Personal Struggle — Part 4

This story is meant to be read chronologically. Please start with Part I.

As I previously stated, this is a deeply personal and painful account that I’m sharing with the world to bring awareness of several atrocious events that happened to me almost 19 years ago and were left unpunished.

I want to take a moment to thank everyone who has been reading my story and to everyone who has been reaching out with kind words of support. I’m about to touch on some very difficult subjects of abuse, suicide, and murder. I would not be able to continue this journey without you. I feel that you have given me a tremendous amount of confidence, comfort, and trust. Without this support and inspiration I would not be able to share my personal story and tell you all the intimate details. To me, this is much more than just blog posts on medium. To me, these are private conversations that I’m having with each and every one of you.

This photo was taken not long before I tried to commit suicide in January 2002.

Part 4:

I woke up the next day after my wedding festivities completely sick with a flu, a 104°F fever, unable to swallow and get out of bed. I begged my ex to postpone our honeymoon trip and cancel our 16 hour flight with 2 layovers to Jamaica, but to no avail. This was a wedding gift from his mother and no way in hell was he going to disappoint her. He was determined to bring me there dead or alive. Mind you, Jamaica was not my choice to begin with. Nobody even asked me. I was forced to accept this “wedding present” from his parents.

He poured me a full glass of peppered vodka and then some at the airport and on the plane, and I was blacked out for most of the way to Kingston. Our stay at that Jamaican resort was straight out the first season of White Lotus where my ex, just like the Shane character was harassing the hotel manager for a room upgrade. We changed rooms 3 or 4 times after which he was still unsatisfied and wouldn’t calm down until the hotel issued us a bunch of spa vouchers. He made sure that we got to use them all even if it meant going there 3 times a day because those treatments were free. All I remember was laying face down on the massage table drowning in snot, counting minutes for this torture to be over. That was the start to my marriage.

When we got back to San Francisco, things took an even darker turn. His first plan was to push me to commit suicide. He knew that it would take some time to bring me to that point of no return so he set the gears in motion on day one. Even on our honeymoon, where I was very sick and exhausted after the wedding and unable to physically comprehend much, I could already feel that something had switched and that he had become a completely different person, someone who I didn’t know at all.

He had to completely destroy me mentally, emotionally, sexually, physically. I intend to touch on all of the above subjects at some point of the narrative to give you a glimpse into his multiple sadistic sides. I lasted for about 6 months and then I couldn’t take it anymore. He was so good at his game that I think he was himself surprised at how easy it was for him.

I was eager to be a good wife and to build a loving family, and a comfortable home, but he did everything to shatter that dream. Initially, I moved into his 2 bedroom in Park Presidio that was part of UCSF housing. He used to have roommates, but by the time we got married he was renting alone. That extra bedroom meant that we could have visitors there all the time.

Firstly, his buddy MK who just graduated from UCLA business school and moved back to San Francisco, would come over to our place every single night to hang out. The dot com bubble already burst and 2001 was the year of economic recession. MK couldn’t find a job, and he was born on September 11. 911 happened on his 30th birthday and this pushed him into a state of deep depression, cynicism and bitterness. This individual felt entitled to come over even before my then husband would get home from work, go straight for the fridge and then drop on the couch to watch whatever he felt like on TV.

I felt that I had no privacy and alone time with my ex and we had fights every time this guy would leave. This went on for the longest time. My ex knew how to set boundaries, but he didn’t want to. He encouraged MK to come over and trigger me to react. Finally, MK moved away from SF when he found a good job somewhere else. I could not have been happier, but my freedom from unwanted intruders didn’t last very long.

Shortly after, this other buddy from my ex’s med school got into a residency program in SF. He was supposedly going to stay for a week in that second bedroom until he found a place to rent. I don’t think that he even tried to look for apartments. That week lasted for 3 months. He was working shifts at the hospital and he would come and go at odd hours of the night. His pager would regularly go off in the middle of the night and wake me up. We shared one bathroom and he would occupy it for hours. He was a total nightmare.

I felt like I couldn’t focus and couldn’t get anything done. I started falling behind in my classes and started ditching school. That place in Park Presidio was also very damp and full of greenery. I started getting terrible allergies and when I went to see an allergist, he told me that I had to move out of Presidio if I didn’t want to have asthma for the rest of my life.

We moved to a different apartment on Beale street in SoMa. I hated the neighborhood, but my ex wanted to be close to Bay Bridge because he worked in east bay. Back then, SoMa was very depressing. It was full of abandoned construction sites after the burst of the dot com bubble and completely dead on the weekends. There was also a homeless shelter next block from our apartment. I didn’t feel safe to venture outside and was trapped in that apartment for most of the time.

