Hello dear ones,
Three weeks ago, I found myself in bed, on my phone, reading the news about Jonah Hill’s abusive behaviors towards his ex-partner, Sarah Brady. I knew I wanted to write something in response, and it’s taken me a few weeks to figure out how. So thank you for your patience as I took a few weeks off from my newsletter to honor the writing process. And special thank you to Raechel Anne Jolie for reading this writing so that I could feel safe enough to put it out into the world.
I’ve sat with whether or not to tell my story, for there are always stakes when you speak up about harm and abuse you’ve experienced. The possible backlash somehow feels less terrifying than remaining silent out of fear — knowing that the person who harmed me wants nothing more than me to never speak of our relationship again. And, as I read the texts from Hill, and the conversation around them, I was given language for understanding my own experience. When people speak up, they help us feel seen. I hope to offer others another opportunity to be witnessed.
I was also struck by just how many comments were made along the lines of “heterosexual men are the worst” or “so glad I’m not straight.” Because what Jonah Hill did — cloaking abuse in the language of boundaries — happens in queer relationships too. And, in fact, I can’t help but wonder if it’s been happening in queer relationships longer, given that queer folks are more likely to be in therapy than cishet men.
The weaponization of therapy language is something that I’ve been writing about for my next book, Queer Wounds: Reckonings on Relationality and Harm. I’ll share some links for further reading at the end of this piece. Please feel free to reach out if you want to share your story about queer wounding with me. I’m slowly interviewing folks, so it may take me a few months to get back to you. You can find my call for interviews at the end of this piece.
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Content note: discussion of emotional abuse, control, manipulation, DARVO, and gaslighting. Please be gentle with yourselves.
It’s around 10pm on a Sunday night and you’re lying in bed, scrolling on social media when you see it: “demanding control over your partner’s autonomy is not ‘having boundaries.’” You swipe through the slides and read the news: “jonah hill’s ex-girlfriend, professional surf instructor sarah brady, has shared texts jonah sent to her during their relationship where jonah asks her to stop surfing with men, to stop posting photos in swimsuits, and to limit her friendships with ‘unstable women.’ he calls these his ‘boundaries.’ none of these are boundaries. dressing up your need for control in progressive therapy jargon doesn’t make it less manipulative.” You feel yourself become dysregulated. Panicked, yet you can’t stop swiping, reading the comments, clicking on the next post. your body is telling you what you’re reading here is familiar.
To: Margeaux Feldman
From: The Ex
Date: Monday, January 30, 2023 18:03 PST
Subject: request to stop writing about me
You click on a video from popular therapist Jeff Guenther breaking down the difference between boundaries and control: “Jonah Hill was using therapy speak to control Sarah, his now ex-girlfriend. And it’s important that we go over this misuse of therapy language…as it masks controlling behavior under a commonly accepted positive concept, in this case boundaries.” You listen as popular internet therapist explains: “A boundary is a healthy limit a person sets for themselves to protect their well being and integrity. It is a rule or guideline that one creates to identify reasonable, safe, and permissible ways for others to behave towards them and how they’ll respond when someone passes those limits. Jonah’s message is more about restricting Sarah’s behaviors to suit his comfort levels and insecurities.”
Please do not talk about me to people you know are connected to my life, it’s inappropriate. Please stop writing about me, my life, and our brief relationship. I would also like you to take down any writing, memes, etc, you have made about me…Thanks in advance for respecting my wishes.
You get out of bed to take a hot shower. Your body suddenly cold despite the fact that LA is in a heatwave. You try to connect with the feeling of the water hitting your skin. To remind yourself: You’re here. You’re safe. You’re okay. Your partner’s out at a Le Tigre concert — but they’re home by the time you get out of the shower and you’ve never felt so grateful. You crawl into bed and tell them the news and how it reminds you of The Ex. You start to cry and they hold you. “I knew something was up when I saw Koala,” (your stuffie), “on the bed” they tell you, and you both laugh. Then you let it go, sobbing into their chest. You take an Ativan and eventually you fall asleep.
The next morning, you wake up feeling sick to your stomach. The panic is back. You find that you’re gaslighting yourself: what The Ex did wasn’t abusive — or was it? After Brady shared these texts, men and women were quick to jump all over Brady’s allegations, claiming that “There is literally nothing wrong with Jonah Hill’s leaked text messages regarding what he wants in a partner,” and “His boundaries are acceptable and he expressed them respectfully.” One headline read: “Jonah Hill Cancelled by Ex for Having Standards and Boundaries.” You understand why you’re doubting yourself. That this is precisely what The Ex wants.
