When I was 18, I was offered a well paying job on the other side of town, which of course my N wasn't having. She dragged me out of bed in the middle of the night, began with hysterical threats and escalated to physical violence until I agreed to turn down the job offer. I did turn own the job, but something very important happened that night. She hit me in the face once, and then backed off and went on another tirade, then came at me again with her first raised above her head. Without even thinking about it, I decided I was done with two decades of physical abuse from her and crossed my wrists above my head to meet her fist, then gently blocked the blow and pushed her hand away. Her expression was not one of rag, or sadness, or shock...it was confusion. She looked at me like I had literally sprouted extra eyes from the top of my skull and could not comprehend that I had defended myself against her. She tried again, as if she'd experienced some sort of temporal disturbance and it was a fluke that could be rectified, and I blocked her again, but pushed hard enough that she had to take a couple steps back to regain her balance. She positively crumpled. For a split second, she looked completely defeated and started to cry. She was actually grieving for the loss of her ability to physically intimidate me. That was when I was absolutely certain that something was deeply and irrevocably wrong with her.

Of course, this just caused the rage to boil up even harder, and after another hour of screaming at me, she did manage to catch me on the side of my head and knock me into a table in the dark. The next day she saw the bruise on my leg and asked what happened as if she didn't know, then tried to gaslight me into believing she wasn't the cause, but I made sure she knew I wasn't buying it. But something changed that night; she realized that I had had the capacity to physically overpower her all along and just hadn't used it until then, and while she ramped up the emotional abuse and manipulation, she never tried to raise her hand against me again.