leave things at that. A victim still knows there is something wrong going on. So, if I couldn’t confront my abuser, there was only one other logical target to go after—the person I thought was truly responsible for everything that was happening. I went after myself.
CLINICALLY STATED, I “acted out,” “exhibited anti-social behavior,” “self-harmed.” These words and phrases, which we read so often, all try to set out in a neat and tidy fashion what it is we victims do. But they don’t begin to describe what actually goes on and what we do to confirm our pain, our guilt, our lack of any sense of self-worth.
Graham controlled me and my body. So I fought back in a bizarre battle of me against me, a battle that in winning I lost and in losing I lost even more.
He loves my feet. So I’m going to rip out my toenails. That’ll show him. He abuses me, but what he does to my body makes me react physically. I hate that I feel pleasure, so I’m going to punish myself for feeling good. I’m not good. I deserve to fail. I will fail. I’ll fail at school, at sports, at relationships, at everything. Nothing matters.
He controls me. I’m going to inflict
intense pain on myself, pain that shows I’m in control of what I feel.
He’s attracted to me. I’ll gorge myself and get so fat so he won’t want to touch me again, nobody will want to touch me. Nobody will want me. Nobody will hurt me again. I’ll be safe.
And so on.
The world looks a bit different in the midst of abuse. Things that used to seem important to me didn’t seem so important anymore. And as I increasingly realized what was going on in our “relationship,” I figured out that I was able to attack myself out of self-hatred while at the same time attacking him indirectly by diminishing what he had come to love.
Well, to say that “I figured out” anything is to overstate how it happened. It just happened, a natural reaction to an unnatural set of circumstances.
I LAY IN bed one night, unable to sleep, tossing and turning, thinking about “it,” what was going on, what I could possibly do next, wondering whether or not I was gay. I told myself that I wasn’t, that my constant crush on Diane Mohr ever since I’d met her in Grade Four pretty much confirmed that. Still, I really didn’t have all the answers.
Maybe I am? Of course I’m not. How do you tell? He says I am. What if I am? What would I do? If he thinks I am, other people must think so too. Do other people think that? Do they know something I don’t? If I am, what will people say? But I’m not. So why I am doing this? Why do I respond to him? Why does my body like this? But I don’t like this. Maybe I do? How do I know? How can… Stop!
Except you can’t turn off your brain.
But you can focus it on something else.
I reached down and started rubbing my feet. Just like he did, except I was grabbing at them hard, with my fingernails scratching, pulling the skin back tight against the toes, then against the heels. I grabbed at the skin on the top of my feet, drawing my fingertips as close together as possible, making a fist, stretching the skin as tight as possible. Pain. Over and over again I dug my fingernails deeper and deeper into the skin. More pain. I grabbed my big toes, right hand on right foot, left hand on left foot, and scraped the tops of them with my thumbnails, my fingers grabbing the thickened pads. I worked my thumbs into the nails of my toes, into the nail beds. I ripped away as much of the nails as I could, deep into the skin. Still more pain. But compared with the thoughts that just minutes earlier had been racing through my mind, this was pure bliss. Those thoughts were now gone, nowhere to be found. All I could think of, all I could focus on, was the intense pain, my fingernails digging into my own skin, my own blood flowing onto my bedsheets.
I closed my eyes and fell into the pain. I was free. I could sleep.
THAT MAKES PERFECT sense when you’re living in a world of abuse. And when I lived in a world where something like that makes sense, how could I ever believe I was worth anything?
I thought I was crazy for hurting myself. It scared me to know that I could do that. But at the same time, I knew, I absolutely knew, that all of this made sense at some level, that I was doing whatever I could to make something mine, to take my life back as much as possible in the midst of the carnage, in the midst of him controlling me and my body.
MY WEIGHT BENCH, dumbbells, and barbell were set up in the basement just outside my bedroom. Down there, I was alone in my own world. I was no longer a pudgy young kid, but a strong athlete playing a number of sports. That transition had taken place in large part because of those weights my parents had bought for us and that I knew they couldn’t really afford. That transition to strong athlete had been hard fought, something nobody had seen as I worked all alone in my own little world. That transition was so very short-lived that it was over almost as soon as it had taken place, before many people had even noticed.
At first, I kept working out in my basement. It was a safe place, a place I could retreat to. Initially I thought of making myself huge, a force nobody could ever overcome. But at the same time, I wondered, what was the point? All getting in shape had ever done for me was get me into this mess. I was already big enough, strong enough, that he posed no physical threat to me. I could already easily overcome him, yet I was still with him. This wasn’t about strength. All I was doing was making myself into something more attractive to him, to others. I didn’t want him to find me attractive, and I wanted the rest of the world to see me for the fraud I was. I didn’t deserve to have anybody respect anything about me.
Why was I doing this? Why was I working so hard? It made no sense to me. One day, I was lying on my back on my weight bench, sweating, in the middle of a set of chest flies, arms extended out to the side, a dumbbell in each hand. Why? I put the left dumbbell down on the ground. I set the right dumbbell on my chest. I put both hands on the single dumbbell and extended my arms directly toward the ceiling. Then I let go, dropping the dumbbell onto my chest, ribs, and upper abs.
