Hello.  
This is my experience with physical abuse. It may not seem extreme, but it did cause me trauma as a person I trusted was the person who inflicted pain.  
 
I was just done with online school, and I was excited to meet my friends after what seemed like years. Lockdown had just lifted, and I was dying to see a person unrelated to me. Especially him, let's call him Dash. 
 
Dash was my best friend. He was the person I went to for everything, and he'd come to me for everything, whether it was girls, school, or his parents. So back to the day where I went to meet my friends. As I said, it had been a while. We sat around, talked, laughed, and danced to the music playing in the background. While this was happening, I noticed Dash sneak out to the balcony. 
I followed him out there and saw he was smoking. He was 16 and smoking. Honestly, I was scared because he was a pretty reckless person. I wasn't sure if he was sensible enough not to get addicted. So I went to stop him. One thing led to another, and the next thing I knew, we were in the middle of a screaming war. I said some things I didn't mean, and so did he.  
 
Finally, it got too much, so I told him, "I'm done. I'm done with this, and I'm done with you!" I stormed back inside and heard footsteps behind me; I turned around, and there he was. He held my neck and lifted his arm, and slapped me. I froze. I had absolutely no idea what to do. Literally, no thoughts went through my head for a minute. Only after a minute did I fully comprehend what just happened; my best friend, my person, had just slapped me. He did have a history of making rash decisions. Still, I never imagined that he would behave that way with me because he never did. On the contrary, he always respected me and respected our friendship. As I sat in the car, I thought about the events that took place that day, I vowed to never talk to him ever again, but that was harder said than done.  
 
As time went on, I found myself normalizing what happened to me because I stopped seeing him as an abuser and a guy who used to be my best friend, and I had to change that. It took my friends and family lecturing me and a whole lot of therapy for me to understand that I can't take this lightly.  
When I decided to write this and share my story, I understood how serious something like this is and how important it is for women to share our stories. Living in a society like ours (Indian society), it's hard to speak about abuse. But unfortunately, slapping someone is "part of our culture", which is absolute nonsense. I know this story is my personal experience. Still, I do hope if you've gone through something similar, you found some sort of comfort that you're not alone after reading this. 
 
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