Written by Audrey Orenstein 

Art by Jorge Avila

TW: Domestic Abuse, SA

As July of 2024 entered its latter half, I realized that my camel’s back had been broken for a while. My boyfriend had said and done so much that should’ve been the last straw, but I had held out hope. However, after a night when he forcibly grabbed my wrist over—of all things—a video game, I came to a conclusion: Our relationship should come to its conclusion. 

By this point, I had already tried to break up with him three different times. Every single one of those attempts were thwarted by a combination of guilt-tripping, desperate pleading, and promises that he’d change. Regrettably, I kept falling for it. But after that night, I knew that this truly had to end. 

My parents had a plan to visit me in Vermont while he was busy with his job and I asked them if they’d be willing to take some things home with them at the end of their visit. I had done this before, usually with books I had finished reading or parts of Halloween costumes I had no need for, but this summer, I requested that they return to Maine with everything of mine, including me. Fortunately, they obliged. 

Packing up behind your significant other’s back is a surreal experience that I hope and pray I’ll never have to live through again. As one might expect, there were a lot of conflicting emotions. Even though my mind was completely made up and the relationship was indeed ending, I was aware of the fact that a complete understanding of the relationship’s nature was something I lacked. Trying to figure out if the good times objectively outweighed the bad, proved functionally impossible. In spite of that confusion, I did manage to realize something that really helped influence my decision to escape him: a concerning amount of my being had become inextricably linked to him. In other words, he had turned my life into the Ship of Theseus. 

If you’re not aware of what I’m referring to, I’ll fill you in. The Ship of Theseus—or Theseus’s Paradox, if you’d prefer—is a thought experiment that deals with the nature of identity. In this hypothetical, the titular ship of Greek mythology had its worn-out pieces replaced over time. The resulting philosophical question is thus: if every single piece of the Ship of Theseus is replaced, is it still the same ship? It’s a good brain teaser, one that’s led to dissenting opinions for literally thousands of years. But you might still be sitting there, scratching your head and wondering how such a paradox could apply to myself and the abusive relationship I was in. Let me try to explain.

Metaphorically, my life is the ship, made up of many different planks of wood that represent my various likes, dislikes, hopes, dreams, etc. With their powers combined, they make up the person that I am. But a very important facet of those pieces is that they’re all mine, they all say something about me. This was what my ship was made out of when I met him.  However, after we started dating, he began replacing as many planks as he could. These planks were by no means in need of replacement, as many of them represented interests I had held for years. Indeed, his replacement planks kept all of that in place, but made one major change: they involved him. If I showed him a movie I liked, it was no longer just that. Instead, it was now a movie I liked that was made “better” by having watched it with him.

I should say that as far as I can tell, these kinds of replacements aren’t always bad, at least in moderation. For example, plenty of the planks of wood that make up my ship are traumatizing memories that really weigh me down. Fortunately, my therapist has helped me find meaning in some of what has happened to me, leading to stronger planks that improve the overall quality of my ship. In that case, my therapist’s involvement in how my ship was maintained, proved to be greatly beneficial. However, what happened with my ex-boyfriend went way beyond mere improvement. In retrospect, I was taking a gamble when I let him into my life to the regrettable extent that I did. By doing that, I was hoping he’d continue to be the wonderful man I fell in love with. If that were to happen, having him associated with every part of my ship would strengthen it immensely! Unfortunately, that is not what happened.

Piece by piece, my personal ship became a relation-ship, one where it seemed as though every part of my existence involved him just as much as it involved me. I think Karl Marx would’ve been impressed by how nothing in my life was truly mine, but instead ours. Even if he wasn’t directly involved with every single plank of wood, he had an opinion on all of them. Those opinions would end up shaping my actions. As a result, my entire being was recontextualized along with my perceptions of it. To put it another way, the shape of my ship was warped to conform to his feelings in a way that I now recognize was anything but shipshape.

This phenomenon was most apparent when it came to friendships. I’ve never been a person with many close friends, but those relatively few friends and I have always been thick as thieves. Sadly, as splendid as this was for me, he didn’t see it in quite the same way. You see, he wanted to be kept in the loop in regards to pretty much everything I did. As such, whenever I would spend time with a friend without telling him about it until afterwards, he would always immediately assume that I was cheating on him. After all, I was “lying by omission”! This led to me being functionally required to ask for his permission to spend time with basically anyone. Additionally, a few of those friends were people I had been together with romantically in the past, people who realized alongside me that we worked better as friends than as partners. But in a fun bit of Orwellianism, he never referred to those people as my friends. Instead, they were always “my exes” in sentences to the effect of “why would you not tell me you were hanging out with one of your exes unless you were cheating on me?”

As you might expect, this forcibly changed a lot of my relationships with other people and my relationship with the world around me as a result. I lost contact with quite a few people during this time. With some of them, I’ve been able to explain what was going on and repair the friendship. Still, there’s at least one person who doesn’t talk to me anymore after I ignored many a text message from them—an unfortunate side effect of being literally afraid to interact with them.

