Lions, Tigers, & Twins: Life in an Abusive Relationship

What happens when the man you fell for and the brother who hated you live under the same roof.

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He wasn't always like this. That's the part people skip when they hear a story like mine and want it to be simple. In college, he was the sweetest, kindest person I knew. Easy to love, easy to be around, nothing about him hinted at what was coming. We dated, we broke up somewhere in our second year, and I moved away. Normal college stuff. The kind of breakup you look back on without much weight attached to it, but he broke up with me two weeks after I had an abortion, pregnant with his baby even though I was on birth control.

I should have known then, that love was only there when it was convenient for him, its taken me years to work through the trauma and the hurt that this abusive relationship put me through, some parts were self inflicted, some parts were just evil, and the smallest parts were the reasons why I stayed for as long as I did, because it was my first time feeling loved by someone who was my best friend first, and that was something that was unparalleled at that time in my life.

A few years later, we found our way back to each other. And I walked into that reunion expecting the person I remembered. I wasn't prepared for how different he'd become.

He'd bought a property with his twin brother, the two of them building a life together on the same land. His twin had gone to a different college three hours away during the years we were apart, so I'd never really known him. Never spent real time around him. When I came back into the picture, I wasn't just stepping back into a relationship with one man. I was stepping into a house with two of them, same face, same laugh, same childhood, and I had no idea yet that I was about to learn two completely different ways of being torn down.

One of them was verbally abusive, the kind of cruel that could turn on a dime into being the sweetest man you'd ever met. He'd say something that gutted me, and twenty minutes later he'd be talking to me like nothing happened, and the whiplash of that was its own kind of damage. You start doubting your own memory when someone can be cruel and then tender in the same hour. You start wondering if you imagined how bad it actually was.

The other one was quieter about it. Emotional and mental abuse dressed up as devotion. He would tell me he loved me in a way that felt like a leash instead of a hand to hold.

Both of them were sweet guys underneath it, genuinely, and that's the part that still messes with me. I'm not writing this to paint them as monsters with nothing good in them. I'm writing this because the good in them is exactly what made the bad so hard to see clearly, and even harder to leave.

Nobody warns you that the sweetest people can also be the ones who hurt you the worst, and that the sweetness isn't a lie, it's just not the whole truth either.

Both of them drank. Heavily. And I was young enough, still figuring out who I even was after the years apart had changed all of us, that I didn't have the language yet for what was happening to me. They did, so I did, some of the biggest regrets of my life were made, drinking with them. I numbed myself entirely because it was the only way I could maintain myself from feeling what I actually was truly feeling, pain. I just knew something was wrong. I knew my body felt it before my brain caught up to naming it.

Looking back, I know the isolation of being on the mountain with little to no service and no one I knew less than an hour and 45 min away, did as much damage as anything else. Living out on a mountain, in the middle of nowhere, with someone who already drank heavily, turned him into someone who drank even heavier. And the two of them weren't just brothers living near each other. They were entirely dependent on one another. If one of them did something, the other did it right alongside him. They were entirely different people but they were the same, which I hated. They lost their individual light during this time, and they were honestly such beautiful people who strayed away, for Jameson.

There were no secrets between them, no privacy, and because of that, no safety for me. Whatever you loved, whoever you let yourself get close to, became exposed to both of them at once. You weren't just dealing with one man's mood or one man's drinking. You had a target painted on your back for two people to take turns aiming at, and nowhere on that whole property was actually private, because whatever happened with one brother, the other one already knew, or would know within the hour. Walking on eggshells was a daily must, triggering his brother honestly? Was one of my biggest fears during this time, I was so scared to be myself, everything I liked, did, said, my voice, my hair, my body, everything possible was under a microscope.

There's one day I still carry with me clearly. It was the middle of the day, peak summer, and both of them were drunk already even with the sun barely past its highest point because they both started drinking when they woke up. I remember trying to get away from the two of them at once, which is a specific kind of exhausting, managing two different men's drunk moods under the same roof in broad daylight. I went down to the barn to hide. I just needed a minute where nobody needed anything from me, where I wasn't managing anyone's temper or tiptoeing around anyone's mood, I needed to hear myself think.

