When telling the truth evokes a bigger sense of justice than a court of law could perhaps ever offer.
Justice /ˈdʒʌs.tis/ noun.
Fairness in the way people are treated. The quality of being reasonable, principled and unbiased… Equitableness, impartiality or moral rightness
Justice is certainly many things to many people… but what it’s really not about is punishment or money or righteousness… or even agreement.
The crux of justice, or maybe where it both begins and ends, is with the fundamental act of being able to tell our own truth and be heard doing it.
Being heard telling our own truth allows us to break through, to break free and it creates an opening for all of us to move on together and/or separately.
When I walked into my empty house that day, the home my husband had sorted through and stripped behind my back, my mind came to a screeching halt as I hastily began putting all the pieces together from the months and the years leading up to that point.
I had to take a blinding, naked, excruciatingly close up look at how stupid I had been the whole time and admit the long, hard, painful truth of Ted’s connivance and his suffocating control… which from the very get-go, had never been love at all.
I’d thought justice meant outlining my truth to convince a legal representative of the justice system that my husband had wronged me. He’d lied and spied. He’d stolen and cheated and falsified… after all. His behavior had been manipulative and abusive and violent before and during and after our marriage.
So I wanted my case to be heard.
I didn’t feel strong enough to just walk away without a fight like my zenner friends advised. Justice, I thought, would vindicate. It would corroborate Ted’s toxic behavior and it would restore my sense of dignity after he’d so secretly and sneakily stripped it all away from me by breaking down my desires and my self worth, my capabilities and my choices for all those years in favor of his own, never knowing surely who I even was or what I wanted, never striving to share or to make me happy, always plotting to satisfy his own wishes without ever wondering of what I dreamt.
Until the very end… when he walked away from my broken body and mind and soul with all of our material possessions as well.
So I thought the courts needed to hear the truth. I felt I needed to tell them clearly. I wanted my arguments to be written and read. I wanted the court to listen. And I thought, they should have been convinced by the sheer magnitude, by the ensemble of Ted’s terrible deeds, by the height of his tales and the depths of his deceit.
I thought they would have sanctioned or punished him, after hearing the truth about how he’d set me up, with techniques, with a plan, with a desire to dominate from day one.
I thought a judge needed to know all of that and I thought I could make her see…
She didn’t in the end.
The judge was not able to comprehend my pain or Ted’s manipulation. The judge, it seems, was influenced by her education and her expectations and her own prejudices, swayed by the social pressures of a small town bourgeoisie and ultimately convinced by either Ted’s arguments or by his connections.
But I said it.
And I am extremely proud to have done so. Grateful that I was able to gather the strength. Dazzled by my valiant commitment to myself first and also to women and to women’s causes everywhere.
Because it was no simple feat.
Gender-based abuse, the patriarchy and toxic masculinity are difficult to stand up to. So I am wowed by every woman’s courageous personal engagement to making a difference in our shared understanding of the flawed, impervious and almost globally held social agreements regarding the gendered expectations and behaviors which allow the patriarchy to continue crushing women’s futures by making decisions for us, based on ancient man-made rules.
I said it.
And perhaps I made a difference to the greffier* or to someone in the court room. Maybe my arguments impacted one of my husband’s secretaries or one of his collaborators who helped him trace out his defense. Maybe, I helped one woman somewhere, by spelling out what my husband did, how his manipulative, sexual, administrative, financial and psychological domestic abuse boxed me in for years, allowing him to trounce all over me, making decisions in my name, forcing me to behave and to act out sexual scenarios of his own design, over and over again.
Perhaps even one woman came to understand that a man doesn’t have to hit us, for his maltreatment to be considered domestic violence.
Ted was vindicated in our divorce alright. He was validated and substantiated and rubber stamped even, in his own favor.
But my justice has been won by telling the real story.
So thank you for hearing me. It’s taken a load off my mind and it’s brought me closer to closure than I’ve been in years.
Translations — French to English : greffier = court clerk
