She’s Bad Because She Wants To Not Be Contained
“The occurrence of an event is not the same thing as knowing what it is that one has lived through.”
James Baldwin, Another Country (1962)
February 2006, shortly after the proposal. I had figured it out the night before; I knew exactly what was coming. His immediate and extended family were on the trip with us, and they were conspicuously conspiring to send us alone to the grounds of an estate where we would go on a horse and carriage ride. I fell asleep that night rigid with panic and had a nightmare that after we’d returned to the US, I told my friends and family I’d said yes, and every single person I loved disowned me.
From the moment he put the ring on my finger I was trying to figure out how I was going to get out of it.
It took me a year exactly, but eventually, I did.
When we landed in Boston, I turned my cell phone back on and made the calls I had dreaded. No one disowned me but I could hear the disappointment in their voices, and it both hurt me and it made me afraid.
But no one said anything or told me not to.
*
I won a writing contest when I was 14 and was published in an anthology, and I later joined the publisher’s forums for teen writers where I quickly became a senior moderator. I posted my work, workshopped with others, and refined my skills — it was more rigorous than the undergraduate creative writing workshops I eventually took in college. Home life was difficult and it was a distraction, so I worked hard.
He had published with them years before and was hired to come back and edit their third anthology. I had already been selected to be featured in that anthology, and an entire section of the book would be mine.
He interacted with me in the forums and chatted with me casually from time to time. Eventually, he told me he was impressed with my talent and offered to bring me on board as his assistant editor. It was a strange offer — typically the writer of a book is not the one to edit it — but it was also a dream opportunity I couldn’t refuse.
I lived in a small town in Washington state. He was living in Colorado after graduating from university in another state, and he was curious about me. By this time, I had moved out of my mother’s house due to a CPS call; I had taken my mother to her doctor out of desperation and showed him my bruises. I was not to stay in my mother’s house, but I was too old for CPS to intervene. After staying here and then there, I moved in with a new friend and her family. So much was changing — I had lost my father and my mother’s already violent and unpredictable behaviors were escalating dramatically; what I was going through was serious enough that the friends I did have at that age more or less stopped talking to me. I made new ones — the best ones I had ever had, and still have to this day — but I was also the most alone I had ever been.
He sent me kind emails, called me at night to tell me he was there if I needed to talk. He wanted to know how he could help. I didn’t really click with him the same way I had with other writers in the forum, but I was lonely. Eventually, he called enough times that I started talking. He was involved with the publishing company that had bolstered my skill and ambition; that had to make him safer than a stranger.
He started sending gifts — books and music — but they weren’t things that he thought I would like, they were the things that he liked and that he wanted me to like, too. When I had all my wisdom teeth removed, I slept off the anesthesia on the floor of my friend’s bedroom and he sent flowers. While I had done some things that approximated dating, I hadn’t had a real boyfriend before — I couldn’t count the senior I’d slept with after watching the Chappelle Show in his basement when his parents were out of town, nor the college student who took me out for dinner and a play at the local community theater, where he clamped my hand down in his lap in the dark and wouldn’t let me remove it.
I had never so explicitly been the object of someone’s desire, the recipient of so many displays of care.
Plus, he’d written an entire book. He was published. That had to mean something.
He started getting more involved. Did I need money? I didn’t have a job and my grades were so low that it was unclear whether I would even graduate high school. Of course I needed money. I hemmed and hawed about it, feeling strange; he sent a check in the mail for $200.
Not long after, he pre-booked a plane ticket and a hotel room in Seattle. He would arrive nine or so days after I turned 18.
That first night, he looked me over appraisingly and told me that I looked a lot younger than he expected. I took it as disparagement; much later I understood that this was actually a compliment.
He made me tell him I loved him first.
*
From a letter he wrote dated June 22, 2004: “Kirsten, I have a secret. If you find out my secret — I think you may know it already — I’ll kiss you twice. Once on your forehead, and once on your cheek. I don’t know which cheek yet so you’ll have to find that out too. I’d like to say I’m investing a lot in you finding out but I can’t. These things collapse if you push them too hard. It’s like a puppy’s head underwater. He needs to drink, but you’ll drown him if you push.”
I was 17 years old, between my junior and senior years of high school.
*
He came back to Seattle one more time. Then, he booked me on a flight to Colorado. It was too easy — I turned 18 early my senior year so I could legally excuse my own absences; I was an adult, and could legally do whatever I wanted. I remember I passed my driver’s test, and a few days later I was driving his Audi from Denver down the dark and snowy interstate in the middle of the night. It was both terrifying and thrilling. I told anyone that cared to know that I was staying with my friend’s older sister in a Seattle suburb.
I went back once or twice; I remember emailing a teacher an assignment when a blizzard delayed my return flight and I returned to school a few days after spring break.
