Courage Is Born in Strange Places

How a crazy experience from a long time ago made courage an easy choice in 2020

Photo by Yang on Unsplash

This story came out this morning out of the blue. There are many layers to it, there is going to be a part two, I decided to split it into two parts because it is long enough as is.

Soooooo, in my early twenties, my abusive ex set me up to go to jail. I was in jail for about a month, it took me a long time to collect my soul from scattered pieces, but it also gave me the benefit of being realistic about the machine.  

Here is how it went. He had issues, that ex of mine. Meaning, I wish him absolutely no harm, he is walking his path, and if he were to “repent” in some way, I would maybe even give him a cautious hug. Maybe. We would have to get there and see. 

At the time, he was more than a little messed up in the heart. He defended his unstable internals by being sadistic. However, during the first few of months of our acquaintance, the strength of his desire to be around me overruled the whatever was ailing him, and he acted kind. And I felt like a stranger in a new country, clutching for straws of kindness, in absolutely no need of “papers” from marriage but in a great need of warmth and love.

So, I fell for it. If you want to know more about that part of my life, I wrote about it a few years ago.

As it became an absolute nightmare, and I could not completely hide it from the world anymore, a generous friend snatched me out of that situation, offered me a place to stay, etc. She was instrumental to me getting out.

Even then, he continued to harass me, at one time he bullied me into meeting with him (or else), he fed me a stupid seafood dinner that I didn’t want, talked crazy sweet, and effectively raped me. (Is locking the doors and threatening to harm me if I don’t go along considered rape? I don’t know, it certainly didn’t feel like an act of love), then he called me on my drive back home, as I was screaming at the top of  my lungs in the car, and talked to me in a concerned, sweet tone (“honey, I want to make sure you are okay because you sounded kind of upset when you left.”) It was all twisted, very unkind, very nazi-like, very insane.

Strangely, I don’t really feel much about it anymore. I felt a lot about it for a long time, I processed it. I can imagine him, as a soul in the afterlife. reaching out to me and saying, “I really messed up, I am sorry, I understand it now, please forgive me, I understand now, it was wrong, and I am sorry, I want all of this to completely heal.”

I hold no grudges.  There is no point. It’s the past. I don’t particularly want to hear from him until he heals (and I don’t have to hear from him after), but I am fine. If I knew that he saw the light, and that his soul healed and wanted to fix things, I would actually feel an uplift, I’d feel sweet about the outcome of the story, healing one soul makes the world a better place. I by far prefer the prospect of a wounded, nazi-acting person healing his or her soul and becoming a force for love to the prospect of revenge. Hurt people hurt people, healed people try to heal people, love melts crap in the end, etc. Which is to say, I wish him well but in a way that doesn’t allow him to hurt more people, and I am fully done with my part of ever relating to him.

Theft of freedom

But then there is jail, and that’s what I want to talk about.

At some point, he started telling me in a threatening tone that I needed to “pledge allegiance to America” because I was somehow not patriotic enough. (I objected to the calls for the death of all Muslims, including the obvious enemy, the dangerous future-terrorist kids. That, I did. If that makes me suspicious, so be it. I still find it to be a misguided and controller-supporting call.) What he really wanted though was to get me deported so that there would be no chance of me ever saying anything about his abuse, which could jeopardize his lawyer license, etc. I was tired, exhausted, terrified, and had no vengeful plans whatsoever--but I guess he felt like it was better for him to do it anyway.

So, to the best of my understanding,  he went to authorities and told them that I was a “Russian spy.” Stereotypes to rescue! Ivan Drago! “If he dies he dies!” Etc.

As a result, four armed men showed up at my door, searched through my things. barked commands, gloated, and then dragged me out in handcuffs past the doorman whom I usually joked with and tipped for helping me with heavy stuff, like a walk of shame.

Then they showed me something, some paper,  gave me a chance to make a call, my phone didn’t work at all, it was all like a really bad film. A film that had no business to be in my life but none the less, I was in a room with those people and not free to go.

Then there was a cold prison cell with a metal bed and one skinny blanket. The blanket wasn’t doing the job, I was cold, and they had taken my jacket away and wouldn’t let me have it. When I asked for an extra blanket, they said no.

Then there were other jails. There was a general jail where you hang out during the day with a bunch of people and a television set, and during the night they lock you up in a small cell. At that place, they woke you up at like 5 to line up for food, and the food was reeking of, shall I say, urine? I don’t know, something bad. I was hungry and ate the awful food but it didn’t smell good. They would also not allow any personal clothes, none at all, so even the underwear was theirs.

At that place, during the first week or so, I  danced salsa in my cell because I really liked to dance and wanted to keep practicing the moves. But then dancing lost meaning, I lost the mood.

