Women instinctually know how to nourish each other and just being with each other is restorative. -Tanja Taaljard

A long, long time ago, I was a different person.

I’m sure that’s something that goes without saying because unless you’re allergic to change and environment, people change. Maybe they don’t become rap queens overnight, but some version of themselves is altered into the person they are now. Little bits of previous schools, friends and relationships may cling on and add some character but ultimately, the core of the individual has changed.

Myself, being a lifelong musician, I attach music and sometimes certain words to periods of my life as a sort of label. During this particular time or relationship, I listened to Emery, Mae and Death Cab for Cutie. During this moment or boyfriend, I tried to like Creed and Breaking Benjamin. During this unfortunate fling, I started really liking R&B as a musical genre. And while parts of me will always think of those songs and moments fondly (and some, not so fondly), I’ve continued to walk forward and develop my own inclinations towards food, music and things. Part of me will always remember and can easily go back to previous moments but on any given day, that’s not me anymore.

So it’s 2019. I’ve done the stealing someone else’s boyfriend thing and I’ve done the pining for them to break up thing. I’ve done the hurt barb swinging and the walk bys at the wretched girlfriend’s job thing. I’ve done the cheated on thing and I’ve done the cheating thing. I’ve done the waiting around for my partner to come home, praying he didn’t see her thing and I’ve done the checking up, driving by local haunts, and going through his phone thing. I’ve done the whining and the crying, the begging him to stay thing, the hatred so heavy it burns and the burden of sorrow for all I’ve ever done thing.

For this particular season of life, I’m through with all of that and in my genuine growth, I’ve learned that no one was the victim and that no one was the villain. (Unless we’re talking about him, and well that, friends, is a different story altogether. I’ll go ahead and save that for Domestic Violence Awareness Month.) We were both young and extremely impressionable, we were both walking eating disorders, we were both blinded by what we thought was love. We both had friends reach out and tell us to stop the nonsense but to be fair, if you weren’t in the triangle, there was no way you could ever understand.

As the years went on, we continued the little bickering bullshit because it seemed only natural after all we had done to each other. To be honest, I still don’t know that I’m ready to really confront all that’s happened (or if there is really even a need to) because I feel really bad about it. As with anything else, certain things bring me back and alert me to what a terrible person I was, under the influence of who I now call “my abuser”. (He doesn’t really deserve a name anymore and to be fair, I’m that disassociated from it all. And I think the woman I’m referencing in this blog has similar feelings.)

To her, I was hateful, incessantly judgmental, inarguably mocking her every move, and hoping she would fail. And honestly, I won’t sit here and say that she didn’t do the same thing to me because I can’t lie or sugarcoat it because I love her again. That just wouldn’t be fair.

Every thing I did back then was a joke to everyone involved. I was never pretty enough, captivating enough, or popular enough. And you know, sometimes, I still feel that. Purely because she does have this infectious energy that just grabs people. And I’m just me; I don’t have that.

Some people are loveable and popular and some people just are not. But I digress.

Love is friendship that has caught fire. –Ann Landers

But the truth is that sometimes people act different in a moment of fervor. They “aren’t themselves” because their mind is being influenced by some mind-altering substance of sorts. In our case, it was an overbearing, overgrown behemoth with a slight New Jersey accent and an ability to lie like a politician. He told her that I slept on the couch and he was just waiting to be rid of me. He told me that she was just jealous of our relationship and that there “was nothing” between them anymore. He told both of us that the other one was just pathetic and clinging on, that he was in love with whomever he was speaking with at the moment, and that he was sort of stuck between a rock and a hard place with the proverbial other girl.

Poor guy. I almost feel sort of sorry for him.

It’s easy to joke about all of this now, especially if you weren’t the one actually living it. Hindsight is definitely twenty/twenty some decade and a half later. But like the young, beautiful idiots that we were, we both believed him. Because why wouldn’t we, right? Why would a guy like him lie? (Now just typing that is difficult because I know how stupid it sounds. Insert allllll the face palm emojis right freaking here.)

And while we should have been blaming him all along and realizing that neither one of us was the problem, instead we took vengeance out on each other. We stalked each other, we gossiped about each other, and we wrote in our respective livejournals like we had nothing better to do. We begged our friends to turn on the other person, we ran and told our story to whoever would listen to us, and we morphed into our asshole boyfriend’s alleged dream girl because we both just wanted to be right. We both just wanted to win. We both wanted to be the one who wasn’t guilty of being hurtful and disgusting. We both wanted to be the one who wasn’t the cheater or the boyfriend stealer.

But really, it was both of us. No one was more innocent than the other and no one gets a pass for how terrible they were to the other person. Now, as an adult, as a survivor of domestic violence, I think to myself, how could I ever not have supported her, knowing what he put us through? Knowing that if this man had never existed, there would have never been any animosity between us?

Do you know what is the most messed up about all of this? She and I have known each other since middle school. That’s like what, eleven-ish years old? We grew up in the same neighborhood, we rode the same bus! We were best friends before all of this happened, well before all of this happened, and the way that we turned on each other during this whole debacle just disgusts me. I’m so sorry for all of it. For all the things that were my fault and for all the things that were my fault by proxy.

