janna otto

This is an excerpt from my upcoming memoir. Enjoy!

This is my story. I am not special. There is nothing exceptional about me. I have spent large portions of my life feeling invisible. People consistently don’t remember meeting me. When picking teams in middle school PE, I was picked last. And in business meetings my presence is overlooked, my opinion is forgotten, unless on a rare occasion when I decide to raise my voice above the near-whisper that is my normal. And I almost never do, because I was raised as an invisible girl in our patriarchal society, lacking confidence to speak up, even when I knew the right answer in math class. I was ridiculed by teachers and bullied by my peers. I suffered through a plethora of relational mishaps and unwanted sexual experiences. 

For some time, I thought being invisible was something I made up, that it was all in my head, but then it happened again and again and again. Then, finally, when I was in my late thirties, my kids started to come to me and say, “Mama, I feel invisible.” I cried. My tears were partly in relief that I finally had someone dear to me to talk to about our common oproblems of invisibility. But my tears were partly in pain, because I had passed on my invisibility to my children, both by nature and nurture, I suspect. But I sat with my daughter and my son, and we discussed it at length. And we ultimately decided that we would be OK. That we would never be like the annoying people among our peers, that we would never be the squeaky wheel that gets the grease. And while it’s painful sometimes, it’s OK, and we could always support each other when we felt invisible to the rest of the world. It was the three of us against everyone.

I am a survivor of domestic violence.

Saying, and now writing, those words is still tough for me. They are big words, heavy with connotations I do not like, and a lot of grief. I never thought they would be words that would be true for me. I didn’t think that I fit into the mold of the “typical victim.” I spent many years in denial that I was in and kept my kids in a situation that was toxic to all of us. Over the last several years I have been on a journey. I spent so many years of my first marriage on a painful journey of awareness. And  since my divorce it has been a journey of revelations and recovery. I needed the help of many friends, advocates and legal professionals along the way. Getting to this point in my journey is the hardest thing I have ever done.

Today, I am considered a success. I have confidently moved from victim to survivor. I have done all of the right things to bring myself and my children home to this point in our lives where we are safe and happy. Where we can feel cozy and comfortable and connected. I have found a new partner. Our life is a perfect fairy tale.

Except, I have a confession: I did not do it all with confidence. Most days, I did it by pushing my emotions so far down inside of my core that they would never be seen again – not for many years. I become a professional in dissociating from my life as a survival mechanism. I became an actress, playing a part in my own life that was not real. I acted for my kids’ stability. And I performed a perfectly happy life through the lens of my social media, my family, friends and the world. Then, when my stuffing of emotions and performance started to falter, along with my body, I did it while spending every moment I could blubbering in a ball on the floor of my office. Pulling myself together only at the last possible moment, to go pick up my kids, and start the performance over again. But my body didn’t like this. It became weak and started to show a multitude of symptoms: insomnia, loss of appetite, nocturia, irritable bowel syndrome, migraines, restless leg syndrome. The worst was that my body just wouldn’t move, I couldn’t stand at the kitchen counter. My body was completely and totally exhausted. I tried to blame each symptom on something else: occupational stress, aging, childbirth, bad genetics, bad luck. When I finally left my marriage, I did it in the middle of the day, while my spouse was at work, miles away, without saying goodbye. I snuck myself and my kids out of the house. I filed a restraining order against my spouse. I never looked back. I felt like a coward. But I felt like I had no other options. And we never had closure.

As soon as I moved into the domestic violence shelter with my children, all of my health complications magically vanished. It was not stress or ageing or childbirth. It was that I was a victim of domestic violence.

We spent six weeks in the shelter and they truly were the best of times and simultaneously the worst of times. I felt, well, sheltered! It was miraculous. But I was also kicking off a legal battle that would go on for six months before my divorce was final.

I have another confession: Today, life is not perfect. We do not feel safe. We are not all happy and comfortable. There are still instances where we have to deal with the remnants of our lives entangled with addiction and generational cycles of abuse. It is so very much better, but forever changed. My life is amazing and would be unrecognizable to my past self. My children and I are now physically safe most of the time. But the emotional damage of so much life spent in a toxic relationship has left scars on us that will never be fully repaired. Our home is safe, but our brains feel like an unsafe place to live. We move forward in a new normal, but we will never be the people we were before. I will never feel completely safe. 

My children and I have done all the therapy: individual, play, family, art, group. But we are collectively living in a soup of complex PTSD, OCD, depression, ADHD, anxiety, and more. We are not happy and cozy and comfortable. Our combined trauma results in anxious interactions with each other and our extended family and friends. Or locking ourselves in bathrooms or closets, overwhelmed with sobs. Or checking the locks on the doors, the video cameras outside the house obsessively before we can settle in for the night and sleep – only after ensuring that our flashlights and pepper spray are within reach. Or days of depression that come on for no apparent reason and can only be overcome when one of us, or a friend, pulls the rest of us out of the dumps. Or being irrationally triggered by a sound, a board game, a feeling, a smell, a place, which leads us back to the anxiety, sobs, obsessions, or depression. The three of us will never again live in the luxury of knowing what it feels to be completely cozy and calm. But it still is the three of us against everyone. 

I have another confession: There is no typical victim. If you are on this journey now, it does not matter where you are or who you are or what your circumstances are. I am here with you. This is a story for you.

I read and listened to many stories when I was in the early stages of my journey. With each one, I learned a little more. With some, I would move towards acceptance of the toxicity of my relationship and build the courage to get myself out. With others, I would sink further into denial, convincing myself that my situation was not as bad as all that, and settle into my determination to stay in my marriage at all costs. There was one story though, that finally pushed me to be brave, to save myself and my family.

For most people, my story will not be the one story that helps them. But if there is just one other person in the whole world, who reads my story, and for them it is the one story that sets them free, then I will have succeeded. 

I have another confession: This is my story. It is mine alone. It is a story of my feelings and perspective. My children, my extended family, my friends, and my ex-husband could all tell you that this story is not the whole truth. But it doesn’t matter. This is my story. It is an encapsulation of how the events of our lives made me feel. In some cases, the events happened so frequently that I can not separate any one instance from another. They are often fraught with fear for my own safety and the complicated combination of heartbreak and protectiveness of my children for all that they experienced. My dissociation puts an opaque film over all the words and actions that replay in my head. Some things were so terrifying that I can’t remember much about them at all. Any one of these factors would blur this history in my memory. All of them together form a disorienting place to sit in and write from.

This is a story of my personal truth.

We have come so far. And while our brains remain complicated places, my children and I have moved through so much pain in these last several years. Their ability to learn from this terrible situation and move forward, help each other, and help friends that are also having a hard time is astounding. For a time, I lived in fear of my children being completely ruined by my inability to fix our family. But now I know that with a lot of compassion and love, things do get better. We may not have much in this world that makes sense, but we have a lot of love.