The Men I’ve Killed with My Boundaries
Survivor’s guilt gets complicated when your abuser dies.
Survivor’s guilt gets complicated when your abuser dies.
Trigger warning: This piece mentions emotional abuse, reproductive coercion, suicide, and sexual assault.
A year before he died, my rapist emailed me saying he was suicidal. A girl had just dumped him and he was spiraling. He’d relapsed on heroin. He was miserably alone and the only person he could think to contact was me.
While my rapist and his girlfriend were together, he’d largely left me alone. That had finally given me the brain space to reckon with what he’d done. Before that, I’d just considered him a friend who had ruined a perfectly good fuckbuddy arrangement by getting greedy. In the silence and solitude, though, I reflected on what had happened, and stopped calling him the comedian in my mind and instead deeming him my rapist.
My rapist’s girlfriend had made him delete our old Google Chat logs and texts. Now he was single again, and lonely, and he wanted me to return all those digital mementoes. He said they might make him feel less like killing himself.
I was entirely happy to oblige. I gathered up the old chats from when we were involved with one another, and pasted them into a big word document. I backed up old, flirtatious phone messages we’d exchanged using the site Treasure My Text. “Here you go,” I told him in an email, and sent it all off. “I hope you feel better soon.”
Included in all these records was a single Google Chat message where he revealed he’d fucked me without a condom, without my conscious knowledge or consent. I’d been incapacitated. But he knew what he was doing. “Now we don’t have to use condoms anymore,” he had told me at the time. “There wouldn’t be any point.”
I didn’t send my rapist these messages because I wanted him to rediscover his admission of guilt. I was traumatized by his actions, unable to engage in certain sex acts again for years because of what he did. But I had no feelings of anger or vindictiveness. I knew he was unhappy and struggling with multiple addictions, floundering as a relative unknown in Chicago’s stand-up comedy scene. I knew he was young, just 20 years old at the time, and I felt so much more fortunate and stable than him, as a 23-year-old in graduate school. His life was bad enough already, I told myself.
When he emailed me again a few days later, despondent in the middle of the night, I replied back. I told him I was rooting for him, that I hoped he would survive. I did it again and again for several weeks, until he suddenly dropped off the map. I felt good about it, proud of myself for being so caring to someone who’d been so violently inconsiderate to me. I also felt relieved. I already knew how it felt to have a death on my conscience, and I couldn’t stand to go through it again. I had already learned that when I made a man my enemy, I had to pay the emotional price for it when he died.
…
I disowned my dad when I was a teenager. It was the only way to end his unhealthy emotional dependence on me. Throughout my adolescence he treated me like a spouse and a therapist, as well as an employee. All the competing roles I was expected to play kinda ripped my mind apart.
From age twelve until about age sixteen I mowed lawns for my dad, the sole help he had running an under-the-table landscaping business. I operated massive industrial-grade equipment. I loaded heavy self-propelled mowers in and out of trucks. I sustained big burns on my legs, from overheated leaf blowers, and had huge gashes cut into my shins by weed whackers. But the real torment of the job was spending so much time alone with a man who felt entitled to the deepest contours of my psyche, and who behaved as if my love was all that permitted him to stay alive.
In the car, on the way to customers’ houses, my dad would rant and rave and cry at me. He talked about his divorce from my mother, and sobbed, and speculated she might accuse him of being sexually inappropriate with me in order to win sole custody. While on the job, he’d berate me if I made even a tiny mistake edging the lawns or trimming the hedges. When he paid me for my labor, he suggested I sock the funds away in a private bank account my mom couldn’t access. He wanted me to create a secluded world separate from everyone else but him. He said I was the only person who could understand him, the only one who ever forgave his rages and outbursts.
When I was applying to college, I said in my application essay that I wanted to be a psychology major because I had so much experience being an informal therapist to my dad. It took me years to realize how sick that thinking really was. I prided myself on being a good listener, on being the one person reasonable enough to tolerate him. But after every conversation with him I retreated to my room to scream into a pillow and hit myself in the head with the heel of my hand. I hated him, and loved him, and felt myself turning more and more into him every day. I wanted to save him, and I was haunted by how much he needed me.
