THE DOG NEEDS WATER - (AB PV SV DA SS)

First, a "don't pull the trigger" warning!

Please be advised the following subjects are included: Domestic violence - Abusive behavior - Coercive control - Mental distress - Drug and alcohol abuse - Victium blaming.

Last night I looked through all of my streaming services, and I have pretty much got them all, from Apple TV to Netflix, iPLAYER to Disney+, and back again. I was looking for a documentary about domestic violence. I didn’t find one.

I found a documentary about PTSD in three men who served in a war zone.

I found three different documentaries about men falsely accused of rape.

There was one teenage-based, light discussion entitled ‘Is this coercive control?’.

But not one story of domestic violence. Not one victim story, not one explanation from a perpetrator, no documentary about a prosecution, not a single discussion of the situation at all. Do you think we have a problem with talking about it as a society? - I do. I know.

As a victim of domestic violence, I cannot tell you how many times I have been silenced, hushed, and erased by my abuser and all of you. My abuser took control of my social media at one point, making sure my last avenue to expression was shut down. When I was free from him, you all started trying to do the same.

‘Don’t put that on Facebook’ was all I ever heard. 

Does it offend you? Is it too challenging? Or do you simply not want to face what I had to? When I was in some of the lowest moments of my struggle, when I was unable to function on a basic human level, I remember one very dear friend coming to my home and saying, “You can’t sit around like this; it’s not good for you. Things need doing; look at his bowl; the dog needs water, you know!”

I know.

I don’t need you to tell me the dog needs water. I know the dog needs water.

I know he also needs good food, twice a day at regular times. I know he needs a walk once a day and probably two half-hour playtimes as well, so he feels happy and part of a family. I know I have to pick up his shit from the yard too, but I am used to that, trust me.

I also know I need to make sure I have more water, drink less whiskey directly from the bottle, and I know I need to avoid drugs and painkillers that just take my mind off things for a few hours, just like the dog I need to eat. I know it should be three healthy meals a day, not just one packet of crisps in four days.

I know I need to shower daily too, brush my teeth, change my clothes, and spend time meditating, getting out for several brisk walks and fresh air, and I know I need to start ‘getting on with things’. I know it isn’t helping to cut myself trying to mask the pain of what they did.

I know I need to take my already prescribed medicines daily, and you suggest I now apparently need to add another tablet from the doctor to make me forget more of this stuff. I know that means telling more people and feeling ashamed.

I know I need to get eight hours of good sleep. I know I need to stop thinking about it, but I can’t.

I know I need a doctor's appointment and to see the optician to get some new glasses so I can see better. I know I need to pay the bills, pay the rent, see my therapist, and pay for that, and I already know I need to find some way to explain all this to my Universal credit worker, who hardly speaks any English. Then I know I have to restart the entire Job Seekers process because I missed my appointment when I was too scared to leave the house. I know I need to do this in the hope that I might get a meager few quid so I can struggle on.

In my spare time, I know I need to get out and make new friends, take on new hobbies, and ‘get myself out there’ again. I know the house needs cleaning, the washing up needs doing and putting away, and I know the sheets need changing and the floors need hoovering. I know the rotting food in the fridge needs throwing out. 

I know that when I get five minutes, I also need to close bank accounts, shut down SIM cards, and collect money from a person I can’t ever contact. I know I need to make sure there is money on the electric so that I can purge my phone, lap top, and devices of any connection to the man that my brain is still complexly in love with, but I also hate with a passion that I know is destroying me. I know it feels like my heart has been ripped out by his inhumane actions, and the hole that’s left is too big to ever fill. I very much know he walked away, leaving me all this, rather than just stopping his abusive behavior. I also know he is still here and always will be.

I know the spare room needs sorting out, I know ironing needs doing, and I know I have to battle over tenancy agreements with more extreme pain and humiliation for me. I know I have years ahead of me trying to even begin to process all this and create an entirely new me and life that I do not want to have because I know it does not contain the things I have wanted since I was born. I know I am not coming to this new life; a different me is making that journey.

I know I have to do all of this with no family support and no friends but you. I know I have to do every single fucking thing on this list and a billion more that follow with no confidence, unable to even comprehend small tasks. I know I have to do it with no energy, with no self-respect, with no self-worth. I know I have to do it with no escape from it all, with no income to pay for it all, and no interest in doing a fucking single thing of it. I know I have to take all these steps with the fear that every single person is his friend, that no one believes me, and that he could be around every corner, in every shop, and behind every unknown number. I know he won't be there, but I know despite that, he still controls my life.

So, how about this? What do you know?

Like, did you know that over two million of us go through this every year in the UK?

Do you know that of those two million people being abused, only around fifty thousand domestic abuse-related prosecutions ever take place? That’s almost two million of us silenced, hushed, and swept away, while the few who get legal justice vanish from your collective consciousness. You can’t find their stories on TV, and your friends won’t tell you they exist. Despite increased awareness and involvement from police forces across the UK, there has been no change in the number of offenses, or prosecutions, for many years.

Did you know around one point-four million women's and seven hundred and fifty-thousand men's struggles are erased by you every year?

Did you realize that around 25% of all relationships in the UK experience domestic violence every year? That's 3.5% of the men and 7.9% of all the women you meet. Did you know that?

Did you know that for every three victims of domestic violence in the UK, two will be women, and one will be a man, like me?