My ex spent as little time at home as possible and when he finally did grace me with his presence late in the day, he was on the phone for most of the night like I wasn’t there. At first, I would make dinners and wait and wait and wait for him to come home from work. He would finally get there and tell me that he already ate, or that he didn’t like what I made, or that he already ate it the night before and that he could not eat the same thing twice. The last one would drive me up the wall. He was so spoiled rotten by his mother that he demanded different dishes for every meal of the day and every day of the week. He would also use his towel only once and then drop it on the floor as if he was in a hotel.

To my questions of why he got home so late again, the answer was always that he had to work so hard because of me. He had to work several jobs to be able to maintain the lifestyle that I “was used to and expecting from him.” It sounded like a bunch of BS even back then. It just didn’t make any sense. I’m pretty sure he was cheating on me all the time and he just didn’t bother to come up with a better excuse. The bottom line was that he never wanted to be home with me.

After a while, the patterns of making me feel insignificant by ignoring all my efforts of being a good wife morphed into a different kind of attack. He started enjoying putting me down and making me feel inferior to make himself feel better. He’d come home angry, take it all out on me and magically get into a better mood. If he saw me in good spirits, he had to make sure to ruin it for me. He found fault in everything that I did. He accused me of being not good enough as a friend, as a lover, and as a wife. Nothing was good enough. I wasn’t good enough.

At some point, he started writing to do lists and demands of what he wanted me to accomplish during the week and then set a weekly meeting time to discuss my progress. Now looking back at it, I can’t believe that I didn’t just walk out on him at that moment.

The problem was that I didn’t have anywhere to go. My parents pushed me out of their lives, sold me off as some damaged goods, as some blemished animal that wasn’t even good enough to be sacrificed. One of the sickest parts of this story is how my parents felt that they had to offload me to someone and how this someone perverted everyone’s reality to the point of them believing that I was such damaged goods that they had to pay him a lot of money to take me away from them.

He completely perverted my reality. I went from being the most eligible bachelorette, young, beautiful, and talented to being a nonentity that should have been grateful that he took her in. “You’re such shit that nobody would put up with you except for me. You should be happy that I’m not leaving you” became one of my ex’s favorite things to tell me over and over again.

I felt guilty for everything. Even for things that I didn’t do. I remember catching myself feeling guilty and not knowing for what before him coming home. I just knew that when he would get home, he would definitely find something to accuse me of and be upset about. And I already felt guilty about it.

By that point I was failing all my classes and I was very scared to tell him or anyone else. I knew that this would eventually get uncovered and I dreaded that moment. I had days when I was so depressed I couldn’t physically get out of bed and then I felt even more guilty about myself.

Just as I was sinking deeper and deeper into depression, I would find more and more opioid medications stacked in our bathroom. These bottles of codeine and tramadol seemed to appear out of nowhere. At some point, every drawer I opened contained ample amounts of painkillers to knock out an elephant. Supposedly, these pills were for his pulled wisdom teeth, his sprained ankle, etc. but he never took them.

It was about 6 months into our marriage when I felt that my whole life fell apart. Somehow my mom found out that I flunked all my classes. I just didn’t show up to the finals. My parents were still paying for my school and she threw a major fit about it. Then she told my future ex-husband.

He was ecstatic when he found out. This gave him so much material to work with, so many ways to destroy me. It was everything ranging from “you are such a pathological liar and I could never trust you again” to “you are a total moron that can’t even get a passing grade.” He delivered an epic tirade that ended with him telling me that he was too embarrassed to appear with me at any public function. The night before, we went to a holiday party at UCSF and apparently he was too embarrassed of me at that event. Everyone was an MD or at least a PhD and I was a nobody. I had no degree. I just turned 21.

After he told me how embarrassing I was, I ran to the bathroom in tears. I locked the door behind me and I didn’t know what to do. I felt completely cornered in and I didn’t see any way out for myself. I felt betrayed and completely alone. I opened the medicine cabinet and stared at the painkillers that were there. I felt that my life had just ended. I started to swallow pill after pill after pill until I couldn’t swallow anymore.

I came out of the bathroom and laid on the bed. I wondered why my ex didn’t run after me, didn’t check in on me. It must have been over an hour since I left the room where he was sitting and locked myself in the bathroom. He was extra quiet and he was waiting. He was very much aware of where I was and what I was doing. It was his triumph.

As I was laying on the bed, I closed my eyes and saw this vivid visual of my funeral. I will never forget it. It was this almost neon bright green grass and a dark coffin and my mom crying. Then I felt sorry for her and I felt that I couldn’t do it. I got up and I walked up to my husband and said: “I just did something very stupid. You need to call 911.”

To be continued …