Now that I’ve escaped my abusive family, it’s a difficult transition — from living only to survive, from fantasizing about death as my only escape — into realizing I have time, and space, to be a person. And lately I’ve been finding it especially hard. I catch myself eyeing families that seem so comfortable with each other and wondering about what it could have been like to be in another family. It’s probably not a “good survivor” thing to admit, but sometimes I am overwhelmed by how many people are on this earth who didn’t have abusive families. And yet somehow, I was in this one. What would it be like if I could just go back, in a different family? How would life have been different in a non-abusive family? What kind of things would I already have accomplished if I had a supportive family?
When you are in an abusive environment, surviving is literally that — it is a singular focus. It is getting through one day and then the next and not being sure if you’re hoping you’ll make it or not. But once you’re out, well then, you finally start seeing all that you’ve missed. Only after the storm can you assess the damage.
But assessing the damage means looking back at how much of my life is just…gone. In that disassociated daze and the haze of pain, and the restricted nature of abusive families, I lost more of my life than I’ve lived so far.
The thing about a survivor midlife crisis is that it comes with trying to gain what we never had. We aren’t trying to reclaim our youth — we are trying to construct one. It’s not even just about the fun moments — about the carefree childhood that alluded us — but even about the pivotal developmental points.
I never got a teenage rebellion. I never got — until my adult years — the ability to question, examine, and come into my own about my beliefs, values, and ethics. I was only able to regurgitate my mother’s words. I never got a lot of developmental stages or gradual independence — these were things I had to figure out once I moved out.
Coming into your adulthood unprepared, then, feels like it’s own midlife crisis. You see your future stretching before you, and know that a solid chunk of it is going to be spent learning the hard way things that most people already know by now. You know that you’ve missed out on so many opportunities, you know that certain stages of life can never be fully reclaimed. You can do things now that you never could before, but it doesn’t feel the same. I went trick-or-treating for the first time as an adult, and all I could think was how much fun it would have been; I’d past the point that it could ever be enjoyable. And that seems small, but there are so many of those small instances. Because you were too crazy, or you weren’t allowed, or your parents controlled your every move, and so you have lost so much that you can never recreate.
It’s hard not to think about death. It’s hard not to feel like it is one step away, like life is slipping from your fingers, when it feels like you have lost so much of your life already. And every setback — everyday that gets swallowed by flashbacks or that all-too-familiar disassociated haze feels like more and more life is being snatched from you.
My 28th birthday past recently and I spent part of the day at the cemetery. Lately, I find that that is a good place to calm the mortality panics and demystify death. Death no longer seems like a dark, dangerous entity when I’m staring at it face-to-face, when I can practically sense its presence. It just seems…there.
And I can recognize that 28 is young to have mortality panics. 28 is also young to have spent 25 years in an abusive family. I want time. I want so much time that I can never get back, and I want do-overs that I can never have because they will never mean the same thing that they would have.
I have to build myself out of the wreckage, I often say. And that means going through the hard part of recognizing that a solid chunk of my life I can never get back. Things are going to be hard — and they might be hard for the rest of my life, I don’t know. When you’re being abused, death seems like nothing but relief. It seems like you’re friend, something that’s going to rescue you from the pain and fear. But when you’ve escaped, it then seems like a threat — something that’s going to pounce any second, and snatch you away from your newfound freedom.
If a midlife crisis is about reassessing your life, then I think this is mine. And I would venture that that might be the case for other survivors too — that our moments of reflection, of reclamation of the past, of wanting to capture something you might never have had — come far earlier for us. We already know what we lost. We can already long for a youth we can’t get back. We often have had to start our childhoods, our teenage years, and our adult years all at the same time. And we’ve often had to contend and confront head-on death, suicidality, and mortality, throughout the entire course of our lives.
Speaking When the World Sleeps 