“shut the f*ck up you ugly b*tch”

“if you dare speak to them again I will kill use both

“you’re worthless Rachel, nobody cares about you”

“without me you have nobody, so you’d better do what I say”

These are just a few things that my ex boyfriend said to me, I was only 16 years old and it was my first relationship.  He told me he loved me and I thought I loved him too. At the time and for many months after I blamed myself for what happened. I had been completely brainwashed and sadly I thought this was completely ‘normal’ , whatever normal actually is.

It all began in the summer of 2015,  I was young and very naive.  I met a boy and I fell for him almost instantly.   It was sweet at the beginning and we were both happy.  Until about a month in when he started to become paranoid that I was cheating on him, which I obviously wasn’t.  He would constantly check up on me and ask me who I was talking to.  Whenever we saw each other he demanded to see my phone to see who I had been talking too and yes I had been talking to boys but only as mates.  But he didn’t see it like it.  He made me delete them all else he said he was breaking up with me.  I thought this was normal, so of course I did.   Then he started getting annoyed with me if I spoke to other boys in person and if I did he’d ignore me for hours and make me feel terrible so I  wouldn’t do it again.  Then he began to accuse me and my boy best friend, who I’ve known since I was 5,  of kissing in the back of the car because we occasionally shared car journeys even though our parents were always in the front of the car! Next I wasn’t allowed to talk to my friends and he told me off for using my phone too much, yet if I didn’t reply to him quickly enough he’d accuse me of doing something.  I became incredible isolated and he made me feel like I had no one but him so I had to do what he said and follow the rules he had made me.  I felt like I couldn’t tell anyone because if I did then id loose him and he’d made me feel like he was all I had.

My coping mechanism was hurting myself.  I became so so desperate, when it became really bad I did it every day.  It made me feel better about myself and it was all I could think about some days.  At the time I thought it was the only way to cope and the only way to release the pain.  I was so desperate but I tried to hide it, I just wanted to make him happy.  But whatever I did I couldn’t, it was like I was under a spell.  He called me all kind of names; a bitch, attention seeking, worthless, a waste of space,  fat, a slag, ugly,  boring and many other.  I just accepted that I was all of these things and that I didn’t have a future.  He told me that I should kill myself and that he wanted to kill himself because of me.  I just didn’t understand what I had done.  I became incredibly depressed and I didn’t leave the house.  I locked myself in my room for the whole of the summer of 2016 and pretty much every night  from April to September I cried myself to sleep, that’s if I ever did get to sleep. I was a wreck and I was fed up of living.   In May he told me that he was going to kill himself because of me, he sent me pictures of bottles of bleach and told me he’d drunk them. Then he didn’t reply to me for five hours  so I thought he had done it because he knew I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if he had.  Even though all he did was treat me like trash.  He never loved me, he didn’t want me, he wanted me as his property because he knew I was scared of him.  He grabbed me many a time and he watched me cry my eyes out while he would just sit there and laugh.  He never wanted to see me and then had a go at me for not putting in the effort.  I was just never good enough he told me I was a failure when I got my GCSE results and threatened me that if I went to a new school hed break up with me.  i had finally had enough of all the abuse he had given me and I told him I couldn’t do it anymore and he told me that if I ended it he would kill himself and he spammed my phone, accusing me of so much trying to make me feel guilty.

I finally plucked up the courage to end it.   I balled my eyes out that night and I told one of my friends that I had been self harming. She was the first person I had ever told.  It felt like a huge weight over my shoulders and it also made me want to stop because I was  embarrassed at the time.  But I’m not anymore.  I did it because I was in so much pain and I felt so guilty.  I hated myself and sometimes I felt nothing but emptiness and I just didn’t see any point to go on because I had no reason to.  I would never wish that feeling upon anyone.   Once I had ended it, I felt so relieved.  But it was incredibly difficult, I went from relying on one person to having no one, well that’s what I though.  Over time I began to realise what he had put me through and how stupid I had been. How much pain he had put me through and how many tears I had cried over him.  He had completely destroyed the person I was, the old Rachel was no longer there.  So I began to build my life back up again, step by step. It sounds ridiculous, but it was incredibly hard and I honestly didn’t think I would make it this far. He still messaged me and made me feel guilty, made me feel guilty about moving on but I wasn’t falling for any of his sh*t.  About a month or so after we had broken up I found out he had cheated on me with my old best friend.  This hurt so much and I couldn’t quite believe it.  I had always suspected something was going on, but she was my best friends and so I just tired my best to put it to the back of mind because I thought I was being stupid. But I wasn’t, it was true.  She knew how much he had hurt me, yet she still did it.

After so many months of pain I finally began to get my life back on track and I began to start living again instead of just surviving. I now appreciate the smaller things in life and I’ve learnt not to take things for granted.

I am now living for myself.