Planning the First @ReclaimYourVoice Event || For our first event, I decided to invite three speakers to share their stories. I planned to share my own story as well because I couldn’t ask anyone to do anything that I myself was unwilling to do. I approached three incredible women I knew who had each experienced some form of abuse. Although I strongly believed in this idea, my nerves began to kick in when it came time to ask if they’d be willing to share their stories publicly. I was worried that my proposition might come across as intrusive or insensitive, but all three of them caught me off guard by immediately agreeing to share their stories. @cher.bear8 was one of the women I invited to speak. I knew her through my photography work and had photographed her many times over the course of 10 years. Her excitement about speaking at this event surprised me completely. When I asked her why she seemed so eager to share something so deeply personal with a room full of people, she said that the only opportunity she’d ever had to share her story was within the cold and unfeeling confines of a courtroom while a defense attorney picked apart every detail of her disclosure and did everything he could to make her doubt herself. At our event she would have the opportunity to share her story―her truth―in a room full of supportive people without being interrupted, questioned or contested. I had a lack of knowledge and experience in this field, but Cher’s enthusiastic response to this opportunity strengthened my confidence in this idea, and started to give me a sense of how complex and multifaceted trauma and healing was. I recalled a quote from Mother Teresa that said, “I will never attend an anti-war rally; if you have a peace rally, invite me.” I’d been learning more and more about the importance of choosing words that focus on the outcome one hoped to achieve instead of on what one did not want, so I made the decision that this event was to be held not in the name of the war against abuse, but in the name of peace and healing for all.
The Idea That Changed My Life || My awakening inspired within me the longing to bring hope to people’s lives, but I didn’t know exactly how I was going to do it until one evening a short while later. I was hanging out with @tungztwisted when he put on the movie Exit Through The Gift Shop, Banksy’s Academy Award nominated documentary. I knew very little about Banksy at the time and I rarely watch movies, so I was unenthused about it and my mind began to drift before he even pressed play. But in the opening credits alone, these lyrics by @RichardHawley hit me like a bolt of lightning: “Those people, they got nothing in their souls And they make our TVs blind us From our vision and our goals Oh, the trigger of time it tricks you So you have no way to grow But do you know that tonight the streets are ours These lights in our hearts they tell no lies.” All of a sudden this film had my full attention. I’d never heard music like that, music with a message trying to awaken people. But then again my awakening had only recently happened and my eyes and ears were newly opened to receiving messages like these. As the movie progressed, I watched as these street artists used their art to create powerful messages of rebellion, subversion and disruption. That’s when it clicked for me and I sat straight up. Sean noticed this and intuitively, brilliantly, handed me a notepad and a pencil and said, “Write.” And I did. I couldn’t stop the ideas from flowing and couldn’t seem to write them all down fast enough.
Finally it all came together: I was going to create what I called a ‘humanitarian street art project’, using my art to anonymously create messages that would inspire hope. I knew that so many people in this world were hurting and I wanted to do something to let them know someone cared about them; I had learned firsthand that there was something so powerful about being on the receiving end of unexpected kindness, specifically when it was coming from a stranger. The project came to be called ‘500 random acts of beauty: the pursuit of positive change through beautiful thinking’ and I committed to dreaming up and executing 500 acts that would add positivity to the world, even if it took me my whole life to do them. In fact I hoped it would take me my whole life, because that meant it would keep my mind in a state of looking for opportunities to do so―a state of beautiful thinking. Most of all what I hoped was that it would create a ripple effect, that when someone was on the receiving end of one of these acts of kindness, they would be inspired to do the same for someone else, the same way woman at the train station in New York had done for me. It was this idea and the decision to act on it that completely altered the course of my life.
I was still haunted by my experiences and around this time I entered into a phase where the question “Why me?” played in my head over and over again. “Why me? Why did he do this to me? Why me, when all I did was love him?” There was a sense of stuckness, an inability to move forward as I struggled to make sense of why all of this had happened. I cried out years worth of tears and journalled constantly but even with all the release, the same question continued to persist: “Why me?”
And then one day something clicked. I began to consider his life and personal history and realized that he was a product of the environment in which he grew up, and that it really wasn’t about me at all. It was healing for me to see that his behaviour came from his own place of pain, and there was nothing I had done to bring it on, nothing about me that had warranted such cruel treatment. I didn’t cause it in him, nor could I have ended it. I’d gotten a sense of at least some of his pain when I was first getting to know him, and it influenced my initial decisions to not leave him; I didn’t want to abandon him during a rough phase in his life. But in an attempt to bring peace to the war within him, I had gotten caught in the crossfire.
Shortly after leaving LO, I went out on a date. A few days after that I started talking to someone else. And a month or so after that I got into a relationship with someone new altogether. I rushed into situations in pursuit of the experience of love and happiness I’d felt robbed of with LO, unaware of how deeply his actions had actually impacted me. I thought I’d left at the first incident of abuse, since I’d ended things the moment he hit me; I had no idea that I’d just experienced three years of psychological violence.
The new relationship was great at first because David was loving and devoted. But when I was with him I found myself acting in ways I hadn’t before. I was on edge. I was reactive. Needy. Possessive. It was a major trigger for me if he in any way displayed inconsistent behavior because that was a warning sign I’d once ignored, to detrimental consequences. LO had acted like such a nice person initially and I’d failed to detect the imminent abuse―what if my judgment was wrong about David as well? How could I trust that he too would not transform into Mr. Hyde the moment I let down my guards? I had no idea how to feel stable or safe and with the ongoing tug of war within me between wanting to trust him and feeling too terrified to do so, I constantly felt like I was on the verge of losing my mind.
With the traumatic memories playing on repeat, I became vigilant at all times for any sign that I might be in danger, in an effort to protect myself from going through the same things again. Although in a sense it felt safer for me to stay in this state of readiness, I was actually revisiting the trauma over and over again as I constantly scanned my environment for its warning signs.
This describes so perfectly what my ex narcissist did to me, using all the intimate details if my life I had shared with them against me as ammunition for the smear campaign right from the very beginning when I was still completely unaware of what was happening. Assassinating my character behind my back while somehow taking ownership of all my good qualities, adding them to his fake facade. And how people I thought were life long friends turned their backs on me.
I needed to see this again to remind myself of what really happened. My memory gets fuzzy and sometimes confused about the reality of the situation because it was so traumatizing I think. But I need to always remember.
This describes so perfectly what my ex narcissist did to me, using all the intimate details if my life I had shared with them against me as ammunition for the smear campaign right from the very beginning when I was still completely unaware of what was happening. Assassinating my character behind my back while somehow taking ownership of all my good qualities, adding them to his fake facade. And how people I thought were life long friends turned their backs on me.
