In the fifteenth episode of the third season of Steven Universe, HELP. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to watch Steven Universe.
Trigger Warning: Extensive talk of abuse, domestic violence, and Stockholm syndrome, as well as a brief mention of drug use, of fatphobia, and an eating disorder, respectively.Â
My first boyfriend dumped over Christmas break. I got a message online from him – through MySpace, which should date me considerably – about how his trip home to visit his mother had gone. I’d just moved into my first studio apartment ever, after saving for four months while living with my brother. During that time, I’d spent a lot of time at my boyfriend’s place. I did his dishes. I cooked him meals. I bought him the things he needed while he struggled to pay bills. I didn’t know then that he wasn’t overwhelmed by debt, but that he’d been using his paychecks to fuel a growing addiction to cocaine. Even if I’d known, I can see how I would have justified that, too, continuing to support him because I loved him.
We’d been messaging each other about once a day while he was on the east coast, and so I sat down on my air mattress to read that day’s message. I couldn’t afford a bed or much furniture at all, but I was excited to have my own space. The two of us had been plotting dinners together and were thrilled about the chance for privacy (he had a roommate he shared his apartment with).
So I read about the snow. His mother’s cooking. His chance to see old friends. And in the middle of it all, a quiet bomb, a weapon. He missed his mother so much that the next year, he would be moving back home. “I don’t do long distance relationships,” he wrote, so it would be best if we went our separate ways.
I don’t know how many pathetic messages I wrote back. How many of them went unanswered. How often I tried to reason with this undoing, this cruelty. I saw him once when he got back to Los Angeles; he asked me to spend the night while his roommate was still away, and he promised we could talk as long as we needed. I fooled myself into thinking I could talk him out of this decision, and the next morning, just as the sun came up, I broke down as I walked away from his apartment. I rode the Red Line to downtown LA, got out while the train car I’d been in was cleaned, then sat back in the same spot, rode it all the way to the end. I must have done that three or four times, crying the whole journey, uninterested in the stares I got, uncaring about how I looked. It couldn’t be over, I kept telling myself. I am a good person. I don’t deserve this.
I know now that the break-up had nothing to do with what I deserved, but at the time, it was the most betrayed I’d ever felt. That gnawing sensation grew over the next month as the men came out of the woodwork to tell me that they’d been sleeping with my (now) ex, that some had gotten high with him in his place on nights when I was at my brother’s. I ran into his roommate – who’d always been a sweetheart to me – and he told me everything. The addiction. The lying. The nights when he’d have to wear earplugs because the sex was so loud. Those were the nights that were followed by awkward mornings, he told me, the two of them dancing around the subject neither wanted to talk about. My ex had the last word one of those mornings:
Don’t you dare tell Mark.
By the time February 13th rolled around, I had come to discover just how bad the abuse was. Some of that was from people who had witnessed it, like the friend who had watched my ex call me a fat cow over dinner, urging me not to finish my meal because it would set my weight loss back. I developed an eating disorder shortly after that meal. Some of it came from distance, and that distance granted me a clarity: this man had emotionally manipulated me and abused me for our entire relationship. I felt ashamed to have been so ignorant to it, but the truth is: I knew. I always had. I just chose to ignore it or explain it away because I was infatuated.
So when he texted me the night before Valentines Day, all the anger and rage and resentment that I’d been stewing in, that I had used to build a wall around my heart, crumbled away. He was lonely. He wanted to make things up to me. Could he take me out to dinner on Valentines Day?
I objectively knew he had been abusive. I knew it without question. And yet, in that moment, I folded. I craved his affection. His validation. His attention. The idea seemed so romantic to me: he was going to declare his love for me again, on Valentines Day, of all days!
I left work early the next day. Bought a giant bouquet of flowers, the first I had ever bought for another guy. Went over to his apartment to wait for him to get home from his shift at work. His roommate beat him there, and he let me in, and we caught up a bit. I recall his eyes shifting over to the bouquet every so often, and he looked as if he wanted to say something about it.