This leads into something I’ve left merely implied for the duration of this piece: the way in which his abuse actually manifested itself. I’ll grant him that he didn’t frequently physically or sexually abuse me, though do note that I said “frequently” and not “ever.” However, the other things he regularly did were still plenty damaging in their own terrible ways. His primary weapon was his mouth, which he used to belittle and insult me whenever he deemed it necessary. The worst was always assumed of me and he made sure I knew that. A great, subtle example of this was when one day he checked in about whether or not I had taken my pills that morning. Instead of asking me “did you take your pills today?” he asked “did you forget to take your pills today?” It was this mentality of distrust and pessimism that came to define his feelings towards me as our relationship dragged on, a mentality that had been allowed to freely infect the planks of my ship. The wood rotted, but that rot was coated by the sugary-sweet person he tried to convince everyone—including himself—that he was. By the time he was telling me vitally important pieces of my ship needed to be removed, even if it would allow water to enter, I had already been convinced that I was incapable of doing nigh anything without his say-so, including standing up for myself and disagreeing with him. Whether it was his intention to make me think these things or not, I truly thought it was better to slowly sink with him than try to sail by myself regardless.

This is really what I’m trying to get at when I compare all of this to the Ship of Theseus. I was no longer “Audrey,” but instead “his girlfriend.” Letting my life be redefined like that would’ve been bad enough had he not been abusing me! But sure enough, it got worse as I realized that all of the connotations I came to associate with him were negative, not positive. By then, it was too late. To reference more Greek mythology, an effective comparison could be made between him and the Trojan Horse. I opened all of my gates to him, thinking that he was everything he claimed to be, everything I fell in love with. For a while, it was just me and the horse. But not long after I allowed so much of that into so much of my life, the Greeks emerged swinging in the form of abuse. All of a sudden, my associations of him were shattered. Before I knew it, I found myself debating, both internally and externally, whether he was more the horse or the Greeks. Fitting in with the ongoing theme of paradoxes and contradictions, he was both.

Something else worth noting, if only briefly, is that this all manifested outside of my ship as well, which is to say physically. We lived together in two different dorm rooms, plus a brief stay at my parents’ house. As abuse kept occuring, the places and objects involved became attached to the stories of what happened, which resulted in being literally surrounded by reminders of what he’d done to me. The door to our room was no longer just a door, it was now the door I had curled up against, crying as he berated me for being scared of a horror movie, all while a friend watched. The couch in my childhood home was no longer just a couch, but the couch where he sexually assaulted me after getting blackout drunk. Even now, as I write this piece, I know in the back of my mind that the computer I’m writing on is the same one where an attempt to input Alt+F4 on its keyboard resulted in me getting my wrist grabbed.

Shortly before and after I moved out, I had hoped that ending the relationship and severing all communication would also remove any subconscious associations I had with him. I regret to inform you that such optimism ended up being misplaced. Yes, getting out and later blocking him on everything undeniably made my life better, as a result of it becoming impossible for him to abuse me further, but there were some ways in which it made things worse. It was as if I had taken two steps forward, but one step back.

Bringing it back to the Ship of Theseus, it turned out that he did a better job of convincing my subconscious that I needed him than I thought. After all, rotted wood is better than nothing, so it came as quite a shock to me when I realized that he had contributed both the rot and the wood. Even as this meant that my ship was much less infected than before, it felt as though much of it had straight-up gone missing. He had woven himself into my life slowly, but there was nothing gradual about leaving him. Furthermore, the negative associations I had with him and the rest of my life by extension actually managed to get worse! Any memory I had of him was now tied to the fact that I left him, that things had gotten to the point where I couldn’t take it anymore. The idea that the man I fell for contained the ability to do so many horrible things to me the whole time haunts me to this day. Seeing him as “my ex” as opposed to something that would paint him in a more positive light gave me quite the startle. To involve yet another metaphor, I think that an abusive relationship is like being slowly poisoned over time, all while the cure is out of reach. But once you finally get your hands on that cure, it’s a weirdly mixed bag. Yes, it’s unequivocally good because I’m feeling so much better, but leaving made me realize just how bad things had gotten.

More than a millennium after the Ship of Theseus paradox was first proposed, 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes added his own supposition that went a little something like this: what if someone were to collect all of the old pieces of the Ship of Theseus that had gotten replaced and built a ship out of them? Which one would be the true Ship of Theseus? While I can’t say for sure in regards to the actual sea-faring vessel, I can say that despite all of the negativity I’ve been detailing, I firmly believe that the answer as it applies to my metaphorical one means that there’s light on the horizon for me.

The truth is, a lot of my planks of wood represent interests of mine, whether they be broad subjects or specific media. Luckily, next to none of those interests were ones he introduced me to! As such, finding the original parts of my ship involves me reminding myself of the reasons they were important to me in the first place, with these reasons having nothing to do with the man that worked his way into all of them. This process of rediscovery and rebuilding has been difficult, but worthwhile. I hope that someday, everything that reminds me of him will have their original contexts restored or new ones added, effectively preventing our history from manifesting unwarranted in my mind. Who knows, maybe I can build the ship better this time around.