30 April 2021
Prompt: Write what you’ve been putting off.
I made this work in February 2021 as part of my Storytelling Lab course. I had no plan for it, I just drew it haphazardly in 45 minutes, crying most of the time. I’d put it off to the last minute out of dread.
The prompt had been: create a graphic novel about your pandemic experience. My stomach sank when I read it. Mine had been amazing until it suddenly really wasn’t. The person who I thought I was building something with, who I was spending every day with, and who was asking me to make certain, increasingly quite troubling sacrifices, in the name of his family, ended our relationship by turning up at my apartment unannounced to demand his keys back. 2 weeks before Christmas.
He refused to talk to me inside: instead he screamed at me in the street that it was over, that he could never trust me again, that our lives were on different paths. ‘Take care’. Months spent in each others’ pockets (through a pandemic), and it was over in 5, maybe 7, brutal minutes. I never heard from him again.
I don’t mean to sound flippant when I say the whole experience was traumatic. I know many people have suffered much, much worse. In the days and weeks after though, I thought maybe I was insane. There was more than one point when I asked myself if I was having a breakdown.
It wasn’t so much losing him from my life – I can see I had a lucky escape. It took a while to see that though. And this tough a break up doesn’t negate the good times we had together – I can still say that I don’t regret the relationship. But it was the loss of my voice, the loss of my side of the story, the loss of any sense of ‘justice’, the loss of my confidence that I hard worked so hard to build that I felt – and still often feel – so deeply.
I felt angry that I told him things that are hard for me to share. Things he used against me, even in the way in which he chose to break up with me. I felt angry that I too had made mistakes, the words that he’d said weighed on my mind: ‘You’ve betrayed my trust. I can never trust you again. I have nothing to hide’ (I had never suggested he did). I felt angry that, even though my intuition was ringing loudly in my ears the last 6 weeks of our relationship, that I had never confronted him. Often I was angrier with myself than I was with him.
I felt angry that he fell back onto the ‘crazy woman’ trope that so many are prone to: ‘Are you going to give me my keys, or make me have to change my locks?’ I really thought he was better than that. And then to deny me any conversation. It made me feel like I deserved everything that was happening. At the time I really thought that I did. Now I can see more clearly.
The few people I showed this comic to told me I should share it publicly – post it somewhere, but I was too scared. But, as time moved on, I started to feel angry that I was quiet all the time, that I had lost my voice. I had to accept that there were things that happened in my relationship that I should have been louder about, angrier about at the time. Why did I find it so easy to give up my voice?
I didn’t want to write this either. Part of me thinks… you’re just showing your hand, that you still hurt, that you still care, almost 5 months later. It’s embarrassing that I do. I know that he won’t be thinking of me. Despite this, I’m also really scared that he will somehow find it and judge me for it the way I judge myself.
But the other part suddenly feels compelled to write out my feelings, and put it down in black and white. I’ve never felt such compulsion to write something so personal before. Not for him, not for sympathy from friends or kind strangers, but for me. I need to take my voice back. It feels more like quiet resolution, or even revolution – not revenge. I really hope that it marks a new chapter.
Living in SIN 