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When Getting Better Started Feeling Like Another Failure
After an abusive marriage, advice kept asking me to improve while my emotional and physical health were still struggling.
My hands were in my soapy hair when the memory returned. I had been washing it in the bathroom of my parents’ home, about a month after leaving my husband. I was not trying to revisit the marriage or the violent moment that happened during it. One minute I was standing in the shower; the next, what had happened did not feel safely contained in the past. Fear came first, and I think I had already started crying when my legs gave out.
I ended up lying in the tub, unable to move or speak. My younger brother knocked on the door, and I could hear him asking for an answer. I wanted to respond, but I could not stop crying long enough to make words come out. He eventually got my mother, who came into the bathroom and covered me before asking him to help her. It took time for them to get me out.
My mother hugged me and walked me to my room. By then, the continuous crying had stopped, but my breath still came in uneven gaps that felt like hiccups. She asked whether I wanted to talk, and I shook my head no. I did not want to be judged, and I did not want to go through the memory again. My father had been…