I knew there was something wrong with it. But I was young, grieving the profound loss of security and safety, and redefining both family and home. The severity of the past two years had alienated me from all of the normative experiences of my peers, and it was an irresistible adventure. The main character moment for a girl who had spent her entire life enamored with stories — the girl whose favorite middle school teacher told her uncomprehending mother during a parent-teacher conference, “She is destined for great things and she needs to get out there and see the world.”
That girl did the best she could with the options she had at the time.
*
The plan was, I would move to Austin with my sister after I graduated. I didn’t really have anywhere else to go. I didn’t know how to apply to college; I attended a financial aid seminar intended for parents and left it overwhelmed by the FAFSA application. My friend’s family couldn’t room and board me forever. I didn’t have a job. While my sister and I hadn’t become close until my father passed, I had grown up visiting Austin, and it was a city I liked.
But my sister was only 25 years old and made it clear that she wasn’t really able to provide for me. While I could rent a room in a house with her, I would still have to make my own way.
I was scared to be an adult so fully, so soon. He promised the kind of stability and security that I really hadn’t ever known. I was smart and curious, open and ready for adventure. He said he’d send me to college, that we would see the world.
It is tragic in retrospect that the very first time in my life I experienced power (ie, having something that men wanted) was when I was also at my most vulnerable. This is exactly the reason laws exist to protect children. When an adult chooses them for something that’s inappropriate, the child is not developmentally capable of perceiving that it’s due to the adult’s lack but rather credits it to their own maturity. That they’re chosen somehow; special.
But he was smart enough to not get caught, and that is why there is another far more precise word for what it was that he actually did: which is groom me.
When I turned 19, he “joked” that I was getting too old for him. More than once.
I thought I had more control than I really did.
*
That first summer, the day after I moved in for good and realized what I had done, I wrote a letter to one of my best friends back home telling her I had made a terrible mistake. When he got home from work, I came out from the kitchen where I was cooking dinner and he was standing in the middle of the living room, reading my letter. I don’t remember exactly what was said, but he yelled a lot, and I spent the next few days bowing and scraping and crying and apologizing, doing everything I could to convince him I didn’t mean it.
That same friend visited a month later. I picked her up from the Greyhound station and then we linked arms and explored downtown together, gallivanting like the kids we were. We ordered a cheese plate at a crepe shop and scrambled up rock faces at the Garden of the Gods, posed for goofy photos with statues. Pure and uncomplicated joy.
That night, while my friend slept in the guest room upstairs, he sexually assaulted me in a way I had not known was possible. I remember after, I crept up to her room and cried in her bed. I didn’t understand what had happened; I only knew that he’d told me it was an accident and that I was in a lot of pain.
More than a decade later, I was watching a sitcom and the thing that happened to me happened in the episode I was watching. The show came under some fire at the time for normalizing the behavior; the creator insisted it was a matter of context, but really it was one of consent. But by that time I was halfway through my tenure at the National Domestic Violence Hotline, and I knew exactly what to call it.
It wasn’t until I knew what to call it that I also understood it had been premeditated and planned, and that it was no coincidence that it happened while she was under his roof.
*
I still wanted to go to college; he said he couldn’t afford both his mortgage and my tuition, so I cashed in a savings bond I’d inherited and enrolled in distance learning courses. I wanted a tattoo; he said under no circumstances. First I wasn’t allowed to wear red on game day, then I wasn’t allowed to wear red at all.
I couldn’t celebrate my birthday on the day it fell either, because there was a college football game. Instead, he ordered pizza and paced back and forth in front of his enormous television in flannel pajamas, yelling at the screen at the top of his lungs. I don’t remember who won that day, but I do know that when his team lost, we usually wouldn’t eat dinner, either.
He wanted children. I had never even considered it. He wanted two — a boy and a girl — and I was to have a girl first, and then a boy. It was what he had decided on with his favorite ex-girlfriend. I thought he was joking.
He had picked out the names we would use with her, too.
I discovered later that he still sent her emails — once every other week or so. She never responded. I remember feeling some anger toward her at the time — not for being the object of his affection, but for being the named catalyst for so many of the things he did, the blueprint for his expectations. I realize now that in cutting him out of her life, she had done the wise, safe thing. That none of it was her fault.
*
Then, in February of 2006, we were engaged. I had been working retail, and when we returned from the trip I got my first full-time job at a bank. He had been working as a contractor for the government and was up for a promotion, but in order to get it he had to first receive top-secret security clearance.
I was mid-shift when the FBI agent walked into the lobby of the bank and directly to my station. I nervously joined him in an empty conference room at my manager’s behest, where he questioned me for what felt like hours. It was the kind of interview where you are asked the same question multiple ways to catch you in a lie; showing up at my workplace unannounced was intended to throw me off-balance. Mostly the questions were about him, but some of them were about me, too.