Then occasionally, they would roll in a bookshelf with really old books. I looked forward to the books.

Then there was animal fear. There were rumors of people never getting out. There was one time when they handcuffed me to two terrified and screaming Chinese girls in the back of a car, and they made our bodies hit the doors, and they gloated, didn’t show any kindness, and said unwarranted and mean things. I was not enjoying my head hitting the car doors but I didn’t scream.

There was a time when I cried through the night in my cell from pain. I don’t know what happened but I was hurting, and the guard was nice but she said there was nothing that she could do till morning, and by morning, the pain went away.

The feeling of another person’s authority on your body is a strange feeling. When you can see the sky from the windows in some corridor on the way to wherever they are leading you, and you can’t choose where you go, and the outside with the whole sky is as unreachable as a fairy tale. You can’t go. It’s impossible, you are not allowed, you can’t go.

There was also a moment when I became overspent and decided, whatever happens, happens. I couldn’t deal with this level of anxiety anymore. I gave up the  active fight. I couldn’t fight. I didn’t want to fight. I just flowed.

Then there were very hopeful and mildly sadistic agents who attempted to break my spirits.  I sure hope that one day, it will come to them that they were trying to break me but that they  had harmed themselves more than they harmed me.

It was like a dream about being inside a a James Bond film. There was a good male cop, a bad  male cop, and a woman. There was a yummy peanut butter sandwich that got my full attention for a sec because it looked beautiful and, unlike the regular jail food, did not smell of piss. I suppose it was meant to represent the good life I would have if I went along.

They uncuffed me and let me eat the sandwich. And then it started, questions about my bio that showed their great familiarity with my life, the hints, the temptation, the veiled threats.

At the time, I didn’t understand, I thought it was just my ex’s abuse and a “mistake” but it so happens that I had stellar academic credentials in the areas that agencies like. I suppose, and I find it inhumane and repulsive, that they knew full well that I wasn’t a spy but they wanted me to be one, and so they tried.  

As it was happening, I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. It was all like Alice in Wonderland, very strange. It was obviously happening but it couldn’t be. There were three serious people with mysterious scary jobs who, in their good minds, seemingly really wanted me to work under them, and there  was me, an abused philosophical child who can’t even properly lie. Dear God, are you kidding me, me? Me? A spy?!!!!!

Scared as I was, I found all that impossible. I had not forgotten the Soviet obvious cultural knowledge of the fact that spies rarely end well. That they are used to the max and then, once they’ve done their job, they get almost inevitably betrayed by their own. 

And even more importantly, no amount of glamor can compensate for the sinking hole of loveless anxiety on the inside that grows bigger and deeper with each harmed innocent soul, because your soul knows that you are doing wrong, that you come from light and will go back to light, and you are not making your own path any sweeter by causing harm to innocent souls. Spirit is Spirit. It’s uncircumventable.  And so what is the point?

I suppose, they figured that I was hopeless. As they were leaving, still hopeful as they left me a card and asked to reach out, one of them said, “I still don’t understand why you went to Tibet.” I almost made a joke (using a line that my best friend in high school liked to use that went, “Some people are just slow to understand”) but I was not in a particularly humorous mood so I thought the line and didn’t say it out loud.

Shortly after, with the help of  my beautiful friends and co-workers, the process went in a good direction, I was eventually released on bail, paid a ton of money to the lawyers, and it all ended well.

And as far as the people involved in sadistic actions, they caused harm, and I had to do a lot of things to heal, and my life would have been a lot lighter had I not gone through this experience of my bodily freedom being intruded so disgustingly, but it is also true that they caused more harm to themselves.

On a side note, some of the people who were absolutely beautiful to me during that time and who went out of their way to help, got mad at me for my “COVID” views and spoke to me rather rudely about my stance on vaccines, etc.

The world is a not black and white! People act differently depending on whether they count you into the ranks of “their people” or not.  When one of my friends from that time snapped at me about vaccines, I was a little sad about it for a moment but then let it go with a light heart. There is a time and a place for everything, that particular person used to be an amazing friend, I am grateful to her for her past kindness, and if she is now indifferent and even dismissive, it’s not on me. People are allowed to feel whatever they feel about my views. I am also allowed to hold my views, and I have no obligation to take their criticisms in.

In part two of this story I am going to go into why all this happened, and how it could have possibly been avoided if I didn’t need the lesson of remembering how to love and nourish myself more. That is the really striking part.

Oh and by the way, that experience was instrumental to the relative ease with which I found courage in 2020 when I got vocal about “COVID” and the overall craziness of what was going on as early as in April of that year.

Stay tuned!

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