When I was sixteen, I decided to stop taking his calls. I was sick of having to absorb his every mood and fleeting, paranoid thought. After a week or two of not hearing from me, my dad left an incredibly cruel voicemail. I changed my last name and told my mother I wanted nothing to do with him. And we never spoke, not ever again.
He died a little while later. He’d stopped managing his diabetes, just like he never treated his cerebral palsy, just like he’d refused to quit smoking, just like he’d refused to ever get an actual therapist. His body sat alone, undiscovered in his home for a couple of days. That fact haunted me for years. It was my fault, I was certain. By asserting a boundary, I had destroyed a man’s entire world. I would not make that mistake again. I wouldn’t let myself be a murderer again.
…
My rapist seemed fine in the last few emails we exchanged. His sense of humor had always been bleak, but after a few months he was flirting and talking about his career again. I thought he was fine. So, when he asked one day if I wanted to meet up, I felt okay about shutting him down. I told him our friendship, like our fuckbuddy arrangement, was over, and that while I wished him the best, I never wanted to see him again. I said it gently, never calling him a rapist. And then I blocked him, so I wouldn’t be tempted to be too kind again.
For a couple months afterward, I kept tabs on him by doing regular Youtube searches for his name. New recordings of his live performances were always popping up. I saw he’d left for Los Angeles with hopes of booking bigger venues. I saw he’d befriended a few bigger names in the comedy scene. I dreaded one day seeing him on late night TV. It seemed likely to happen. He really was talented.
…
There were other men in the ensuing years, who noticed my penchant for saving sad boys and put on elaborate performances of despair. Like Phillip, the boyfriend whose graduate school progress had stalled until I allowed him to copy the concept behind my own Master’s Thesis. I loved Phillip because he was smart and deeply unhappy. Every problem that came into his life was mine to solve. If his bike got stolen, I had to help find it. When multiple academic advisors dumped him, I had to get him a new one. After all, it wasn’t fair I had a bike, and an advisor that didn’t hate me.
Phillip stole money from me, sexually assaulted me, and turned increasingly violent. I had to cut him out of my life in order to save myself. A few days after I dumped him, he got arrested for angrily hurling a trashcan into the side of a bus. Once his jail term ended, he got fired from one tech job after another because he kept lying about his credentials. Then he wound up on the street. For all of this, he blamed me. And truth be told, I was deeply tormented by all of the awful things that happened to him. The police brutalized him in jail and hospitalized him with a concussion. I had never called the cops on him, not even when he broke into my apartment and threatened me; I’m an abolitionist and it’s not something I would ever bring myself to do. Yet I felt responsible for his fate. I should have been looking after him better.
Then there was Ethan, the writer I met online who started off trading story drafts with me, but then began to bombard my inbox with increasingly disturbing suicide threats. As I had with my rapist, I spent countless evenings keeping him company from afar. I was well practiced at it by that point. I didn’t want his death hanging on my heart.
Then one day Ethan showed up in my city. He’d moved there abruptly to be closer to me. He told me he went to bed each night clutching a pillow and dreaming about our love. I stopped talking to him because I was terrified. As soon as I did, he started making posts online accusing me of having manipulated and misled him.
Whenever he lost a job, alienated a roommate, or had an intense depressive episode, Ethan wrote me long rants implying it was all my fault. He said I was a charmer, a liar, and an abuser. He claimed I had exploited him by pretending to care, then showing with my actions that my care had a limit. And I kind of believed it, because it was in line with how my life always went. I assumed I must be a terrible person. That only reinforced my desperation to earn my right to be alive through the saving of somebody else.
…
Every man who has ever mistreated me has come to incredible misfortune afterward. I don’t think many survivors can say something like that. It’s a really strange and dubious bit of good fortune to have. And for years I thought this good luck (which didn’t feel good at all) absolutely had to be my fault. My boundaries were dangerous. When I refused to give someone my attention, I destroyed their whole world. There was no way to tell the difference between a safe limit and a cruel one. I was a murderer each time I put myself first.
This kind of thinking got me in a whole lot of trouble. If you think saying “no” to someone will end their life, you wind up saying yes to a lot of unreasonable things. It made me resent every single person I spent time with. I felt debased by others’ needs, like a crumpled up tissue filled with decades of snot.
