Beautiful Lies

Some kids dreamed about prom. I dreamed of escape.

The sounds of my childhood were usually doors slamming and voices yelling, always my cue to disappear. Before I could tie my shoes, I knew how to read the room and hear the words not said.

That kind of hypervigilance takes its toll. To this day, I'm always just a little bit physically braced for whatever might come next, something I covered in A Long December.

I remember that same feeling in my stomach when I would hear certain footsteps in the hall or my name spoken in a certain way. That alone told me how my night was gonna go.

I remember rehearsing escapes I’d never make. Accepting apologies no one ever gave and coming up with mic-drop responses no one ever heard.

My bedroom was the safest place in the house (which isn't saying much). My mother had me keep a jar of peanut butter with saltines under my bed for when she wasn't home, so I wouldn’t have to come out and risk running into him.

Her first husband, the man responsible for my DNA and my nightmares.

She thought it was about his temper, which was partly true, but she didn’t know the whole story.

He made me his servant. His verbal punching bag. And behind closed doors, where no one could see, he made me his dirty little secret.

He used guilt, fear, and shame to keep me quiet about the unspeakable things he did, always with threats of what might happen if I ever told anyone.

But then one day, I told someone.

It was a fourth-grade play, of all things, with a plot that was way too close to my actual life, that told me I needed to speak out. And that night, I said the things I wasn’t supposed to say to the people that I wasn’t supposed to say them to.

But even after he was gone, the damage remained.

I’ve always needed a little story to keep me motivated.

When I was little, I danced in front of my bedroom mirror, holding my Ambassador curling iron like a microphone and lip-syncing to Celine, Whitney, and Tina (ah, the '80s).

When I wasn’t rehearsing dance routines in our grimy little garage under an imaginary spotlight, I was memorizing movie lines.

Movies were predictable, where nothing bad ever happened unless the story called for it, but even then, they always had a happy ending.

Real life...not so much, so movies were what inspired my daydreams. When your earliest memories are of a father whose presence did more damage than his absence ever could, daydreaming was the only way to escape to a safer, better world.

But eventually, that escape led to a productive strategy.

When I was fourteen, I earned a spot in our state's top performing arts school. It was competitive, intense, and full of talent and drama.
I loved every moment of it. I had real chops, maybe enough to make it.

But after graduation, while classmates headed off to LA, Juilliard, or some obscure theatre program in Europe, I stayed.
I let someone else’s fears talk me out of the risk, and I told myself I was being realistic.

But looking back, I know I was just scared of actually being seen. That little nugget of fear hasn’t fully left me either. More on that later.

I don’t blame anyone else for the choices I made, but I’d be lying if I said I never wondered what would’ve happened if I’d chosen differently.

Instead, I got married; I deeply regret everything about that marriage except the daughter it gave me.

I used to think the "beautiful lies" were the ones I made up as a kid to get through things. In hindsight, the more damaging ones came from my first husband.

Manipulation was his thing, and it took me a long time to stop confusing that for love. He said allll the right things, and I believed him. I needed to.

I was barely 22. I didn't know anything about anything yet.

When we met, he was losing his sight, and I took that on as my responsibility. He refused to learn Braille, so I read to him, put touch dots on appliances, and helped him learn how to use his cane.

I adjusted his world to accommodate him.

To everyone else, it looked like he was becoming more independent. At home, nothing really changed; those dots stayed mostly untouched.

But it wasn't his blindness that eventually drove me away. It was everything else.

For every sweet thing he said, there were red flags I chose to ignore. I kept thinking that if I just tried harder, kept being patient, and did everything just right, his promises would eventually come true.

By now, it's pretty obvious that I didn't have much of a sense of self-worth back then. I didn’t think I could do better. I wasn’t even sure I deserved better.

He wanted to be taken care of, and I needed to be needed.
That's really what kept us together for as long as it did.

I wanted to be a good wife, a good mom, a good person; the kind of woman who just handles things.

So I handled things.

I handled his moods, his dog, his appointments, our daughter, our house, our jobs, and his insults. I got blamed when things fell apart and dismissed when I tried to fix them.

And every single time I threatened to leave, he’d threaten to kill himself.
And every single time, I believed him.

I begged him to come with me to couples therapy. He told me, “Going to therapy means admitting there's a problem.”

Which, ironically, might be the most honest thing he ever said.

Meanwhile, I was drowning.

I didn’t stop escaping into my imagination because I'd outgrown it; I just didn’t have the headspace for it, no pun intended. My life had narrowed down to getting through the day and doing what I thought I was supposed to do.

I stopped imagining a life I actually wanted; I barely believed I was allowed to want it.

Even then, I still thought that if I were strong enough, patient enough, and selfless enough, I could fix it all and end up with a better life anyway.

I was wrong, and so damn stubborn about it.

I went to college while working full-time and running our household, convinced I could fix it all and make a better life for us.

