I would never consider myself a domestic abuse victim, and I definitely wouldn't consider myself a domestic abuse survivor. I've seen what they look like and I'm far too silly and careless to be able to identify with them. "Its not like you're a battered wife," I was told for 4 years, and he was right; I wasn't. But only because I learned to modify my behavior. I knew what I needed to do for an easier life. I knew what I could say and where I could go and who I could talk to and what I could wear. When I hear about the 'warning signs' it's all so clear and I feel stupid for not seeing them from the beginning. Or maybe I did see them, I just didn't know what to do. This is my diary, word for word, (even the cringy bits!) of how it all started...
Feel free to learn from it.
N.B. A few months after this last diary entry I had left home and was living with P. Two months after that, I was pregnant. Over the following years I slowly found out that everything he'd told me, about who he was and what he'd done, had pretty much all been lies...
