In no way and no circumstance can I think of a more damaging or abusive behavior than the assumption of the gifts of one by another. Beat me, break my bones, tell me I am worthless, or stupid, or fat, or ugly, attack my connections to family and friends, bind me with chains of guilt, steal away my dreams... I can survive all these things so long as I know I have my fundamental self, those small glories that the Universe bestowed upon me that make me unique. Take away that deep connection to my unconscious and I founder and fail.

One of my great failings, perhaps, is that I play to an audience. My writing, my art perform for applause. Granted, I receive a deep satisfaction when I know that I have turned out something of quality; a pride in my workmanship, an achievement of manifestation of the subconscious in consciousness. But in presenting my creations to others, I realize a connection with another human being, a touch of their mind to mine, of their inner being to me. This connection is that which all intelligent beings seek from the time of puberty onward. No matter how fleeting our brief experiences, we are immediately addicted to that ephemeral kinship and strive again and again to recapture those moments, that juxtaposition of selves, a means of spiritual and intellectual joining occurring on a plane far different from the physical.

The ultimate aim of my abuser, however, seemed to be the stripping away of all such connections, all such ability to feel contact with anyone but him. His encouragement to break off contact with my family and old friends, the creation of bonds with new friends that included him in all things, the guilt if I contacted or -- heavens forfend -- enjoyed spending time with old friends: all these were separations of both spiritual and physical sorts from any individualism I might have once had.

In time, I lost the ability to do anything alone, except attend to my tasks as an employee wherever I worked. He greeted any lone attempt on my part to see friends, leave town, or perform any errand that might even be marginally interesting with the most profound suspicion upon announcement and festering guilt upon my return. When guilt proved insufficent, he added separation from "the action" and "group fun", in truly cultic form, as impetus for me to either bring him along or drop my plans altogether. The lion's share of the encouragement was for the latter, as he acted in such a way as to make bringing him along on any visit or errand maximally uncomfortable and troublesome.

The logical extension of my being unable to do anything solo, of course, was to accomodate all my irksome intellectual and artistic leanings. He could not equal my education, but he could certainly acquire all the buzzwords and their required definitions. And he could absorb the performance of all artistic endeavors into the realm of himself. Art? Of course, he designed everything I drew. Why? Because whenever I drew something of which he did not approve, indicating individual thought and creativity, he attacked the work with utmost contempt.

Writing? He suddenly emerged a writer who collaborated with me on everything... except that garbage porn story that sold in the very first market it landed in. Never mind that I corrected spelling and grammar, turned his collage of sentence fragments and half-formed thoughts into whole sentences, rewrote whole paragraphs so that the story flowed, researched possible markets, formatted the manuscript appropriately, printed it at work, wrote up the envelopes (both the main envelope and the stamped, self-addressed envelope enclosed for potential return of the work) and mailed it to the first two potential publishers. When the $75 check arrived that could have helped pay the phone bill or the electric bill or the rent, the majority of the money went toward comics, because it was, of course, all his.

I let him claim credit, foolishly believing that if I let him have his own accomplishments, he would leave mine alone.

When I had received my first commission from a real publisher, I had realized, with years of experience behind me, that the only possible method I could use to wrest time from his control and so create this book I had, starving, grasped to my wretched breast would be to allow him participation. So, despite his infantile writing style, his lack of creativity in presentation, his inability to maintain a voice beyond the third person omniscient taught to so many students in middle school, he wrote half the book. With some significant modifications to the state of the text, it did not turn out to be the pathetic, wriggling shred of prose I expected. It pleased the editor enough that he gave me another book.

Unfortunately, by the time I received the second major assignment, the walls had closed in and his iron grasp was strangling me. He spent the duration of the writing of the book ignoring the deadline, occasionally writing a fragment here or there, deriding my handling, layout and design of the story, objecting to any creative touches I wanted to add with such illustrious terms as "stupid" and "dumb" (in front of witnesses, no less! How bold he had grown!), and obstructing my attempts to give the manuscript to the editor on time and complete. Is it any wonder that almost all the 32,000 words were written in my office during my work hours? By the time that project went to print, less than 200 words of the piddling amount of text he had actually written existed in the document, and those words were only rarely strung in the original order he had ventured. Perhaps two of his original concepts survived the brutal savaging given the text by myself, my lover and my editor. Fear of retribution, though, made me tell the editor to leave his name as "co-author" on the book, a decision I have regretted in the long months since that time.

Why do I regret? Because that book remains in stores, in the hands of the public, lacking any evidence of the truth. What is that truth? That I was the victim of verbal, emotional, physical, sexual and spiritual abuse. That for a time that equals a quarter of my lifetime, he had such control over me that I submitted to his vampirism of my talents, my skills, my finances... my life. That book remains a symbol of his dominant will, remaining even after I had managed to leave him. The attribution of half of that book to him causes me pain, because I know that it is the last dreg of fame he will ever receive through my talents and he is going to drain it dry of its glory. Despite the fact that it is unremittably my work, I find myself unable to claim it. Despite the kudos it received upon publishing, I am crippled by self-condemnation and cannot stand for the applause. The book, one of my more impressive accomplishments, causes me nothing but an agony of the soul. Perhaps he intended it so, but I find it difficult to lay this blame at his feet. Rather I cringe at my lack of courage, my cowering at the feet of a faceless fear he had long ago instilled within me.

And especially every time I see or hear an attribution of the book to him by a mutual acquaintance, someone who knows the truth and cares not for it, I remember having my eyes torn from me and the agony of peering myopically through another's lenses. It is a reminder that I am still making my own eyes for myself, a slow and painful process for the blinded.

Copyright© by the Author

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