But instead of being supportive, he got suspicious.
“You’re just going to school so you can find someone better and leave me,” he said.

Le sigh.
More red flags than a matador parade, and still I stayed.

You ever wish you could go back in time and just…smack the stupid right out of yourself? I do.

But I stayed; I was still too deep in denial to accept that my hopes were constantly being used against me.

I remember one day really clearly: I was driving down a busy road, running through my mental to-do list like I always did.

My husband had already called me several times that morning, checking in. Again. Making sure I wasn’t doing anything he wouldn't approve of.

God forbid I have a moment to myself or talk to someone who wasn’t him.

The irony was that I was swamped with responsibilities he refused to share. I barely had time to breathe, let alone cheat (which I wouldn't have anyway).

And that's when it hit me:

This is it.
This is my life.

Nothing was going to change. The arguments, the loneliness, and the nonstop grind of taking care of everything would look exactly the same when I was fifty as they did right then.

That terrified me.

Not long after that, I was at a business lunch when someone asked: "So, tell me about yourself."

I had nothing.

I had no identity that didn’t involve taking care of someone else. I wasn’t a fulfilled wife. I didn’t even feel like a whole person.

I was a utility.

That's when I knew I had to leave. Not impulsively, but strategically. I knew I wasn't going to make it through another round of tears and guilt.

So I detached. I stopped trying to make him understand me. I stopped engaging and reacting.

They call that gray rocking now, and he noticed almost immediately, of course. He quickly accused me of not loving him anymore.

I mean, he wasn't wrong. I hadn't loved him for a long time. By then, all I felt for him was resentment, and then guilt for being resentful.

"I don’t want to be in this marriage anymore," I told him, my voice flat. I didn't even bother to pretend to be sad about it.

I just couldn't do it anymore.

The promise I made to myself, which kept me strong enough to do what I had to do, was that I wouldn't live like this anymore.

And that's when he suggested therapy.

By then, that ship had already sailed.

Of course, the first thing he asked was "Is there someone else?" As if he couldn’t imagine that he might be the reason I was done.

And despite everything, I still struggled with the decision. I had taken my vows seriously, and I hung in far long than I should've trying to fix something that never should have been.

After I told him I was done, he made those same threats to himself again. But this time, what used to guilt me into staying just pissed me right off.

Because I finally saw them for what they were: a last-ditch attempt to regain control. But it no longer worked because I was only focused on what was best for our daughter and for me.

So I called his bluff.

Was I harsh? Maybe. But I'd spent over a decade ignoring red flags, taking his abuse, and feeling guilty for wanting out of a marriage to a 'helpless' blind man.

I was sick of his bullshit, and I finally let him know, in no uncertain terms, that no amount of tearful promises or threats to himself would make any difference to me.

Don't worry, he’s still very much alive.
Probably still waiting on that Oscar.

After we separated, his relatives left me voicemails calling me selfish and yelling about who was going to take care of him now.

Like I was the hired help or something. The truth is, they knew what they'd raised; they just didn't want to deal with it.

But I had a daughter watching all of this, and I wasn't about to let her grow up thinking that this was what love looked like.

That had become my line in the sand.

I thought the divorce would be the end of it, but it wasn't, at first.

Even after it was final, he kept calling, supposedly about visitation but really just to keep access to me. For a while, I let him.

Part of me wanted him to see how much better I was doing (I wasn't).
Another part wanted him to finally acknowledge me. I had zero interest in getting back together; I just wanted to feel validated by him.

Codependency is a bitch to get over, after all.

But eventually, I remember thinking, “Didn’t I pay a lot of money to not have to deal with this anymore?”

I realized the divorce hadn't magically fixed my problems. I had to set boundaries and actually keep them. And once I did, I found my way back to imagining more from life and leaning into it.

After years of surviving a toxic relationship that nearly broke me, I stopped believing the lie that wanting more for myself was greedy or foolish.

I stumbled around in that age-old quest to 'find myself'. I didn’t even know what I liked anymore, so I tried new things, even things that felt ridiculous and I completely sucked at.

I didn't care; I felt so far behind, and I was in a mad rush to catch up on a life I hadn't gotten to fully live and learn from yet.

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about the future, especially the big, audacious goals that still make me nervous. When I was eighteen, I’d internalized this idea that big, ambitious dreams were for better people - thinner, prettier, richer, smarter people.

But now, when I think I can’t possibly do this, I ask myself one question:
“What if I can?”

That question has taken me farther than I ever imagined, and I'm not done. Not even close. I want to take the life I scraped together and turn it into something remarkable, even if some part of me still wants to crawl under my desk every time I hit “publish”.

You can't create something and yet stay invisible. I tried that, and it goes nowhere.

Eventually, I stopped waiting for things to be perfect or for myself to be "ready" and just started acting as if I were.

It was a beautiful lie.

Heather Papovich is the voice behind Unfinished Business, a weekly essay series where real life meets pop culture, and how to get through both without (mostly) losing it.