Idiot
The unseen diary that left me questioning my memory, my behaviour, and eventually my own sanity. This is the story of what happened when the truth finally came out.
There is a story from the end of my marriage that makes me laugh now. It even made me laugh for a brief moment at the time.
But before I tell you why, I need you to understand something.
Before I laughed, I genuinely thought I was losing my mind.
Not metaphorically.
I genuinely began to wonder whether I was having episodes I couldn't remember. Whether I was saying or doing terrible things and somehow blacking them out. Whether I was becoming someone I didn't recognise.
I considered going to my doctor because I thought something might be seriously wrong with me.
And eventually, it became darker than that.
I became so frightened by the possibility that I might secretly be the terrible person I was being told I was that there were moments when I wondered whether it would be better if I simply wasn't here.
All because of a diary I wasn't allowed to read.
Seven Months Earlier
The story actually begins before I knew the diary existed.
At Christmas, desperately wanting to save my marriage, I read a relationship book.
Its advice essentially moved through stages: talk to your partner, write the letter, get angry if nothing changes, and, eventually, step back.
Stop dragging the relationship forward alone.
Give the other person the space to step towards you.
I realised I had already done the earlier stages.
I had talked.
I had written.
I had pleaded.
I had become angry.
I had tried.
And tried.
And tried.
So I did the final thing.
I stepped back.
And I waited.
It took approximately seven months for him to step forward.
Eventually he asked me:
“Are you in this marriage or not?”
It led to a huge conversation about us, our marriage, and where we went from there.
Everything was finally on the table.
Or so I thought.
Because then he told me something I wasn't expecting.
He had been keeping a diary about me in those 7 months that I had stepped back. He had noticed the distance but, as I understood it, hadn't addressed it with me. Instead, he had been writing things down.
I remember thinking:
What the f*ck?
So I asked the obvious question.
What had I done?
But he wouldn't tell me.
“It's Too Bad to Tell You”
That evening I kept asking, pleading, in fact.
If everything was finally on the table, then put this on the table too.
Tell me. So I can understand, take accountability, change...
But I was told that what I had done was so bad that he couldn't.
So terrible.
So disgusting.
So hurtful.
Too painful to talk about.
What did I do?
"I can't tell you."
Then how am I supposed to understand any of this?
"It's too bad to disclose."
He left two days later (that's another blog in itself!) and through the conversations and communication that followed, the same accusation remained:
The way you've behaved was appalling.
If you knew what you'd done.
But still, he wouldn't actually tell me.
And that was where my mind began to unravel.
Because if somebody you love repeatedly tells you that you have done something absolutely terrible but refuses to tell you what it is, your brain doesn't necessarily leave a blank space.
Mine didn't.
Mine filled the space with monsters.
I Started Investigating Myself.
I went through everything.
Every conversation I could remember.
Every argument.
Every occasion when I had challenged something.
I would sit for hours replaying things in my head.
What had I said?
What had I done?
Had I completely lost control at some point?
Was I getting into some state where I did things and didn't remember them afterwards?
Had I screamed something horrific at him?
Had I thrown something?
Broken something?
Damaged something?
I actually started looking around for evidence.
Was anything broken that I couldn't account for?
Was something damaged?
Was there physical proof somewhere of this apparently terrible version of me that I couldn't remember being?
Then I'd go through it all again.
Day after day.
Week after week.
Trying to find her.
This woman he apparently knew existed, but I couldn't remember being.
And slowly the question changed.
It stopped being:
What is he talking about?
And became:
What is wrong with me? What have I done?
That's the part that frightens me when I look back.
I stopped questioning the accusation.
I started questioning myself.
Maybe I Needed Help
I seriously considered going to my GP.
I thought perhaps something was happening to me that I needed medical help for.
But even imagining that conversation tied my mind in knots.
Me: I think I'm doing things I can't remember.
Dr: What things?
Me: I don't know.
Dr: Why do you think you're doing them?
Me: Because my husband says I've done terrible things.
Dr: What terrible things?
Me: He won't tell me.
I didn't even have an actual accusation to take to a doctor. Perhaps they would have recognised what I would later come to understand as gaslighting. By then, I had begun to believe, without knowing what I had supposedly done, that there might be something terribly wrong with me.
And eventually my thoughts became very dark.
Because I started wondering:
If I really had done something that bad...
If I was capable of something so disgusting it couldn't even be spoken aloud...
If I could hurt someone that badly and not even remember doing it...
What kind of person did that make me?
There were moments when I thought perhaps I didn't want to find out.
There were moments when I wondered whether everyone might be better off if I simply wasn't here.
That is why I tell this story.
Because psychological abuse can become dangerous without leaving a single visible mark.
By that point, nobody needed to convince me that I was terrible anymore.
I was doing it to myself.
The Diary Came Into Counselling
Eventually we began marriage counselling.
And the diary came into the room with us.
Not physically.
But it may as well have been sitting between us.
I begged him to tell me what was in it over several sessions.
How could we possibly work on our marriage while this enormous unnamed accusation existed?
I remember saying:
I can't put something right if you won't tell me what I've done.