“It’s very disturbing to me that my friends report back to me about your postings, writings and memes about me over the last several months. It feels unethical to take a narrative, that in my opinion is incredibly inaccurate, and capitalize on it. The narrative you have created is so wildly not in line with with my experience that I’m genuinely concerned for you.”
The email confuses you. You never made any memes about them, and you wrote a few newsletters where you talked, very briefly, about the breakup and its impact on you. You never wrote about their life, shared identifying details about who they were, or anything private that they shared with you. The Ex knew you were a writer. In fact, your writing was what drew them to you. They’d purchased many of your zines, subscriber to your newsletter. It was through your writing, both online and offline, that they learnt about all of the healing you’ve done around intimacy. Their desire for you is inextricably linked to your writing.
You recall the conversation you had shortly into dating. You outline how you navigate writing about the people you’re in relationships with. How you’ll use a pseudonym; won’t share anything about their private life or any details that would make it easy for people to identify them; and you offer to send them any writing you wanted to publish in advance so that they could read over it first. They had no requests, no issues. They were so moved when they read the first piece of writing you put out. It wasn’t until the relationship ended that The Ex told you to remove any past posts and stop writing about your relationship. Suddenly, what attracted them to you was a problem. You, a human they found through your writing on the internet.
This, you’ll learn, is the love bomb to devalue cycle. You know that you’re not alone here when you see. You’re reminded of a meme you saw: “oh so dating a guy who gets mad at you for being the person he was attracted to in the first place is a universal experience? cool cool cool.” Jonah had messaged Sarah before they started dating, complimenting her surfing photos. Now that they were together, things had changed: “If you need to…post pictures of yourself in a bathing suit…I am not the right partner for you. These are my boundaries for a romantic partnership.”
You think of another post you read in response to Jonah Hill’s attempts at controlling Sarah Brady: “To protect our self-concept as a nice person, we subconsciously try to reframe our rejection of our loved one’s qualities as something they’re doing to us…The reframe overstates the harm of the offending behavior and seeks to control by way of triggering feelings of guilt, shame, and responsibility.” You try to let these words serve as an anchor, tethering you to what you know is true (and, at the same time, you know that multiple truths can and do co-exist; this knowledge frees you and traps you simultaneously).
What you do know is this: You’re a writer who wrote about how The Ex abruptly ended your relationship via email after you’d spent a week together. (You’d just bought tickets for your next visit. You’d both agreed on the dates. They said, “See you in September,” when they kissed you goodbye. And so you went ahead and bought your plane tickets. Apparently, you should have double checked with them first. You didn’t know that you needed to do so. A fatal error. Or maybe the best mistake you could make.) Their email was cold, unkind, and cruel (You use these words only because those were the words reflected back to you by friends, your therapist. You felt that their email was all of these things, but your propensity for self-gaslighting made you question yourself. Maybe you’re just too dramatic, this voice said.) It was paternalistic, The Ex telling you that this was “the kindest thing they could do” before they signed off with “best.” (You feel the need to add in another parenthetical comment here too, so that anyone reading this will understand just how unkind that sign off was, after you spent a week together fucking and talking about your feelings (appositional phrases are the domain of those who’ve been taught to doubt themselves. Is this necessary? is a question that’s become a refrain.)).
In a rare moment of anger, you think to yourself: if you didn’t want to come off poorly, maybe you should’ve ended things differently. You let yourself feel some of the rage that is often too inaccessible: Isn’t it funny how, as soon as you talk about how they hurt you, you’re a capitalist? You’re the one being unethical? The Ex knows that using the language of consent and boundaries and exploitation will turn you into the bad guy, the crazy ex who can’t respect boundaries. Perhaps, you think, you should stop dating writers.
What disturbs you the most from The Ex’s email is this line: “The narrative you’ve created is so wildly not in line with my experience that I’m genuinely concerned for you.” The subtext: you are mentally unstable. The Ex carefully positions themself as the good person, the one who is “genuinely concerned,” as a way to make you question your own reality. There’s nothing scarier than another person telling you what’s real and what isn’t.
Around the same time that you received their email, you hear from a friend of The Ex:
“A lot of us know what you did recently in relationship with someone—violating their boundaries, behaving in clear, non-consensual ways, continually writing about them online in your dissociated, delusional state.”
Like The Ex, they accuse you of slander, of profiting off of those lies.