I wondered faintly later whether they ever considered my relative age, the way we had met.
He passed the security clearance; some months went by, and then he had to leave the state for an entire month. It was fall, and I spent that time mostly alone. I decided to visit my sister in Texas. It was a short trip — I remember watching a movie on her couch and walking her fawn-colored Doberman through their neighborhood.
When I returned home to the cold empty house, I set my bags down on the carpet and then I crumpled, too.
I was desperately lonely. I had been there a year and a half and I hadn’t made any friends. I knew I couldn’t marry him, and nearly a year into our engagement I was having a difficult time putting off his mother’s questions about why I wasn’t planning the wedding yet. Why we hadn’t set a date.
I cried for a few hours, and then collected myself and called my sister. Did her offer still stand? She was surprised but agreed right away.
I would like to say I booked my sister’s plane ticket and reserved the rental car that we would drive to Austin right away, but I didn’t. It took a long couple of months, continually talking myself back into it. But I do know that I called him that same night to tell him that I wanted to leave.
I left behind the ring he’d given me and half the contents of my savings account. I never wanted to feel like I owed him anything ever again.
In February of 2007, at 20 years old, I started over.
*
I began to write again nearly a month to the day after I miscarried my first pregnancy. It had been hard for me — I had wanted children for some time, but it didn’t feel safe because it wasn’t. I found out I was pregnant a month after Roe v. Wade was officially overturned by the Supreme Court, and though Texas had already banned abortion after six weeks in September of 2021, a brand new trigger law was on deck that would make it a felony punishable up to life in prison for a doctor to provide abortion at any stage. If anything went wrong, my health could be at severe risk.
It felt unsafe in other ways, too. I mostly credited my terror to a fear of becoming my own mother. I looked around and I didn’t see myself anywhere. If I wanted positive experiences with the act of mothering, I was going to have to create them myself — I certainly hadn’t been the recipient of that kind of healthy love. It felt like a trap, and I hadn’t yet connected the dots that for me, once, it had been.
Two weeks after the loss, I had a gorgeous leather-bound notebook. I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and what I wanted to say. But I still couldn’t start. I knew there was a lot to be sorted through and felt, but I wasn’t afraid of that. It was something else that hovered over me, blurring the edges. The sensation I had carried with me throughout my adulthood — this notion that writing was somehow tantamount to putting my hand on a hot skillet. Dangerous and irresponsible.
Then I began, and the funniest thing happened — it didn’t feel messy, frenetic, or dysregulating in the way I had expected. It was calming with its own pull; I knew exactly what I wanted to say, and I wrote until I was done each night and then I closed the book.
I mentioned it to my therapist, who asked the simple question: “When did the trauma surrounding your writing start?”
I did a quick mental scan, and then I remembered. How writing was how he’d found me. How it was also one of the first things he began to unravel once I’d moved in; how he questioned my intellect and discredited my taste.
I had tried to resume my identity in the years after I left him, but it was too much too soon. I spent a lot of time silent at first, both at social gatherings and in my bedroom. I once overheard a roommate whisper, “What’s wrong with her?” I didn’t know, either. In order to build a life then, I had to bury what I didn’t have enough hands to carry. I didn’t think about him, and I (mostly) didn’t write. I learned how to knit, tried out new recipes, took pictures, and partied in earnest. On the occasions that I did write, what felt like electric shocks in my body activated all kinds of discomfort I could not name. I recognize these sensations now as symptoms of PTSD.
There was more healing in my pregnancy than I expected. I would wake up in the morning, and the first thing I would notice and feel was how I was both self and other; that my body was both container and portal.
There is a lot of good that feels intolerable when your nervous system was wired for survival. But being pregnant felt like the embodied corollary to the healing work I’d been engaged in for nearly seven years, gently gathering up all the disparate parts of me in hiding. Creating space for them to feel their feelings. Allowing them to kick and scream until they were ready to be held.
I lost them, but I know in my bones that I am a parent. This notebook that I am writing for them is the only way I know how to be that for them now: “It feels like what I am carrying inside of me settles neatly when I sit here with you, bricks ordered into a house. My body is once where you lived — now, I build you another home.”
In writing about him I am exiling that which was never mine to begin with. Making my body my home again, too.
When I look back now, I see a girl who is passionately creative and fiercely intelligent, with a wicked sense of humor and a lot of love to give. I believe in accountability and justice, but I also know that believing oneself to be the arbiter of such things is a trap of its own. I was ashamed; I’m not anymore.
I am excited to see what that girl will do with this new kind of power — the kind that can only come from the clarity and freedom there is in telling the truth.