It was impossible to turn down a request. It was evil to have a self. I was in a codependent relationship with everyone. And every time I broke down and became physically or mentally incapable of meeting someone’s needs, it caused me to panic. To fail someone else was to consign them to die.
…
I got sick. Really sick. So sick I had to spend every evening on the couch, covered in blankets and shivering. I got a 103 degree fever every night for nearly nine months. It took the majority of the year to figure out what was wrong with me, and a litany of heart scans and blood tests. Doctors ruled out things like mono, lupus, and rheumatoid arthritis. I had a heart murmur and very little iron in my blood.
Ultimately, the only conclusion doctors made was that I was exhausted. I had to work less, do less, disappoint people. I spent a lot of time alone that year, refeeding myself and watching music videos in the dark. I got to thinking about who I really was. And I started writing about my dad, and the fucked up way he’d treated me. Gradually my energy levels began to improve.
In the late fall, on a rare day of sunshine and warmth, I took a walk through Lincoln Park with my friend Rick. We were both relieved I was feeling well enough to socialize for once. He asked what I’d been up to and I told him about the thoughts I’d been having about my dad, how I was rethinking the narrative that his death was my fault. Rick and I had known one another for years at that point, but I’d never told him the details of how my dad had treated me. The way he’d leeched off of me, insulted me, emotionally used me up. As soon as I started spelling it out, Rick began crying.
“You had to stop being around him,” Rick told me suddenly. We paused in the middle of the lakefront path, looking one another in the face. “You absolutely had to get away from that.”
“I guess,” I muttered back, still feeling guilty.
“Imagine how your life would be if he were still in it.”
I had never thought about that before, somehow. My dad’s entitlement to my time and attention would have only become more all-consuming. His inappropriate remarks and impulsive actions would have only put me at greater and greater risk. Being around him would have slowly ruined my life; there was never any other way it would have gone.
“I am better off without him in my life,” I admitted. “If I’d stayed around him, it would have really fucked me up even more. But it feels so horrible to say.”
“It’s not horrible,” Rick told me, “It’s a good thing. I’m so proud of you for refusing to be treated that way. That kind of self-respect in a teenager is a really big deal.”
By then I was sobbing too. Somehow, his words revealed to me how absurd my thinking on this topic had always been. Blaming a sixteen-year-old for the death of a fifty-year-old man made no sense. I was a child. A child who was made to act like a therapist. What he’d done to me was awful. It was okay that I got free. Every other boundary that I’d set with an overly demanding or downright abusive man was okay too. No, it was all more than okay. It was beautiful. It was a thing to be proud of.
“I’m really glad you got away from him,” Rick said again, and I accepted his embrace, blubbering into his chest and leaving streaks of mucous on the front of his jacket. My heart was flooded with unfathomable relief.
…
A few nights after that conversation with Rick, I decided to do a Youtube search for my rapist for the first time in years.
This time a video popped up that I’d never seen before. It wasn’t a stand-up set, or a sketch comedy performance he was in. It was an hour-long eulogy in a black box theater. My rapist was dead. He’d been dead for several years. In the video, local performers traded memories of him and recited some of his old bits. A relative came to the stage to read some of my rapist’s old emails, reflecting fondly on his sardonic wit. I watched the whole video sitting upright in bed. The date of my rapist’s death was just three short months after I’d last spoken to him.
Watching my rapist’s funeral play out on the screen, I didn’t feel ashamed or disturbed the way I expected to. I could no longer entertain the delusion that any of it was my fault. I just felt sad for him. He had been so young. Like my dad, and Phillip, and Ethan, this man’s life had come apart horrifically, and I’d gotten hurt trying to help him hold it together. But it never had anything to do with me. It was just an awful reality I needed to respond to, and eventually protect myself from.
Instead of my usual survivor’s guilt, I was consumed with a sorrowful gratitude toward my younger self. They’d tried to balance compassion for others with respect for themselves, and thanks to them, I’d come through it all with a chance at a new life. Past me had proven unable to save the lives of the men who had abused them, but that should have never been their responsibility. I could mourn the loss and suffering of these men without holding myself responsible for it.
I had never been a murderer. I’d just refused to die for somebody else.