Tag: Who is Jack Stallings?

The Puzzle Pieces of Harm

That is part of why it can be reasonable to give people the benefit of the doubt when something happens. We ask whether it was a mistake, whether we misunderstood, whether there is another explanation, or whether it is something that can be talked through and fixed. Most of us do not want to treat every bad interaction as proof of a larger problem. The difficulty comes when we keep looking at each new event as though nothing similar has happened before. At some point, the question may no longer be only, “What happened this time?” It may also be, “What keeps happening?” That is where patterns start to matter. One piece is not the whole picture I like the puzzle-piece metaphor because it captures something I struggled with for a long time. If someone hands you a single puzzle piece, you can describe it accurately. You can see its color and shape. You may even have a good guess about where it belongs. But you cannot reliably tell what the whole picture is from that one piece alone. The same can be true when we are trying to understand harm.

Harm In Relationship

One of the things I have had to learn is how much the relationship between two people changes the context of what happens between them. The same behavior can have a very different effect depending on who is involved, what they know about each other, what they have agreed to, and how much trust or reliance already exists between them. A stranger, a friend, a parent, a coworker, a casual partner, and someone we have built a life with do not occupy the same place in our lives. They know different things about us, and we rely on them in different ways. Someone close to us may know our fears, our history, our routines, our finances, our boundaries, our vulnerabilities, or private parts of our lives that we simply do not share with everyone.

What Can We Harm?

A more useful question is: What actually changed in a harmful way? What became meaningfully damaged, constrained, lost, or put at unnecessary risk because of what happened? That sounds simple enough, but once we start answering it, we find that harm can reach many different parts of a person’s life.

More Than Hurt: What Is Harm?

Hurt tells us something about our experience. Something was painful, upsetting, frightening, embarrassing, disappointing, or difficult. Harm asks a different question: what did this actually do to the person? Did it take something away, limit a choice, create a risk, or damage something that mattered? That distinction matters because hurt is unavoidable.

What I Carry Forward

When I started writing What We Carry, I was trying to answer what seemed like a fairly simple question: What have I actually lost? It turned out to be an annoyingly productive question. I started pulling apart things that had been tangled together for a long time. I thought about what I believed care meant, what I thought I knew about another person, why I felt safe, and the strange grief of possibility when someone is still alive and could still make different choices. I thought about the limits of what bringing something into the light can actually accomplish. Eventually I started thinking about what I had not lost, what I still knew, and what I had gained. Somewhere along the way, I think I stopped asking how to get rid of the grief. That may be the most important thing I learned. I believe in moving on. I want to keep moving forward. I do not want grief, anger, regret, or anything else that happened in the past dictating the life I get to have now. But I am much less interested in the idea that moving forward requires completely letting go of what we have grieved. Some things simply do not work that way.

What I Have Gained

I have been thinking a lot about what I have gained through my experience with Jerry, and I keep getting stuck on the word gained because it can make the whole thing sound much tidier than it was. I do not think everything happens for a reason. I do not think getting hurt was in any way necessary so that I could become a better or stronger person. Most of the things that helped me through what happened with Jerry were things I already had before I ever met him. I knew who I was and I knew I could survive disappointment. I knew how much work I had done and how many people had helped me get there. But that does not mean nothing has changed. Some things really are new. Some things I already had have been tested in ways I had never experienced before and feel even more solid now. Some parts of my life have expanded simply because I kept living, exploring, meeting people, making things, and paying attention.

What I Still Know

There are a lot of things about being human that I do not understand. The older I get, the more comfortable I am with that. But there are also things I do know. I know that none of us exists separately from everyone else. Relationship is not something we occasionally choose to enter. We are born into it, formed through it, and spend our lives affecting and being affected by other people, including people we barely know and people we will never meet. Our lives depend every day on the work, knowledge, choices, creativity, generosity, carelessness, and care of people whose names we will never know. We inherit a world shaped by people who came before us, and whatever we do becomes some small part of the world other people will inherit after us. We are all just fucking interconnected, whether we acknowledge it or not. Sometimes that is beautiful. Sometimes it is highly inconvenient. Usually it is both.

What I Have Not Lost

When I started thinking about what I had lost through everything that happened with Jerry, the losses were pretty easy to name. Trust in him. A relationship that mattered to me. Some memories that mean something different now. The confidence that what I knew about him was enough to make informed choices about my own life. What I have not lost is harder to put into a list, mostly because the important things were already there long before Jerry ever was. By the time I met him, I had spent years figuring out who I was, what mattered to me, what belonged to me and what did not. I did this in many ways: through therapy, recovery, complicated family relationships, grief, friendship, community, mistakes, repair, and a lot of ordinary life. Healing has been far from an easy or predictable process, and it certainly hasn’t been linear. I also spent plenty of years angry, resentful, hurt, frustrated, grieving, and carrying things I did not yet know what to do with. For much of my life, I believed that I would carry some resentments for the rest of my life. I do not think any of that means I was doing life badly. It means I was living it.

