Abigail Sefzik

“Why didn’t you just leave?”

Questions, followed by blank bubbles, empty, eager to be chosen, to be filled with meaning. I sat frozen, sweaty-palmed, heavy-breathing, heart racing, as the nice lady from the non-profit helped me fill out a questionnaire. “Some of these questions might be triggering,” she gently warned, “we can take as long as you need.” I nodded and assured her, more confidently than I felt, that I would be okay, just like always. I’m okay. Two words I had soothed myself with a thousand times before.

“Did he ever…”

“Did he try to..”

“Did he use…”

With each question, floating outside my body, I heard my own voice mechanically answer, “yes.” Not exactly a test I wanted to ace. “It is highly recommended to see a specialist,” she said. Noise, bouncing off my ears. “It’s okay to cry,” she said. I bit my lip, blinking back the tears, wrestling my own body, afraid to break the dam. Damn, how did I end up here?

According to the National Center for Health Research, approximately 35% of women in the U.S. experience intimate partner violence (IPV) in their lifetimes. The CDC reported that 1 in 4 women and 1 in 9 men experience severe intimate partner physical violence, sexual violence, and/or stalking in their lifetimes. And, only about 50% of domestic violence incidents are ever reported to police, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.

I write not for sympathy, but for advocacy; for those who cry silent tears, from fresh wounds or old scars. While the public is not entitled to the exact details of my abuse, I want to share just a sliver of my story because statistics are just numbers until they have faces- just like mine.

“Why didn’t you just leave?” is a question that grossly misunderstands abuse at its core. I did not set out to love someone who would harm me. No one does. It’s not like abusers introduce themselves over a hazelnut latte on the first date, “Hi, nice to meet you. I’m John. I’m about to royally screw up your entire life. When can I see you again?”

Abuse does not announce itself; it seeps in quietly, eroding boundaries until they feel negotiable, then eventually invisible. With each brush-off, it’s not that bad, or they didn’t mean it, I numbed myself further. What I thought was love was, in reality, slowly isolating me, swallowing me whole. Research shows that abuse often develops gradually and alters stress and bonding systems in the brain. Trauma bonds distort reality; control masquerades as care. (Mabunda et al., 2025).

The truth is, I fell deeply in love with a man, one who was handsome, charming and who fell in love with me. However, what I believed and accepted to be love was gray, a line blurred. The abuse seeped in so slowly that I hardly noticed. My abuser convinced me that control was love, and manipulation was care. Eventually, my body no longer felt like mine. My choices no longer felt like mine. I was a stranger to myself, living inside a life I didn’t recognize. Love makes you see someone as how you want them to be, not as how they are. As Geoffrey Chaucer wrote in The Canterbury Tales, “For love is blynd…” So when asked, “Why didn’t you just leave?” The truth is, I did leave. But instead of leaving my abuser, I left myself: my dreams, my standards, my friends, family and my sense of reality. I completely lost myself in someone else. I sacrificed myself on the altar of his redemption, tormented by the belief that I could fix him, a martyr to my mission.

The first time I went to the police was in the middle of a chilly night in April, after months of stalking, harassment, and manipulation, my ex-partner had broken into my apartment for the second time. The image of the officer’s face under fluorescent lights remains burned in my memory. I sat across the table from him in the station and told him the facts of my abuse, like I was coldly explaining how to get to my favourite coffee shop, but perhaps with even less emotion. Divorced from myself. That night, a judge issued an EPO (Emergency Protective Order) for me. The times since then I have chosen to share my story, I’ve been shocked at how clear to others the abuse was, stating it for what it was. Even so, I still found the need to defend him, his reputation, his choices and his personhood, even at my own risk.

But why? An abusive relationship feels like treading water in a typhoon, drowning, while your abuser is equally the tempest and the lighthouse. Exhausting. Disorienting. You’re struggling to keep your head above water. Your eyes sting with salt, blurring your perception of reality.  Before the world even has the chance to judge us, we are already doing it to ourselves. Self-blame can become so ingrained, especially when the abuse is emotional, psychological, or manipulative.

