Status Quo — unRootedblog

By Abigail Hunt

Fitting in was never my intention. I was just as interested in getting muddy as I was wearing tutus to dance class. My hair was never as long as the other little girls I grew up with. I liked it short. In eighth grade, I cut my hair short, really short. I didn’t think about the implications of it, what people might think, I wanted to be like Audrey Hepburn.

The next year, high school brought on a type of scrutiny I didn’t expect. Girls would laugh and point at my hair, “do you want to be a boy or are you a lesbian?”

So, I let my hair grow. I let my hair grow to fit in.

Raised in the small mountains of Tennessee, situated in the Bible belt, there a lot of things people don’t talk about, so I started running instead of talking. The sweat dripped down my face, my tears in-tow. I ran and ran. I crumpled into a ball on the grass. I kept telling myself that I was being dramatic. Pulling my now dark hair out of the band than held it in a ponytail, I stood up and looked around.

I thought it would make me feel different. To stand in the place where I was raped. In a graveyard. I wanted to bury my feelings like the grave we lay on that night, when I said no and he said yes, when he told me take off my hoody, so he could wipe himself off on it. I was a junior in high school; I was 16 years old. I didn’t know how to talk about it.

Starting my senior year of high school I was a depressed brunette, with hair long enough to qualify as pretty. I learned how to fix it. How to curl it and put it up in a bun. It maintained the status quo.

I didn’t know how to tell anyone. I had told my mom, that I was raped, I mean. My mom is a wonderful mother, but she was not equipped to cope with that kind of truth. So, when I met someone new in my senior year of high school, someone who needed me, who was more “messed up” than me, I jumped at the opportunity and called it love, a relationship.

He was a different breed of human, outgoing, ADHD, charismatic as the day is long, deceptive, addicted to drugs, and deeply obsessive. Several of these qualities I was unaware of for quite some time. He asked my mom’s permission to date me and so it began. We had sex for the first time in the back of his car. I was still a novice. He was nervous.

I don’t know when it all began, things unravelling. Dating someone who is truly out of control made me feel crazy. I started reigning things in—controlling the only thing I could, myself. I set out with good intentions, just trying to be healthy. I became vegan. The more things that happened between him and I, the less I ate. I was doing gymnastics at the time and spent hours stretching and doing high intensity exercises, burning more calories than I consumed. At one point I was eating 400 calories per day or less.

He was constantly around. Constantly controlling. He was the first person I had an orgasm with, the first person I felt that I loved. I know now that it wasn’t love. He raped me, often. At the time, I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know it was rape. I didn’t understand that I could be in a relationship with someone, “love” someone and still be raped by them.

I dyed my hair black my second semester, people called me Snow White. It started falling out though, my hair and my relationship.

My back was flat on my bed. My mind was running laps in and out of hell. The sounds of his choking, sobbing, and groping hands rang in my soul. When I awoke, it was too late. I was so busy keeping a drug addict from hurting himself, that I had forgotten to care for myself, months of forgetting. I found myself in a soaking bed, my brain was struggling, my own bodily functions were no longer under my control.

The tears burned from shame as I tore my sheets off, I sobbed from frustration and exhaustion. All I wanted was dreamless sleep. I soaked up what I could from my bed and pulled off the wet clothes hanging on my skeletal frame.

My body felt foreign, I was no longer sovereign.

I walked into the bathroom and turned on the shower. I looked in the mirror, my emerald bloodshot eyes glared back at me. I washed myself off and watched as my tears and malnourished hair fell onto my feet.

I don’t remember where I slept that night. I think on my floor. I do remember my mom finding me and asking why I wasn’t in my bed. I cried. I was ashamed. Nothing felt safe, nothing felt sacred, not even my own body. When you can’t live in your own head, it’s hard to live outside it.

Almost as quickly as it had started, it was over. I ended things with him. It felt worse at the end for some reason. Maybe reality had started to trickle in.

I dyed my hair the night before graduation. I wanted to do something for me, something that made me feel beautiful. I graduated from high school with honors.

I thought things would get better; they didn’t, at least for a while. I started eating more. It took a lot of work. It still takes work.

I wanted to sever the past from the future, so I decided to cut my hair. I remember going to a cheap hair salon and telling the hairdresser to just cut it off. I looked like a soccer mom. I cried.

I made an appointment with the most expensive salon I could find and went there. My hairdresser was looked like a pin-up girl you might see on a muscular man’s arm, at a truck stop. I thought she looked like she could run the world. I wanted to be like that. I told her I wanted a pixie. Something short and bold, but elegant. Something different.

We talked as she cut away at my hair. She was from Seattle, a city I dreamed about living in one day. She seemed intuitive like she knew me before I even told her a single thing about me.

Her shears stopped clicking away. I looked in the mirror, still thin, still depressed, but I looked new. I felt new, but more importantly, I felt like me.

Abby Hunt, @furtherthehunt, is an intellectual force of a woman. She is a writer, a lover of the outdoors, and she loves her friends/family selflessly and powerfully. For more of her writing, visit her blog here.