That was the day he snapped my phone in half.

I wanted to call my best friend. I needed to tell her I was depressed, that things had gotten bad, that he'd been awful to me in ways I didn't fully have words for yet. Instead of getting to make that call, I watched him break the one thing that connected me to someone who would have believed me. That's not an accident. That's not just drunk anger. That's someone making sure you stay isolated, whether he understood that's what he was doing or not. I felt like that was my last anchor to myself and my identity being able to talk to someone who wasnt them.

They found me in the barn. Both of them. And instead of asking if I was okay, they started talking at me, calling me a cry baby, taunting me for hiding, for having feelings, for needing a minute alone. Then they got on the four wheeler and rode ahead of me while I walked up the hill in that hundred degree heat, sun completely out and beating down on me. They cut me off, in the ATV, went right in front of me almost hitting me with the trunk. They began to slide a bit, the hill was steep, the wheels spun out, so they kept doing it while laughing, kicking up all sorts of dirt, dust, and rocks, again and again.

I could feel my heart breaking in half, then again, when they stopped and his brother called me a peasant, and then again hearing them laugh at me while driving up to the house, leaving me there in that state, I was outside my body,

I fell to the ground. I was covered in dirt, scratches all over me, dirt in my eyes, in my mouth, in my hair, everywhere. I broke down right there on the ground. And then I had to make myself get back up, because I knew if they saw me that weak, they wouldn't let up. They'd just keep going, relentlessly, and I wouldn't even get the one minute I'd gone to the barn looking for in the first place. So I pulled myself together enough to walk the rest of the way to the house on my own two feet, dirt and blood and everything still on me, with tears streaming down my face.

By the time I got inside, his twin had already passed out on the couch. My boyfriend was still drinking. I went straight to the bathroom to shower, just trying to wash the day off of me, and he banged on the door the entire time. Calling me pathetic. Telling me I was stupid as fuck. Telling me I had no reason to be upset, to get the fuck out, asking me who I was talking to in the bathroom but he had forgot he snapped my phone in half. I had no car there. My phone was already in pieces. He was the one who brought me out there in the first place, for what was supposed to be a good summer together after years of being apart.

I laid down in the shower and let the water cover me, and I just wanted to scream cry. I cried so hard I burst a blood vessel in my eye. I was a broken person that day, in the most literal sense. I stayed in that shower until the house finally went quiet.

I got out of the shower, went and remembered I could get on my macbook and imessage someone, so I got on my computer, told my best friend and another friend, who lived an hour away on the coast, what was happening. They came and got me the next day.

I knew, laying in that shower, that this was the last day I'd spend with him. I found a place on the coast and I moved there. I never moved back after that. I kept things at his place for a while, but never anything real, never anything that made it feel like mine, because some part of me already knew I would never be someone an alcoholic would love, or change for, no matter what. He never changed while I lived on the coast, I left there and moved to a different state and he was still that same person.

On my birthday, later that same year before I moved away, he told me, "Who would ever want to be with you? You're a whale, you're disgusting." Him being 5'6 and around 160lbs himself, all he cared about was how it looked for me to not look like him, skinny I mean.

I never went back after that birthday. I detached completely. And that's when I learned the thing I still carry with me now. Someone who doesn't love themself could never actually love you. Not really. Not in a way that's safe to stand inside of.

If you're in something like this right now, where the person you fell in love with feels like a stranger wearing a familiar face, I want you to hear this. You're not confused for grieving the version of him you knew while also being afraid of the version standing in front of you. That's not a character flaw. That's just what it feels like to survive something before you have the language for it.

You'll get the words eventually. I did. It just took getting off that mountain, out of that shower, and onto the coast first.

And just so you know, I've been with every person I have wanted to be with since him. I have been loved completely, dated, got married, had my son, had romances, lovers - and not one of those people ever called me disgusting or body shamed me, in fact- quite the opposite.

When someone shows you who they are, their character? Believe them. Dont allow for you to fall to the ground and question who you are because someone is too broken themself to see you for what you actually are.

xx. Jess