Authors: Augusten Burroughs
The girl’s family all spoke of her as though she was an honors student at Juilliard. While she sat right in front of them at the dinner table, struggling with her noodles.
“Believe me, you: I know talent. And that girl’s got it,” Vincent’s mother said.
Vincent’s father was the only one who even came close to admitting the truth about the girl; he said nothing and kept himself mostly tucked into his plate.
After the plates had been cleared, the girl abruptly stood and shrieked, “You know how whistle, Stee. You puh the libs together in the blow.”
The family members clapped vigorously.
The girl said the line once again.
In their combined denial and attempt to bolster the girl’s confidence, they had
misinformed
her.
Then she turned to me and said, “I have Oscar and he made of gold? And I will win him. And mirror street will not get to have him because I get to.”
“She means ‘Meryl Streep,’ ” the mother told me. “She’s saying she’s going to win the Oscar and not
Meryl Streep
. I’ll tell you one thing, that girl is no small dreamer.”
THAT EVE NING WHEN WE
returned to The Italian’s apartment, I gently broached the subject. “So . . . what’s the deal with your family and Mel? It’s like nobody seems to even know what’s up with her.”
He pried one shoe off his heel using the toe of the other. “What do you mean, what’s up with her?”
“Well, it’s great that everybody is so encouraging around her and she’s nuts about you, but, what I mean is, because she’s obviously mentally retarded to some degree, is there a risk she might take this encouragement literally? And, like, in real life want to be a movie star?”
Which is when I learned that the only thing that you can say to an Italian that’s worse than “Your mother charges twenty dollars extra if you want her to swallow” is “your sister is mentally retarded,” even if it’s completely true.
He didn’t punch me. Instead, he turned around and he opened the door and stood back. He didn’t say a word but he motioned with his head,
out
.
It would be five years before we spoke again. He called to tell me I had been right, his sister was mentally impaired. They had learned this when she began to go on auditions in the city and she had been confused.
She was happy now, though. She was almost eighteen and was working at a company that made biodegradable soy-based packing material. Her job was to count things, then click, then do this again and again until it was time to go home. He said she loved it.
SOMETIMES IT’S NOT QUITE
so obvious that the dream is the wrong size, color, and shape for the dreamer. That’s when encouraging somebody to keep their dream alive borders on cruel.
No. There’s no bordering. It is cruel. It’s just accidentally, well-intentioned cruelty.
It is not true that you can do anything you set your mind to.
It is a lie that with hard work and perseverance, you can achieve your dream.
And it’s better for you to know this: wanting something with all your heart does not mean you’re good enough at it.
Letting go of a dream because it cannot be yours is not failing. There are many ways to fail in life but this is not among them.
The other thing about dreams you must know is that they are not like spleens. There is not just one per person.
And here’s the hardest truth: you are the only person to judge whether or not you do have the talent or skill or ability to make your dream come true or you don’t. Nobody else can tell you because you may be holding in reserve something extra, something more and rare, and very much enough. Only you know.
We think of dreams as belonging only to the young, like smooth skin or mononucleosis. Yet dreams may not only
last
a lifetime—sometimes you must wait almost a lifetime to see them come true.
Most people know the story of Grandma Moses, the American painter who achieved worldwide fame when she was “a grandma.” It’s become a cliche to invoke her name when talking about how dreams can come true at any age.
But most people are not aware of the specifics.
When her husband of forty years died, Grandma Moses was almost seventy herself. She took up needlepoint. But by the
time she was seventy-six, the arthritis in her hands forced her to give it up.
So she decided she’d paint.
She was nearly eighty when her work was exhibited at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Which made her famous.
For the rest of her life she painted and traveled around the world showing her work in galleries, appearing on magazine covers, and being an art world celebrity.
This went on for the next twenty years. So it’s not like she achieved her dream at an old age, then dropped over dead. Her career as a painter lasted longer than Van Gogh’s.