Did you know that it is believed that well over 25% of LGBT+ relationships in the UK experience domestic violence each year, with projections up to 35% possible?. This is currently a severely underreported crime due to perceived and valid homophobia, so no one is really sure. Did you know that?

We are your friends, your neighbors, and your family, and we are strangers. We are the silent shame of the UK.

Well, I won't take your shame for you, just like I won’t take theirs for them.

Because I know the dog needs water. But here is my question. Have you told him that?

Have you said one word to the abusers?

Even when they stood there and said, to your face, and whilst I could hear them shouting in the street for my neighbor's benefit, “I hope he fucking dies." Did you tell them the dog needs water then?

Did any single one of the people who sat back and told me I was making it up, paranoid, overthinking, that I needed to try harder or compromise, or reminded me that I was too controlling and just needed to relax more? Did all the people who said to me, ‘He’s lovely’, go tell him the dog needs water?

You stood there too.

You could be my friend, my ex-partner, my neighbor, a stranger passing on the street, a girl in a shop, a taxi driver, the waitress, the nameless face who walked on past, but you are all of us, and I am all of you.

You let him speak about me like I was dirt, nothing, and I didn’t matter. Who would be upset by my suffering, right? Apparently no one, because no one cares when it's time to tackle these people; they just want the victims to shut up, don’t make them aware of their part in it, and pretend it wasn’t happening. Why the fuck do you all seem to think you are blameless in this and everything should fall on me?

I KNOW you are all partly responsible, as much as I am, to have accepted it, but do you KNOW?

This is the reason I am here in my life today, and you all need to know. Because I let him speak to me like that for years, and now I believe it. I let him do that to me, and I thought I deserved it.

That I am useless, worthless, and pointless, and no one would be even slightly agitated if I did not exist. Nearly all the people I once knew would rather just pretend that the past years I lived did not happen or that I don’t exist now. If I had not gotten away from it, that is very much a possibility. On average, two people are killed every single week in the U.K. due to domestic violence. Did you know that?

Because I know the dog needs water.

Whoever you are, if I confided in you about him, I told you he had physically attacked me three times. That he’d pushed me to the ground and raised his fist to my face. If I told you he nearly broke my arm, and I told you he had assaulted me in our home. Maybe you're the person who said, 'Well, he only had his hands around your throat once’, or are you the person who, when mad at me, said, ‘You deserve what he did to you?" If you were the one who I told I was worried it was happening but was confused and unsure, or you are my employer, who still had his photo from that Christmas do on the wall of our office—even after you knew what he did to me.

If you were any of these people, I forgive you; I don’t blame you; I blame him. But, to this day, between you and him, he is the only one who has offered an apology for his part in this. 

Sure, it was a limp, a vague attempt to gain some forgiveness and ease the voices in his own head, but he admits it happened in some small way. You are all whitewashing the story of my life. You are whitewashing your own shame.

And when I crawled out of that nightmare of many years, I was trying to piece a shattered life back together. The day I came to explain to people who I lost contact with that I wasn’t ignoring them; I was being abused, beaten, and suffocated. When I was explaining my humiliating story to them, what were you doing?

You were sitting with my abuser and his new love in their new house, having drinks and smiling on social media. You were whispering tales of disbelief, spreading unsure thoughts, and telling tales of exaggeration. You were liking his status of ‘Lost my man—it just didn’t work out’. You were wishing him well; you were befriending his new lover, guiding him into the trap I barely escaped. You were making friends with his next victim, and you knew that.

Do you have any idea how much that hurt me? To witness the lack of care you all had. No one believed me because of you. Because you didn’t want to believe it, you chose to carry on the norm rather than accept the beast. Well, I didn’t have a choice in those years; I had to accept both in my life. The beast was the norm.

Even when I plucked up the courage and told you calmly that was unhelpful, you began confrontation with me until I snapped your head off with reality! He was an abuser who attacked me, and you didn’t believe me! You are not the only one, by a long shot, but you are one of many.

So as I accept that the dog needs water, hopefully you now know that you need to go tell him that the dog needs water, too.

Whilst your there, why don’t you tell him how disgusting it is to speak like he did, how ashamed you are that you didn’t say anything at the time, and how you think he’s a liar and an abuser who has deliberately or intentionally, with knowledge, controlled, coerced, and beaten down another human being who is worth so much more than him, and he needs to do every single fucking thing he can to make this as easy as he can for me to get through this.

Tell him he can pay my bills for six months so that I could recover, and that he needed to sort all the accounts we had connected, close everything that links us, pay off his bills, and get rid of the shit he’s left behind. Tell him you won't allow me to go to the tip for him or to walk his dog once a day. Tell him he should pay for the car he damaged, and he needs to do it all and not contact me and never let his presence cloud my future again.

Tell him to his face he would be lucky if I allowed him to get down on the floor and grovel through dog shit and broken glass, in the vain hope I’d listen to him apologize for breaking me into a million pieces when he knew I was a good person and he was doing wrong.

Tell him he just didn’t give a shit about me.

He won't do a single thing, will he? Of course not; I know that. But that isn’t what it's about. This is about you and your apology, your penance, your purgatory. 

I understand that, just like I understood the dog needed water. So if you're asking me to do that simple task to start moving forward and show that I can start again with better awareness of what's around me, then maybe you should do that too.

NB: The above work is based on various people's words who appeared in my life at different stages. Although very much a factual piece, it would be unhelpful to make assumptions about individuals contained in the article. You don’t know; that is the point of the above. No one person can be blamed; we are all partaking.