In this subculture, you need to write your oppression resume like you’re applying for a fucking job. So here is mine.

I was fifteen years old when I met a boy. We were best friends for almost a year, mutually falling in love, until I told him I liked him on the phone. For a week after that, I thought that my life was over. I was young and in teenage love and he hadn’t said he liked me back. But he was just nervous, waiting for the right moment to admit it was mutual. He asked me to be his girlfriend. I was so happy.

And it was really, really good for a while. For six months, longer. We were the couple everyone knew. We were both losers, but we were so sweet together that our romance elevated our social status. I loved him so damn much that it still hurts my heart a bit to think about how strongly I felt.

It started with jealousy and that was it. But it got worse. He had a temper. He told me that no one else would ever be with me because I was too fat to attract anyone but guys like him who liked that. He’d tell me he loved me and then an hour later he’d hit me. He’d ignore me for days to make me crawl back and then pretend it had all been my fault. He hated me spending time with anyone else and intentionally isolated me from my friends and hobbies. I think the perfect microcosm of our relationship was when I walked all across the school with my skirt tucked up into my own waistband. I didn’t know I had my ass hanging out. He chased me all the way down the hall. When he caught me, he grabbed me and shoved me back against a locker. He put his face right close to mine. “Do you have any idea how many other guys just saw you?”

But I UNDERSTOOD him, and that was what made it so dangerous, right? He was a military brat. His father was a disciplinarian and withholding enough that he was starved for affection. Worse, his elder sister was given so much love and attention. So it all swirled together to become this monstrous uber complex, fear of abandonment combined with a desperate need to be loved. ANd I did love him. God did I ever. And because I understood why he hurt me so much, because he wanted to be sure I’d never leave him, it made what he did seem okay. I knew he was abusive, sort of. But did that matter? He made me miserable but he also made me happy. I loved him. I loved him so much. He asked me to marry him when we were eighteen. I said yes. We started making wedding plans. His father was reassigned to another base and he just… went with them. For a few years, and then he’d be back. He just couldn’t afford to live at home right now, and his parents would put him up.

With some actual distance between us and the clarity of being 20, he and I finally split. He called me a bitch, a cunt, a whore. Accused me of cheating. Lots of stuff. It’s been ten years, and we haven’t talked even once. I know he’s around again. Dating one of my old friends from high school, which I consider a betrayal on her part because she knew, but I also feel bad for her, because I doubt he’s changed.

I don’t miss him. I hate him a lot. I miss him all the time. I still love him a little.

Why do I need to write an essay about my five year relationship with an abusive guy who I almost married? Well, because that’s how this works, isn’t it? We lay all of our cards out and we compare who deserves to say what and then we decide who should be allowed to have what opinions…

My homestuck OTP is DirkJake and I don’t read it as abusive at all.

It’s a little ridiculous, isn’t it? That I have to seriously write my memoir to be allowed to have that opiinion? But I do, because I, a survivor of years of horrible abuse, can’t go into the tag for my OTP without being called an abuse apologist.

If you see it as abusive, fine. That’s fucking fine. I get that there are a lot of different ways to read things. I am personally 100% certain that Hussie didn’t INTEND for it to be abusive, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be read that way. Texts have a lot of interpretations. Your perspective is equally valuable. Everyone gets to interpret text differently. Here’s what you should probably not do: tell me what abuse looks like. Tell me I can’t understand how complicated and devious abuse can be, how it can disguise itself as something else, how the people involved in it can be full of mixed feelings. Tell me that abusers aren’t immutably bad people who are always evil all the time and it comes in a lot more subtle shapes and sizes than that. Don’t you fucking tell me that because I lived it. I don’t need your stupid tumblr bullshit telling me what I should and should not be offended by.

Here is what I think:

I have been fifteen and in love and confused. I know what it looks like. I’m not saying that your version of Dirkjake is wrong. I’m just saying it isn’t more right than mine. I’m saying that the issue is super not cut and dry, super up for debate, and it would be super cool if you could keep your bullshit out of the tag so that people like me who have lived the HORROR of an abusive relationship could enjoy our fucking OTP in peace without having pleasant “daily reminders” that Dirkjake is “canonically abusive.” It’s not. The text can support a reading that it is. That is not the same thing even a little bit.

You standing there and telling me that I should think a little harder about whether it’s abusive or not, like, what are you trying to accomplish? My mind is made up and I know this topic. I know it inside and out. I have thought about it. I have weighed it. I’ve listened to what you’re saying. I think you’re wrong. I see how you could get what you got, but I think it involves taking a lot of things out of context of the world it exists in but you know what? It isn’t hurting me, you thinking that it’s abusive. But you know, what IS hurting me, a survivor, is you feeling the need to keep stating over and over again that those of us who see Dirk and Jake as two flawed teenagers who despite mutual romantic interest experienced catastrophic personality incompatibility resulting from Dirk’s need for constant affection clashing with Jake’s need for space and avoidant tendancies, that we are categorically and provably wrong when we AREN’T. We just AREN’T. Canon SUPPORTS my reading. And I could get into the meta of why, but why the fuck BOTHER? This topic has been argued back and forth and back and forth and back and FORTH into the grounnnnd. Is the brobot abusive and rapey? Does Dirk bear responsibility if it is? I say no and no, you say yes and yes, we are never going to see eye to eye on it, so how about we all just BE COOL?

I’m going to HELLA regret posting this in the morning but I’m so FUCKING tired of this. I DON’T think DIrkjake is a fluffy cute flawless pairing. What I like about it is how Dirk and Jake are incompatible and the possibilities of how they can work through that together. But I consider the blame in their relationship failure to be shared about 60/40. In Dirk’s favour, sure. But I don’t believe Jake was scared of Dirk because he was abusive. I think he was scared because he’s a coward when it comes to confrontation. I think Dirk’s neediness wore him down and he bolted. I don’t think Dirk was manipulative… no more than anyone is. When you think and think about the phrasing of your text. When you try to think of how to ask in a way that will make it most likely someone says yes. I think the brobot was a comedy character playing to Hussie’s love of ultraviolent slapstick. I don’t think it raped Jake. None of this makes me a monster.

And people telling me day in and day out in the tag I just like to visit to see teenagers in complicated teenage love that I’m an abuse apologist after everything I’ve been through is fucking BUMMING ME OUT.  Can’t I just appeal to everyone’s better judgement here? What are you hoping to ACCOMPLISH?