I’m sorry for all the times I turned a blind eye to his sniveling little comments, for the times I allowed him to follow her around in my presence (that should have been a dead giveaway, am I right? He couldn’t even stay away from her in front of me…), for all the moments I sat quiet while he ran his mouth about her to his idiot friends. I’m also sorry for any contribution to the anxiety she feels now, for the things that she battles on her own end these days, and for any tears that were shed because I couldn’t stand up to him all those years ago.

Moral of the Crazy: And honestly, I’m just barely glossing the surface. I could go on and on for actual hours about the story that has lived between us, about the awful things we’ve said and done to each other, about the insecurities we’ve contributed to. But there is only a finite amount of time I’m willing to dedicate to our dirt bag of an ex-boyfriend.

But what I’ve learned is that as women, we need to stick together. I’ve learned, without getting political, that essentially, it’s kind of a men against women world these days. I’ve learned that while violence and hatred doesn’t discriminate, in those days when I was hiding from her and torturing her behind her back, I should have clung to her and allowed her to pull me away from him.

(One unheard part of this story is that we had planned to confront him together and for one reason or another, I sort of chickened out. Domestic violence is like a disgusting, rotting disease of the flesh. I don’t know if I was more scared of him or the truth of the hell I was living. Admitting it still isn’t easy.)

What I’ve learned is that our defenses were up all those years ago, that we weren’t really acting as ourselves, but as women petrified to lose the one person we thought we could trust romantically. What I learned is that if this terrible and absolutely stressful event hadn’t occurred between us, she probably would have been one of my bridesmaids instead of someone I didn’t talk to for ten years. What I learned is that while we were busy verbally assassinating each other and incessantly trying to one up the last insult, we were busy enduring the same abuse, the same anxiety, the same inability to eat because the entire event was just too stressful (and apparently, he thought I was fat), and the same desire to just end the feud.

To be honest, I’ve had a child and I’ve drank a lot of whiskey over the last few years. I don’t remember who messaged who first (although if I reactivated my Facebook, I’m sure I could figure it out but really, who has the time) with the opportunity to end our decade long bad blood. I can’t remember what words were exchanged or if anyone conceded and took the blame. What I do know is what I feel now and what I felt when I saw her in person the other day.

It was genuinely like no time had passed. She had made the joke that we were both sort of nervous to see each because legitimate things kept coming up and we both asked, “Want to reschedule?” And you know, for a moment that was true for me. For a moment, while I was getting dressed in my mom clothes and trying super hard to even just put foundation on, I thought to myself, “She’s going to judge me so hard, she’s going to think I’ve gained so much weight, she’s going to think my skin looks so bad, she’s going to think my child is an absolute maniac (and she would be right, because she kind of is…).”

But then I realized that no, none of those awful things anxiety tries to get me to believe would be true because she knows me. Sure, we had a falling out. Sure, we gossiped hatefully about each other once upon a time. But she’s known me since I was a child. She knew me when I would confess all the stuff I worried about because things like “anxiety” and “mental health” weren’t yet acceptable. She knows all the insecurities my ex-boyfriend instigated and fueled in me because you know what? She dated him too and she knows the appalling things he says to the girls he claims to love. She knows I worry about my looks (especially around her) and she knows that kids can be psycho and annoying af because she has a niece and nephew and is around kids all the time.

You know what the most awkward part was of our whole reunion outing? When my kid tried to eat out of her bowl…

(Moms, you feel me, right? Sometimes they just make you look so bad, am I right?)

The point is it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows getting here. But when we stripped down the things that had previously ailed us, we both realized that we were still the same people from all those years ago. We still had the capacity to foster a healthy friendship because all of the tools had always been there. We just had to dust the crap off.

The six foot three, probably close to three hundred pound, looking like a balding Penguin from the Michael Keaton Batman, born in Patterson, New Jersey mother f-word-er crap.

What I think is the most awesome is that it was like no time had passed. It was like nothing had ever happened between us. And we even spoke very briefly about him in passing and we both just kept the conversation right on going. We didn’t get stuck on it, we didn’t cry in our smoothies, and we didn’t get mad at each other. It was like it was some unimportant stranger in one of our lives that never really surfaced until the one, brief second.

(I think that speaks absolute volumes for the state of our mental health. But what do I know? I’m just a social worker…)

The other awesome thing, and I totally geeked out and told her this because like my husband says, sometimes I’m just too honest, is that I was literally riding on the high of seeing her for a couple days afterward. Nervous? Who’s nervous? I’m like the clingy friend she can’t get rid of now! Poor thing started a new job and I’ve basically texted her endlessly while she sits in her orientation. If she misunderstands any of her healthcare options, it’s probably my fault.

When I saw her pull up in her cute little orange car, and my heart did that little excited jump it does when good things make me flutter, I knew I had to blog about this. Because although most of you know my domestic violence story, you don’t know the story behind the other girl involved. You don’t know what she endured and what she felt. You don’t know how far she went to remove herself, and you don’t know how she was the original person who tried to save me. She even told me I could sleep in her sister’s bed if I needed a temporary place to stay.

Some enemy, right?

So call that friend, rekindle that romance, and forgive that person that wronged you because life is too short not to. And you don’t know how you’ll feel one day when you get the call that you almost lost them. Life is too precious; take care of each other and remember what’s below the surface. Because like my old boss used to say, “She wears the same underwear you do…”

It didn’t feel like the pain had weakened over time; rather that I’d grown strong enough to bear it. –Stephanie Meyer, New Moon