E, the toxic one

This chapter of your life is one that is hard for you to look back on, you had a bad time and it was the origin of much of your sexual and emotional trauma. It also brought you shame, guilt and self-blame for not setting boundaries and being self-destructive. How much you learned though. Nobody taught you more to say, “Enough, no more!” than your first boyfriend, the toxic one.

In the last year of high school, with all the pressure of the future and the choices you have to make, with all the stress of the final exams, with all the burned out parts of your brain from 13 years in an educational system that looks like a prison, you desperately need your free ticket to fantasy. The stress has to come out somewhere. What better way than to fall in love? In this state of vulnerability, confusion, stored up adolescent energy, unexplored passions and repressed desires, you are most likely to cloud your reason and end up making a big mistake by sticking with an abusive and toxic relationship for more than a year. Yeah, that happened to me.

I have had a hard time forgiving myself for tolerating so much bullshit.

E, the toxic, was my first “real boyfriend”. He was extremely jealous, insecure, and emotionally violent. He didn’t like to give me oral sex because he was “disgusted” by my pussy. He became jealous of me every time I interacted with other men. He isolated me from the world. He shut me out of much of his life, I never knew his home or his family, and on the other hand I forced him into mine. No one from my family liked “E”. They thought he was ugly. In fact, they called him the Ugly One. He was a very damaged person, and he hurt me a lot. He was a person who did strange things that I never understood, like wearing two pairs of pants at the same time. It wasn’t to protect himself from the cold. When I found out he was doing that, it was the middle of the summer in Santiago. I felt shocked. When I asked him why he did this, he became extremely uncomfortable and I dropped the matter. To this day I am still wondering what the hell it was all about.

When I finally decided to end the relationship, I didn’t just turn the page, I ripped it out of the book, made it into a ball and threw it behind my back without looking back, trusting that a dog would eat the paper and turn it into shit. What a big backpack that I got off of my back when I decided to get free of it. I remember I was in the subway, the one that goes straight up and overlooks the Andes. It was a beautiful sunset, just to see the sun hiding between the mountains and I felt so light that the memory tastes like hope. Yesterday I heard on a podcast that “ending a relationship is always good“. In this case I couldn’t agree more.