And it didn’t even begin until she was almost twice as old as he was when he died.
H
OW TO
I
DENTIFY
L
OVE BY
K
NOWING
W
HAT
I
T’S
N
OT
L
OVE DOESN’T USE A
fist.
Love never calls you fat or lazy or ugly.
Love doesn’t laugh at you in front of friends.
It is not in Love’s interest for your self-esteem to be low.
Love is a helium-based emotion; Love always takes the high road.
Love does not make you beg.
Love does not make you deposit your paycheck into its bank account.
Love certainly never, never, never brings the children into it.
Love does not ask or even want you to change. But if you change, Love is as excited about this change as you are, if not more so. And if you go back to the way you were before you changed, Love will go back with you.
Love does not maintain a list of your flaws and weaknesses.
Love believes you.
Love is patient; Love does not make a point of showing you how patient it is. It is critical to understand the distinction.
Patience is like donating a large sum of money to a charity anonymously. What matters to you as the donor is that the charity receives the funding, not who wrote the check, even if knowing who donated such a huge check would wildly impress the world.
So, patience is exhibited only by a lack of pressure. This is how you know it’s there.
But when you see on the face of your partner or spouse an expression that reads, “I’m being very patient with you,” this could be the single detail that alerts you to the fact that you are in an abusive relationship.
You can be in such a relationship and not even know it. You can receive so many black eyes, you forgot it’s abnormal to have even one.
Physical violence is one kind of abuse. Emotional violence is another kind of abuse. These assaults are delivered with concepts. People usually say, emotional abuse is about words: fat, ugly, stupid, lazy. But it’s not about words because an emotionally abusive person doesn’t always resort to using the verbal club, but rather the verbal untraceable poison.
They may, in fact, speak very kind words to you. And appear nothing but supportive to those around you. Their covert abuse is administered in small, cunning ways. Over time. So the impact is gradual, not fist-to-the-eye immediate.
An abusive partner is controlling. They are manipulative. They might make a special point of coyly sharing information that they actually know will upset you. They might supply reasonable arguments as to why they and not you should make important decisions.
If you possess talent or a natural ease and comfort with a particular ability and your abusive partner is resentful, abuse might arrive in the form of subtraction: no remark at all, not a compliment or a gesture of support. Perhaps one small, internally flawless diamond of a criticism will be presented.
Silence when there should be discussion to resolve an issue is another method of abuse if the silence is used as a tool to frustrate or sadden or otherwise intentionally manipulate the emotions of another.
I knew of somebody—part of the same couple I mentioned earlier—who was many years into an abusive relationship but did not know it. She knew only that she had been so happy when they met and that it seemed to her this feeling was bled out of her year after year, and she found that she now resembled her partner, whom she had once seen as strong and silent and loving but had come to understand was emotionally disturbed and was not silent in his mind, but roiling.
When she finally left him she did so still loving him. She had been more financially stable so she had given him their home. He had admitted to her that for the last couple of years, he had been occupied with planning his suicide. He told her he’d worked out all the details and would do it in a quaint West Coast town right on the Pacific that they had frequently spoke of visiting but never seen.
When she left him she left their beloved dog with him because she worried a totally empty house would be dangerous.
Their plan had been to share the dog but he wanted nothing more to do with her. And the regular updates and photographs he had sent when they first parted stopped now completely.
Months passed and she heard nothing until he sent a brief
email informing her that the dog now had a potential serious health problem and that he would take care of it.
She could not help but feel that he had taken a small measure of satisfaction knowing how brutal the news would be to her ears and how helpless she would feel being able to do nothing, not even see this dog she had loved for so long.
Emotional abuse is the process of breaking the spirit or shattering the confidence of another for one’s own purpose.
Abusive people never change. There is no point of pursuing couples’ therapy when one member of the relationship is abusive. A therapist may tell you otherwise. But I’m telling you the not-for-profit truth. Abusers do not change.
