There are a lot of abuse and recovery stories out there in fandom. A lot of them are written by people who’ve never been in an abusive relationship. That’s fine, that certainly doesn’t mean you can't write it, especially when it’s present in canon. Unfortunately, it does mean that a lot of people get it wrong.
The usual abuse narrative you see in fandom is a story about absence. The lack of safety. The lack of freedom. The lack of love, or of hope, or of trust. They try to characterize the life of an abused kid, or an abused partner, based on what’s missing. They characterize recovery based on getting things back: finding safety, discovering freedom, and slowly regaining the ability to trust–other people, the security of the world, themselves.
That doesn’t work. That is not how it works.
Lives cannot be characterized by negative space. This is a statement about writing. It’s also a statement about life.
You can’t write about somebody by describing what isn’t there. Or you can, but you’ll get a strange, inverted, abstracted picture of a life, with none of the right detail. A silhouette. The gaps are real but they're not the point.
If you’re writing a story, you need to make it about the things that are there. Don’t try to tell me about the absence of safety. Safety is relative. There are moments of more or less safety all throughout your character’s day. Absolute safety doesn’t exist in anyone’s life, abusive situation or not.
If you are trying to tell me a story about not feeling safe, then the question you need to be thinking about is, when safety is gone, what grows in the space it left behind?
Don’t try to tell me a story about a life characterized by the lack of safety. Tell me a story about a life defined by the presence of fear.
What's there in somebody’s life when their safety, their freedom, their hope and trust are all gone? It’s not just gaps waiting to be filled when everything comes out right in the end. It’s not just a void.
The absence of safety is the presence of fear. The absence of freedom is the presence of rules, the constant litany of must do this and don’t do that and a very very complicated kind of math beneath every single decision. The lack of love feels like self-loathing. The lack of trust translates as learning skills and strategies and skepticism, how to get what you need because you can’t be sure it’ll be there otherwise.
You don’t draw the lack of hope by telling me how your character rarely dares to dream about having better. You draw it by telling me all the ways your character is up to their neck in what it takes to survive this life, this now, by telling me all the plans they do have and never once in any of them mentioning the idea of getting out.
This is of major importance when it comes to aftermath stories, too. Your character isn’t a hollow shell to be filled with trust and affection and security. Your character is full. They are brimming over with coping mechanisms and certainties about the world. They are packed with strategies and quickfire risk-reward assessments, and depending on the person it may look more calculated or more instinctual, but it’s there. It’s always there. You’re not filling holes or teaching your teenage/adult character basic facts of life like they’re a child. You’re taking a human being out of one culture and trying to immerse them in another.
People who are abused make choices. In a world where the ‘wrong’ choice means pain and injury, they make a damn career out of figuring out and trying to make the right choice, again and again and again. People who are abused have a framework for the world, they are not utterly baffled by everyone else, they make assumptions and fit observations together in a way that corresponds with the world they know.
They’re not little lost children. They’re not empty. They’re human beings trying to live in a way that’s as natural for them as life is for anybody, and if you’re going to write abuse/recovery, you need to know that in your bones.
Don’t tell me about gaps. Tell me about what’s there instead.
