Lila’s Story
Lila grew up in a household where violence was the main influence, recalling her mother would "beat the living fuck out of me." By early adolescence, she was involved in the system.
By her early 20’s, she started doing heroin and met her partner when she was desperate for “I don’t know what.” She said, "You really want to believe someone when they tell you that they love you. I was damn near blind to everything else,” and reflected, "I guess you'd rather be with someone abusing you than be alone."
Her relationship was toxic and abusive with daily physical assaults; her partner would frequently kick her, and she described one time where he “jammed my foot, which never healed properly.”
Despite the consistent violence, she felt “trapped” and “so hooked on heroin I couldn’t leave. It was like a game of predator and prey,” with her days revolving around drug use and violence: “Every day consisted of me waking up dope sick, and we would do drugs [together]. He was a dealer. The violence seemed to never end.”
Her partner was also jealous and controlling; if a man passed her by, he would say, “You looking at him?” and he would get violent. She recalled him “punching me dead in the face in public,” and a stranger intervened, shouting, “I'm recording,” implying for him to stop or the police would be called.
Lila shared a particularly harrowing moment: “I'll never forget thinking ‘he's going to kill me,’” when he had her in a chokehold, and she heard neighbors scream, “We're going to call the cops!” She woke up with paramedics working on her after he “knocked me out.”
Despite the danger, she felt unable to leave: “I couldn't leave... I was so far removed from my own self that the thought of having to function without him consumed me. He knew there wasn't anything he couldn't do to me; he knew I wouldn't leave. I was a shell of a human being.”
Lila also explained how she “wasn’t allowed to do anything, I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere. I wasn’t even allowed to have a job.”
One day, after being awake for three days straight, she was too afraid to go home. She thought he would punish her less if she found drugs and brought them home for them both to use. Lila ended up in the company of a stranger, a man she thought could get her drugs, but the experience turned traumatic when “he raped me three times.”
Following this event, she was even more afraid to go home, knowing her boyfriend would “find out I had been with another man,” and she feared, “I was going to get the living fuck beat out of me [once he found out].”