It will only get worse.
The difference between physical violence like a slap on the face or a shove and homicide can be as small as a few centimeters or the angle of approach.
Also, abusers are always very, very sorry. Men who abuse women probably shed more tears in one year than the combined tears of all the girls in the audience of a Renée Zellweger movie opening weekend at the Paris Theatre in Manhattan.
That’s how sorry he is.
Or so he says, with his tears.
Of course, he’s not sorry. She is.
Unless the roles are reversed. And the abuser is a woman, not a man.
Women can and do physically and emotionally abuse their partners. The perception that the abuser is always a man is false.
One need only live near a lesbian bar like I did in the mid-nineties to know what sons of bitches women can be. Especially if they’re shit-faced and pumped up on early Indigo Girls.
People remain in abusive relationships for the same reasons they remain in loving ones: they’ve built a life together, they have children, financial interests, habit, nothing better. Lots of reasons.
But probably the number-one reason is simply not knowing they’re in one.
You think of domestic violence and you think of a character and a weak victim: macho, powerful bully and a passive, frail woman and you don’t recognize that. So it can’t be you.
It might help, then, for me to show you in clinical terms what domestic violence actually looks like on the printed page. This checklist is from the National Domestic Violence Hotline. Ask yourself, does your partner:
Think about the answers before you answer. Does he prevent you from working? No, he encourages you, that’s terrific.
Or does he?
Does he
maybe
prevent you a little by getting drunk and then, say, being unable to find a certain pair of shoes so he turns the house upside down, creating such a scene, a ME, ME, ME moment that you can’t possibly work?
Might he always, over and over, bring it all back to himself? Leaving no room or time for you to work on your crafts, aka possible future home business aka threat to him?
Domestic violence is extremely difficult to detect when it is happening to you because domestic violence always only happens to other people, and you are too smart and sophisticated to ever, for one moment, be with somebody abusive. The thought is absurd. Domestic violence is a lower-class problem, something that afflicts only those whose homes are clad in aluminum siding.
Besides, you would know if you were being abused.
Except the truth is, some things are too terrible to know; too impossible to see; too painful to realize; too heartbreaking to face.
You could be in an abusive relationship and be unaware that you are, unable to see the abuse for what it is.
Sometimes the truth must unspool slowly. It’s simply
impossible to grasp it all at once. Perhaps, one day, you will be able to see a glimpse of abuse in your relationship.
In time, you’ll be able to see more.
Because if you allow yourself to have one small serving of reality, the hard part, the opaque part, is over. And eventually, you’ll be able to see the rest.
Also, the more unlikely it is that you would ever be in an abusive relationship, the closer you need to look at your relationship. Not because you want to try to see something sinister that simply isn’t there, but because you’re more likely to be blind to abuse if it is there.
Just, you know, pay attention. To all those familiar, everyday things they say to you or do to you. Ask, “If he said that to my friend, would I think it was mean?”
Try to actually hear what the person says to you. Try to hear it fresh. Try to see if what they say to you might, in a way, also be a kind of steering wheel.
It’s a spectrum, too. Maybe your partner isn’t exactly “abusive” so much as a little controlling. This is fairly easy to see.
What’s difficult to see is when you’re with somebody who is a full-strength abuser. And maybe one reason it’s so difficult to see something that to the rest of the world—at least on paper—is so obvious is because there’s no contrast. They are controlling and abusive and this is what they are.
If you realize you are in an abusive relationship, you may want to call this phone number—it’s toll-free so it won’t cost you anything and it won’t show up on your phone bill. If possible, take the number with you and call from somewhere else:
National Domestic Violence Hotline 1-800-799-SAFE (7233)
Seventy-nine-nine, seventy-two, thirty-three.
If you have children and your spouse is abusing them physically, mentally, or sexually, leave now.
It never takes courage to leave.
It takes love.