I’m not sure

I’m not sure you understand yet. I’m not sure you understand that this isn’t about you, or what I think of you, or how I really feel about you. This is about survival. It’s about running on empty so long that I no longer remember where I was running. It’s about making do with nothing until there is nothing left I can do. It’s about pain that hasn’t been salved, and injury that hasn’t been treated. It’s about extended deprivation and repeated assaults, enacted again and again, using the same clumsy manoeuvres. It’s about being victimised by assumptions about my apparent success, while my real failure is delivered in daily doses of economic strangulation. It’s about the kind of despair that engulfs, not after weeks of hopeless futility, but months and years of it. It’s about the lies that people have told me before they went on to enact the very opposite of what they said they would. It’s about the cumulative physical damage to me of being unable to access medical and dental care. It’s about losing my inheritance and all the personal mementos that I vowed I would fight for, before I’ve even had the chance to fight. It’s about the falsehoods writ large that have kept me personally isolated from the people I most care about. 

No, it’s not about you at all, unless you are one of those people I care about. But it is about you if you find dismay or distress or anger of your own in what I’ve written. It’s about you if your pain meets mine in the twists and turns of this horrible extended torment that has taken so many excruciating words for its voice. And it is very definitely about you if any or all of this thrusts a jagged blade through the tattered remains of what care or regard ever existed between us. I’m not sure you understand the depth of desperation that could require such an enormous risk. But neither can I comprehend how any of this could be a shock to you. How is it that the truth of my life has been so invisible when I am so painfully in the view of so many people all the time? How can you, any of you, have allowed this to go on so long, even after all of my best and most eloquent words had collapsed into a torrent of incoherent distress? 

No, I’m not sure you understand. But I hope you will try.