Reality is like an onion. Every time another layer peels away, I have to hold back tears. It doesn’t matter how many layers I’ve already gotten through. There’s always another one under there, waiting.
Here’s the layer that peeled this week.
I have been a steadfast supporter of Jasmine Crockett. I voted for her in the primaries. I defended her when people came after her with false allegations, gave her the benefit of the doubt regarding her AIPAC affiliations and because I wanted to believe in her, and because I know first hand what it looks like when a woman gets attacked for existing loudly in a room full of men who'd rather she didn't. I also saw a lot of myself in her. Her stubbornness to say the thing everyone else was too scared to say, her refusal to shrink herself down to make a room more comfortable, the way she'd rather be called difficult than be quiet. I recognized that in myself. I admired her for it.
So when she got up on stage at the AT&T stadium in Arlington and did what she did, it didn't just disappoint me as a supporter. It felt unexpectedly personal, like watching a piece of myself do something I would never do.
I watched her get up on stage and celebrate Chris Brown. A man who beat Rihanna so bad in the early 2000’s, she was forced to cancel her Grammy appearance. A man with a well-documented, ongoing pattern of violence against women. And I watched Jasmine hand him a Congressional Record honor, sing his praises and give him a great big hug on stage for the world to see.
My stomach turned.
I’m a domestic abuse survivor. I have spent years of my life and my writing standing up for women, saying the things people don’t want said out loud, calling out the bullshit. So I said something. I put it in a Substack note:
“Jasmine Crockett really got on stage & handed Chris Brown, a man who beat the shit out of Rihanna, among other violence against women, a Congressional Record honor. Gimme a goddamn break. How disappointing. It’s also why we don’t fully trust politicians.
They will let you down. Every. Single. Time.”
That’s it. That’s the whole crime. Naming a fact, and being disappointed by it.
Someone I considered a friend called me judgmental and racist because I’m a white woman voicing disappointment in a Black woman — not about her actions — the thing I was actually disappointed with, but made the argument about the color of our skin instead. That same friend went on to claim the allegations against Chris Brown were tabloid news as well. It wasn't though. Chris Brown really is a bad person. He pled guilty to beating Rihanna. He's been accused of assault, battery, and worse by multiple women since, in multiple separate incidents, over more than a decade.
That's not a fucking tabloid. That's a documented pattern, and patterns are the whole point. I didn't make it up to be dramatic or because I was on some sick mission to squash Black joy as I was accused of. No. I said it because it's true, and because it mattered, and because staying quiet about it would have made me exactly the kind of person I've spent my entire life refusing to be. Every time a woman praises, excuses or even romanticizes violent men, especially publicly, it signals to others that it’s acceptable — even admirable. Silence from bystanders is one of the strongest predictors of whether harm continues, because it removes social cost. Not to mention, for victims of domestic abuse, it’s triggering as a mother-fucker.
What followed between my friend and I wasn’t just a disagreement — it was a flash. A quick, ugly flash of something that had apparently been sitting underneath the friendship the entire time, waiting for an excuse to surface. Mean girl energy, pretending to be moral concern. And once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. You don’t get to un-know what someone’s animosity looks like once it shows itself to you, even for a second.
After a few back and forths, I blocked them.
NO explanation. NO warning. Poof. Blocked.
Ten years ago, that’s not how it would have gone. Ten years ago I would have been devastated. I would have tried to explain myself into a corner, apologized for things I didn’t do, twisting myself up trying to keep a friendship that had apparently never been what I thought it was. I would have cried about it for a week and wondered what I did wrong. I would’ve begged to be seen and heard.
Last night, I was hurt. I felt it. I let myself feel it. But I stood on my values and morality anyway knowing I was losing someone I cared about in the process. My husband drew us a hot Epsom salt bath, where we let the music playing in the background talk for us, as we just soaked until the water went lukewarm and our shoulders finally dropped from wherever they’d been living all day. After the bath, I lay on my husband’s chest, listening to his heart beating low and constant, like a tide going out and drifted off to sleep.