Pain. Intense pain. Nothing but pain. Nothing.
I deserved this pain for what I was doing. I loved the pain for releasing me from my thoughts. All I could think of was pain.
It was perfect.
SELF-HARM. SELF-ABUSE. A lack of self-worth. A belief that I was a fraud, that I didn’t deserve success. Sometimes the thoughts just didn’t go away. Some nights I couldn’t sleep because I knew I deserved to die but was too chicken to kill myself. I was ready for those nights. I kept a bottle of something stashed in a secret place, above the basement ceiling tile next to the light. One sip tastes awful, two not so bad, and by three or four I was already losing focus about what it was I was worrying about. I liked not worrying about things. Soon the only thing to worry about was remembering to hide the bottle before I passed out.
Still, when that wasn’t possible because there was nothing around to drink, or if I just feared the headache that came whenever I drank, I would dig. It was always much more satisfying to dig into myself. Because he liked my feet, they were my preferred place to go to, and the blood that came out pulsed with my heartbeat. I had very good circulation.
Digging is the entry drug to cutting. I eventually got there too.
THE ALARM GOES off in the morning.
It’s the start of a day like any other day, just some random weekday for a seemingly normal high school kid who came home from school the day before with some homework to finish and then a hockey practice to attend. Today is a new day. Carpe diem.
Maybe I was lucky and had a fitful sleep. Or maybe instead the nightmares about him were too much and I couldn’t fall back asleep after waking in the middle of the night drenched in sweat, heart pounding, images of him on me, laughing at me, inviting others from our hockey world to follow him on me. Maybe my head is pounding with an intense headache from the constant crying ever since I awoke, crying that I muffled in my pillows, in my bedsheets. Maybe my head is buzzing from the rum or rye whisky or whatever else I could raid from my parents’ supply and hide above the tile of my basement ceiling and then guzzle in the middle of the night without anybody knowing. Or maybe my body is sore because, without realizing it, I have been mindlessly picking my skin open and ripping little bits of flesh from myself as I try to find anything to take me away from the horrible feelings arising from my nightmares.
Whatever kind of night it has been, all I can hear now is that alarm going off, and with that the inner dialogue begins. I know that it’s curtain call, time to start acting, to carry on as if none of this is happening. I know that I have to get up and take my place in the world. I can’t let anybody see that I am weak, that I am a loser, that I am a complete failure, an utter fraud.
But deep down, the only thing I can think of is that it’s all just a complete waste. All of that work to get into shape and excel physically? All of that academic achievement? That kind, gentle, polite personality? All of that just made me attractive to him. All that did was make me unsafe. All that did was put me front and center and right into his sights. I will never make that mistake again. I know there is safety in being anonymous, in being unattractive, in being undesirable.
In fact, what’s the point
in getting out of bed? I’m safe here, nobody can hurt me here, nobody can get at me. Besides, it’s a world where people like him not only exist but also flourish, where people like him hold important positions, where they are respected in the community and have people supporting them while I am crying myself to sleep alone in my basement bedroom. What kind of world is that? Why would I want to live in that world? What kind of life is that to live among him and people like him?
But I’m lucky. I somehow realize that not every day is going to be one of those dark days when everything looks bleak. I remind myself that I still have good days when I believe that anything is achievable, when I absolutely know in my heart that life does have meaning, that there is more to life than him, that I am still me no matter what else might be going on. I make myself remember who I really am and remind myself of my drive for life, for hard work, for success, for kindness, and for laughter.
All of this fight, the daily battle with myself inside my head, just to get out of bed. It’s a lot for a high school kid to deal with.
Sometimes I wish that the alarm had never gone off, that I could just go back to sleep, nightmares be damned, because going through all of that effort just to get out of bed doesn’t seem possible or even worth it. So I choose revisiting the demons in the dark over fighting just to take my first step into the unknown day ahead. But that’s not even close to the worst. No, when it’s really bad, I wish that I had never awakened in the first place, that I could have just fallen into a deep and never-ending sleep so I would never have to face another minute of hell on earth.
But today I hear the alarm. Suck it up, buttercup, and get moving.
Carpe diem indeed.
I HAD ENOUGH self-awareness that I came to understand that my secret meant my life was going to be a battle between wanting to run and needing to stay. But I didn’t understand what that would do to me. And because what was going on was a secret, my secret, our secret, no one knew what was behind my self-destructive behavior and odd actions. Why wasn’t I the engaged student I had once been? Why was I regressing as an athlete, no longer putting in the extra work that had once transformed me? Why was I always tired and moody? Why was I always wearing long sleeves and not showering with the team after practices and games? Why was I increasingly funny, loud, and disruptive at school? Yet because teens are not known for their stability of character, it was easy for me to get lost in the crowd of the angst-ridden.
I Am Nobody Page 7