Many survivors of abuse struggle to identify as “victims” because that word has been so heavily stigmatized. Society often attaches shame, weakness, and helplessness to it when, in reality, being a victim of abuse says nothing about your worth, strength, or agency; it only describes an act done to you. Anytime I saw someone who even slightly resembled him, I would stop in the street, my body overcome with fear, blinded, back in the eye of the hurricane. Trauma does that, it collapses time, turning strangers into threats and memories into present danger. Shame followed closely behind, ancient and familiar.

Shame taught me to police my own body. I remember nervously choosing my clothes for court, changing shirts, pants and blouses, just to change again, afraid the judge might think I looked too seductive, as though the curve of my waist would justify his violence. Abuse teaches us to interrogate ourselves before anyone else can. But standing in that courtroom, behind a wooden desk awaiting judgment, I felt something shift. When the judge looked me in the eyes and told me I was a victim of abuse and granted my protection, the word did not burn like a scarlet letter. It grounded me, protected me. I reclaimed more than safety; I slowly began to reclaim pieces of myself.

I am writing this many months after my trial, reflective, but also preparing for another trial due to my abuser breaking his restraining order and landing himself in jail. A reminder that despite everything, I am still not safe.  While I have left him, he still has not left me.

Leaving is not a single act; it is a pilgrimage. Even after you leave, the memories remain. You must leave that version of love again and again. Abuse does not get better; you only grow more numb. And finally, when some of us finally do reach dry land, we are still accustomed to our sea legs, and even safety feels unstable. It can feel almost impossible to have a normal relationship when your compass for love has been spinning in the storm. Treading water is often more familiar than walking without direction. When healthy love finally appears, it can feel terrifying. Gentle hands feel unfamiliar when you’ve learned to flinch. But healing is not forgetting; it is remembering without self-betrayal. Trauma may fracture identity, but it also deepens empathy and our ability to love and be loved. It teaches us how profoundly human we are, how desperately we want connection, safety, and to be chosen. Breaking the cycle means relearning love without fear, without disappearance.

I do not know you, your story, or your pain, but if it is anything like mine, I know how far from yourself you feel. But please know, this is not your fault, and it is not too late. You are worthy of real love, even if you may not feel it now. But, I promise you, real love is so much better. I just celebrated one year with the most gentle, loving partner I have ever known, but more importantly, I am learning how to stay with myself. There is a way out. And there is a way back.

Yet even as I reclaim myself, I cannot ignore the ways our society continues to fail survivors. Too often, we ask the wrong questions: “Why didn’t you leave?” “Why didn’t you report it sooner?” We scrutinize the choices of those who have endured trauma instead of confronting the actions of the perpetrators. We place the burden of proof, and the weight of shame, on the very people who have already been harmed. If you want fewer women to “just leave,” as a society, we need to stop asking the wrong question. Ask why abuse is so often invisible, or even exists at all. Ask why survivors are expected to be perfect, decisive, and unbroken in order to be believed. Ask why safety is conditional, and why healing is treated as a personal failure instead of a collective responsibility.

Legal systems delay justice, social networks doubt victims, and cultural narratives normalize control, manipulation, and silence. Survivors are blamed for the violence inflicted upon them, forced to navigate judgment alongside trauma. The reality is clear: our society has yet to fully reckon with how abuse thrives in secrecy, how fear and shame are weaponized, and how protection and empathy are conditional rather than guaranteed. Until we shift the responsibility from the survivor to the system, until we teach children, peers, and communities to confront abuse without excuse, we will continue to fail, not because victims are weak, but because our collective response is inadequate. We fail when we ask survivors to be perfect, decisive, or unbroken in order to be believed. We fail when we treat trauma as a personal flaw instead of a societal responsibility. We inherently fail when leaving is framed as heroism and staying is treated as consent.

I am still learning how to live in a body that once felt like a crime scene.

But I no longer disappear for love.

I no longer barter my safety for hope.

I no longer leave myself.

I am here.

And this time, I am staying. 

National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1‑800‑799‑7233