This morning I sat at my desk with my favorite mug, the smell of Texas pecans and coffee beans filling up the office, and my brain got quiet enough to actually think. I finally realized, I wasn’t scrambling. I wasn’t replaying the conversation looking for the sentence where I could have said it differently, softer, or smaller. I wasn’t drafting an apology in my head for a thing I didn’t do wrong. Ten years ago that’s exactly where I’d have been, still fighting for a friendship that had already told me what it actually was.
Instead I just sat with it. And somewhere in the sitting, I realized what actually changed. I stopped being a person who explains her way out of other people’s ugliness. I became a person who sees it, names it, and moves the fuck on. Like a muscle, that resolve gets stronger every time I choose what's right over what others want me to choose. The hurt was still there, lingering a bit and a little raw around the edges. It just didn’t get to run the show anymore. It got to exist, and then it got to be Monday.
Maya Angelou said it, and it’s true every single time, that, when people show you who they are, believe them the first time. I always struggled with that, especially as a child. I was so used to forgiving bad behavior that all I could see in front of me was the good in people. Constantly giving people the benefit of the doubt even after they showed me exactly who they were. And that set me up to get hurt over and over and over again in my life. So, I quit that shit. Now, as soon as I see a person’s true colors pop out, I make decisions. Quickly.
I believed her. I believed Jasmine — that she made a choice, and that choice was disappointing. Not because she's a Black woman. Because I genuinely don't understand why such an outspoken woman who advocates for justice as hard as she does, would uplift a person like Chris Brown, given his violent history towards women. If there's a good reason for it, nobody knows, because her office has been quiet as a church mouse and so has she. No statement. No explanation. Nothing, despite the backlash. Just silence where an answer should be. Public figures have a responsibility to the public and she has been silent. I believe the pattern she presented.
And I believed my friend, the second that flash of hidden animosity showed up where warmth once was. Because that’s toxic behavior when someone spends so much time performing warmth toward you while resentment sits underneath, just waiting. That’s not a friend who simply disagreed with me. A disagreement would have looked like an argument, a hard conversation, maybe even a fight. This wasn’t that. This was character assassination, the fastest tool in the drawer when someone can’t actually argue the facts. Call her racist. Call her judgmental. Don’t touch the thing she actually said, because the thing she actually said was true.
That’s the toxicity of it. It’s not that we disagreed. It’s that the disagreement gave permission for something else to come out, something that had nothing to do with Jasmine Crockett or Chris Brown at all. If it takes one Substack comment to reveal that kind of animosity, it was never about the comment. It was already there. I just handed it an excuse.
That’s what makes it so disorienting when it happens with someone you actually love. You’re not just losing a friend or a partner or a family member, you’re rewriting the last however-many years in real time, wondering which parts of the warmth were real and which parts were just the waiting.
The onion doesn't stop peeling. I don't think it ever does and I've stopped waiting for the day it will. But I've gotten a lot better at letting a layer go once it's gone. I used to try to put it back on, press it into place, pretend I hadn't seen what was underneath, just to keep something that already wasn't what I thought it was. I don't do that anymore. I let the layer fall where it falls, I let the sting come and go and then cut into the next one.
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Thank you for being here. Seriously. You make this worth doing.
~Eevie
imagine if society just strait up SHUNNED abusers? don’t look at them, don’t talk to them, ignore their existence. outsiders of community. it’s so disappointing that abusive males continue to be amplified, platformed, enabled, praised and awarded. gag me.
Agreed. I used to support Jasmine Crockett. I loved her quick wit, and the way she stood up and spoke her mind (especially to MTG🤭). But this?? Presenting a Congressional Record Award and hugging a man who brutally beat a woman?? It sickened me. You did not speak out “against a Black woman”… you spoke out against a Representative who disregarded values.