“You should take all of this to your therapist, along with the chance you have BPD and narcissistic personality disorder. Narcissism 101 is exactly what you’ve done, which is why I think you need to be mindful of that so you don’t abuse more people. Wishing you healing and true recovery.”
You find yourself in therapy the week after, asking your therapist if you’re a narcissist. “The fact that you’re asking yourself that is a sign that you’re not,” she tells you. Later, you’ll ask your best friends: “But what if I just managed to trick my therapist? To trick you?” “The fact that you’re wondering that…” they mirror back.
While you cannot attribute the words used to describe you to The Ex, it’s clear that they’ve painted a picture in which words like “dissociated” and “delusional” are appropriate descriptors. In whatever story The Ex is telling about your relationship, you’re the one with the personality disorder. The abuser. Another thing you wonder: is this DARVO? Deny responsibility, attack and discredit mental stability, values, and motivations, reverse victim and offender. Another thing you know: nowhere in your writing about your relationship do you diagnose or pathologize them. Nowhere do you paint them as a villain. You are not to blame for their bad behavior.
You also know that it’s possible that you harmed The Ex. And, in holding that possibility, you remind yourself that harm isn’t a justification for manipulation, control, harassment, and abuse. Even if you’d done all of the things you’ve been accused of, you do not deserve to have these disparaging words thrown at you. Another thing you hate: the way that personality disorders have been pathologized to the point that we see them as dirty words that taint us and overshadow every other part of our personality – words we must distance ourselves from at all costs. This, you know, is ableist. And yet, you’re still so deeply afraid that all of these proclamations about you are true; that The Ex knows you better than you know yourself. Impressive, their ability to make you doubt yourself so completely.
You don’t know how to finish this piece because you’re too afraid:
That one of The Ex’s friends will read this and tell them.
That you’ll be criticized for quoting their email; but questioned if you don’t show “the evidence.”
That you’re just too sensitive; none of this was really that bad.
That you’ll come off as angry, mean, delusional, dissociative, [insert invective here].
That this story isn’t needed.
That you should’ve remained silent
– just like The Ex told you.
“It’s like they still have so much power over me,” you tell your therapist. It’s been 3 weeks since you started writing this piece; 6 months since The Ex last emailed you; and over a year since the relationship ended. You wish you could feel empowered. Instead, you feel fear. The Ex can still hurt you. They still have their claws in you somehow. This, you know, is how emotional abuse works.
“Remember our session a few weeks ago,” your therapist asks you, “where you realized that they can hurt you but you have choice here?” The session feels like a vague memory. “Okay, let’s see if we can get back there.” Your therapist asks you first to be with the fear. Then, you call upon your core vitality, your adult self energy. You feel your chest open up. And suddenly it’s as if The Ex is a dark cloud, floating away from you. No longer enveloped, you feel a protective barrier in place. Perhaps this is another way to think about healing. Maybe it’s not that you reach some final stage of being Over-It: not a dark cloud in the sky. Rather, you can learn to be with the fear without becoming it. You’re no longer the cloud.
You are still very much in process. You’ve been accused of writing from the wound, not the scar. Perhaps you are, to borrow Leslie Jamison’s words, a wound-dweller. And that’s okay. The idea that we can only write from the place of being Over-It is an injunction that keeps certain people quiet – and by certain people, you mean survivors. Some wounds never fully close. Sometimes, you read about another person’s experience of abuse, and scars become wounds again. You capacity to be wounded, your vulnerability, was what drew The Ex to you. They wanted to learn how to be vulnerable, and you would teach them. It is not your fault that your greatest strength would become, to them, your most dangerous asset. So you do what you do best: you write. And through the writing, the cloud recedes further. This is how you take your power back. You are so much more than whatever story they could tell about you.
Please note that I’ve turned commenting off on this post. If you’d like to share your thoughts or feelings, you can reach out via email to hello@margeauxfeldman.com or share this writing via IG and tag me.
Further Reading:
The Romanticization of Vulnerability and its Discontents (Queer Wounds Part 2)
Queer Villains and the Ethics of Opting Out (Queer Wounds Part 3)
As part of Queer Wounds, I’m looking to talk with folks who’ve experienced harm in queer relationships. Specifically, I’m interested in hearing more about: the weaponization of therapy-language (boundaries, attachment theory, self-care, diagnoses) and the experience of being love bombed and then disposed of. That being said, I’m open to other experiences of queer wounding that you might want to share. If you’d be interested in talking with me, please reach out to hello@margeauxfeldman.com with the subject line QUEER WOUNDS, and share a couple of sentences in the body of the email about the experience you’d like to talk about.
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