Even in counselling, the issue of withholding this information was challenged. My memory of those sessions is that the difficulty of trying to work with accusations that hadn't actually been explained was acknowledged.
Still, he wouldn't tell me.
We spent the counselling sessions going around and around it.
Until eventually, in a later session, I reached my limit.
This had to stop.
Whatever the terrible truth was, I needed to hear it.
Just tell me.
And finally, he did.
The Evidence
He had recorded things like:
The last time I kissed him.
The last time I sent him an affectionate text.
The last time I opened the front door for him.
The last time I made him a coffee in the morning.
The last time I initiated s*x.
The last time I held his hand.
And the list went on.
I sat listening.
And slowly I realised something.
This wasn't a catalogue of horrific things I had done.
It wasn't about things I had done at all.
It was a record of things I had stopped doing for him.
Affection.
Attention.
Acts of service.
The very things that had naturally changed when I stopped carrying the relationship and stepped back to see whether he would step towards me.
And then came the big one.
The terrible behaviour.
The thing that apparently demonstrated just how awful I had become.
Buckle up for this one.... I did...
I had called him an idiot.
Twice.
In front of the children.
And I laughed.
I actually laughed. (You may be laughing now too! I wouldn't blame you!)
The Laughter Was Relief
I don't think we should make a habit of calling our partners idiots in front of our children; I'll accept that.
If he'd simply said:
You called me an idiot in front of the kids. That hurt me.
That would have been something real to discuss.
I could hear it.
I could understand it.
I could apologise for it.
But that wasn't why I laughed.
I laughed because months of terror suddenly left my body.
That's it?
That was what I had been searching for?
That was why I'd wondered whether I was having blackouts?
That was why I'd looked around my own home for things I might have smashed and somehow forgotten?
That was why I'd considered asking a doctor whether something was wrong with my mind?
That was the terrible person I had spent months trying to find?
I called you an idiot twice?
I laughed because, suddenly, I knew.
I wasn't deranged.
I wasn't secretly living some second life that disappeared from my memory.
I wasn't committing terrible acts and somehow erasing them from my mind.
I had spent months searching for a monster.
And finally somebody turned the light on.
There wasn't one.
You Cannot Defend Yourself Against Nothing
That's the part of this story that matters most to me now.
An accusation you cannot see is almost impossible to defend yourself against.
You can't reflect on it.
You can't challenge it.
You can't explain it.
You can't apologise for it.
You can't repair it.
And if you're repeatedly told that the evidence exists but that it's simply too terrible to show you, eventually you may start supplying the evidence yourself.
You interrogate your memories.
You question your reactions.
You examine your character.
You stop asking:
Is this true?
And begin asking:
What if they're right?
That is what happened to me.
And that's why I no longer think psychological abuse should ever be minimised simply because nobody has been physically touched.
Your relationship with your own reality matters.
Your ability to trust your memory matters.
Your confidence in your perception matters.
Your sense of who you are matters.
Because when you gradually lose confidence in those things, the consequences can be devastating.
I know.
I reached a point where I wasn't frightened of him.
I was frightened of myself.
I Know Who I Am Now
There is another conversation to be had about accountability in relationships.
About the things we tolerate.
The excuses we make.
The ways we over-give.
The moments we abandon our own needs while desperately trying to keep something together.
That's a story for another day.
This story is about something else.
It's about what happened when somebody else's version of me became louder than my own.
I know now what I couldn't know then.
I wasn't having blackouts.
I wasn't secretly smashing things.
I wasn't doing terrible things and erasing them from my memory.
I wasn't deranged.
I wasn't losing my mind.
But I had become frightened enough by what was happening to believe that I might be.
And perhaps that's why the word idiot can make me laugh now.
Because underneath that ridiculous little word is one of the most frightening periods of my life.
A period when I searched my own mind for evidence that I was a terrible person.
A period when I came frighteningly close to believing perhaps the world would be better without me in it.
And then, eventually, the great terrible evidence was dragged into the light.
One word: "idiot".
Some coffees I hadn't made.
A hand I hadn't held.
A kiss I hadn't given.
And absolutely no evidence that I was losing my mind.
The laughter wasn't cruelty.
It was relief.
And If You Won't Tell Me...
There is one more thing I know now.
If somebody tells me I've hurt them, I'll listen.
If I've said or done something that needs owning, I'll own it.
If I've got something wrong, I'll apologise.
But if somebody tells me there's a problem and then chooses not to tell me what it is?
I won't fill in the blanks for them anymore.
I won't spend hours replaying conversations.
I won't search my memory for something terrible I might have done.
I won't invent possibilities.
I won't beg them to tell me.
And I certainly won't create a story in the silence and automatically make myself the villain in it.
If somebody chooses not to communicate with me, that is their choice.
I know what I have said.
I know what I have done.
I know my intentions.
And I know myself well enough now to recognise when something genuinely belongs to me — and when somebody is asking me to carry something they won't even name.
I spent far too long believing that another person's silence meant there must be something wrong with me.
It doesn't.
So these days, if there's something you believe I need to know, tell me.
I'll meet you in an honest conversation.
But if you choose not to?
I will not destroy my own peace trying to finish a story you refused to tell me.
I don't need to anymore.
I know who I am.
Love Molly x