He never did. And my ex never showed up.
I passed out on the couch eventually, not because I believed he would show up, but simply out of exhaustion. Those minutes stretched into hours, those hours into a lifetime, the anxiety and dread blooming in me, spreading out from my chest and filling my body. I simply became too tired of the mounting terror within. I woke up some time in the early morning, and his bed was empty, still perfectly made, still as vacant as me. I left as the sun was coming up, and it was a stark reminder of the last time I’d been in that apartment, the last time this man had betrayed me.
I never saw him again. I got one message after that, a piecemeal apology that was cluttered with the same excuses I’d always gotten from him. Turns out, he had stood me up after getting drunk with coworkers and going home with some random man at the bar he was at. He wanted to make it up to me, he had said, and he’d do anything to get me back.
But the rising sun on the morning of the fifteenth broke the cycle for me. For those who’ve been abused, there often comes a distinct moment of clarity once you escape. It happened with my first boyfriend, and it also happened with my mother. It’s a breath of fresh air, but there’s also a residual shame. You see how obvious it was that this person was poisoning you, how frequently they spewed their toxicity, and how easily you fell for everything. And for me, it was even more embarrassing because I’d already escaped a cycle before. Many of the things my ex did to me mirrored my mother’s treatment, even if he never got as bad as she was. How had I not seen it? How had I let him fool me so many times? Truth is, I was proud to have escaped my mother’s abuse, and I still am. That might seem like a strange thing to say, but even now, looking back on that terrified, sixteen-year-old version of me, I saw a tiny crack in the wall that my mother had built around my life, and squeezed through it to freedom. It’s not easy to leave an abuser, but to do so while a teenager? To throw one’s self to the wolves that young? I’ll forever be proud of what I did then, and it’s also why I felt so ashamed by falling into another cycle of abuse years later.
I don’t blame myself anymore, and the empowering thing about writing of the abuse I’ve experienced is that I can shift that blame on the people who behaved as they did. I can name their actions. The affects. I can categorize the whole thing in a way that allows me to accept that it happened to me, and that it is not my fault that it did. No one deserves to be abused, but abusers rely on their victims believing this.
I refuse to.
I relate to what happens in “Alone at Sea” because I have been right there. As Lapis stood in front of Jasper and wrestled with the complex feelings she had for Jasper, I knew instantly what I was going to write about. Not only do I enjoy these moments and the opportunity they provide me to emotionally connect with fiction, but I wanted to demonstrate another example of that same emotion: What happens when you want to be with your abuser? How do you deal with the reactions of other people, who don’t understand this feeling or compulsion?
Granted, the relationship here is complicated in ways that are not analogous to my relationships. The writers include details that build up a more mutually abusive relationship between Jasper and Lapis; Lapis admits that she enjoyed hurting Jasper, that she thrived on the sensation of holding Jasper down. That adds a whole layer of depth to this relationship that I can’t relate to, but I do think it’s important to discuss. Both these characters hurt one another, and both of them have cravings to resume their companionship. Yet Steven helps Lapis realize that this relationship isn’t healthy. How could it ever be? I do think that “Alone at Sea” gives Jasper’s characterization a lot to work with, and I hope that the show at least allows Jasper a chance at redemption. However, at this point, it would take a lot of work for Jasper and Lapis to repair their relationship with one another, and thus, the best choice right now is for them to go their separate ways.
I suspect that won’t last long.
Steven Universe has surprised me before in terms of the content of their stories, but “Alone at Sea” shocked me the most. I know very few shows for younger audiences willing to address the complexities of abuse. Hell, most shows for adults don’t do a good job, either! This show, however, avoids using abuse as a punchline; they don’t portray this relationship in a way that further adds to the stigma of abuse; and most important of all, these characters are still treated as people, worthy and deserving of sympathy and understanding.
Goddamn, this show has me messed up.
The video for “Alone at Sea” can be downloaded here for $0.99.
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