What We Grieve, What Matters

I have spent a lot of time wondering what my grief about Jerry says about what existed between us. For a while, I think I was still trying to understand whether what we had mattered to him in anything close to the way it mattered to me. Not because I needed him to have loved me or wanted some bigger relationship. I never believed that. I just wondered whether the connection itself held anything like the same weight for him. I may never know and I am realizing that I do not actually need to know. Jerry and I never had a clear label for what we were. I do not know how he thinks about that time now. I do not know whether he would describe what we had as intimate, meaningful, casual, complicated, or something else entirely. But I know what it was to me. I spent almost a year knowing him, spending time with him, having sex with him, talking to him, trusting him, laughing with him, worrying about him, getting irritated with him, caring about him, and eventually being hurt by him.

When Griefs Overlap

I started writing What We Carry because I realized I was grieving more things than I knew what to do with. Apparently the universe thought I needed more material. My mom died recently. I am still figuring out what that loss even is. Our relationship was complicated, as mother-daughter relationships often are. She was far from perfect. So am I. There are things about our relationship I will probably be sorting through for a long time.

What Happens When Everyone Knows

I think I expected getting people to understand what had happened to be the difficult part. It turns out that telling people creates a whole new kind of work. Once you tell the story, you explain it. Then you explain another part of it. You document things, answer questions, clarify details, and try to make sure people understand what you actually know versus what you think might be happening. I have spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to be precise because that matters to me. I do not want to make claims I cannot support. I do not want anger to make me careless. I worry about saying too much. Then I worry that I have left out something important. And after all of that, people are still free to decide what the information means to them. I think that has been one of the harder things for me to accept.

What I Cannot Prevent

A younger version of me would have had a much harder time separating his choices from my own sense of worth. I can imagine spending years wondering what I had done wrong. Why I was not enough. Why someone could make me feel so seen and important and then behave in ways that seemed to say the opposite. I might have taken all of that confusion and turned it inward. I know there are women who would do that now. That is the part that scares me.

What Could Still Be

One of the strange things about grieving someone who is still alive is that the future is not actually gone. Jerry could still change. I still believe that, and I think that is part of why this is so sad for me. I have never thought I could make Jerry change. But I did believe he could become different and for a time I thought I was watching it happen.

What Felt Safe

I felt safe with Jerry. I keep coming back to that because I think it matters. I did not feel safe with him because I ignored a bunch of obvious warning signs or because I desperately wanted him to be someone he was not. I knew pretty early on that Jerry could be very messy. There were things about his life and his choices that concerned me, and I paid attention to them. As I wrote in the last post, because I knew him so well, I thought I knew what the risks were. But nothing about Jerry screamed danger. In fact, he was almost the complete opposite of the kind of man women are taught to watch out for.

What I Thought I Knew

I know an extraordinary amount about Jerry. I know about his family and the complicated relationships inside it. I know the people he has lost and which dates on the calendar are hard for him. I know how he became a Christian, how he found his way into ministry, and how some of his beliefs changed over time. I know about friendships that shaped him, things he regrets, and things he wishes he had done differently. I know about his recovery, his therapy, and how much he struggles with ADHD. I know many personal details that Jerry shared with me over the countless hours we spent together. I also know completely useless things, like his favorite ice cream flavor.

What I Thought Was Care

When I started asking myself what I had actually lost after my experience with Jerry, one answer kept coming back to me: I thought Jerry cared about me as a person. I don’t mean that I thought he loved me. I don’t mean that I thought we were building toward some conventional relationship. Jerry and I never had a defined relationship, and I was never interested in a long term relationship with him. I liked him. I enjoyed him. I cared about him. I thought he cared about me too.

What Have I Actually Lost?

For a long time, I did not think of what I was carrying around my experience with Jerry as grief. I knew I was angry and hurt. I knew I was trying to understand how someone I had trusted could make choices that contradicted so much of what I thought I understood about him and about what existed between us. I kept returning to certain moments and questions, trying to make sense of what had happened. I knew it was affecting me. I just did not recognize some of what I was doing as grieving.

Editor’s Note – Followup

Violet addresses additional feedback and further updates to the project. Revisions after editorial review should not be understood as a correction, retraction, or change in the underlying account. They reflect an abundance of caution and an ongoing commitment to the same principles that have guided this project from the outset: telling the truth and limiting unnecessary exposure for people who are not the focus of the story.

Editor’s Note

Violet addresses feedback and updates to the project. Revisions after editorial review should not be understood as a correction, retraction, or change in the underlying account. They reflect an abundance of caution and an ongoing commitment to the same principles that have guided this project from the outset: telling the truth and limiting unnecessary exposure for people who are not the focus of the story.

Violet: Chapter 32 – The Lightness of Truth

Harm is not simple. Accountability is not simple. But complexity is not an excuse. Trauma is not an excuse. Addiction is not an excuse. Loneliness is not an excuse. Poetry is not an excuse. Tenderness is not an excuse. A person can be wounded and still wound others. A person can be suffering and still be responsible for the choices they make. Violet had spent her entire life learning how to love people who suffered. She had also spent her entire life learning the cost of confusing love with protection from consequences.

Violet: Chapter 31 – Release the Ropes

Violet thought she had a small amount of experience with rope. It turned out she had very little understanding of how rope should actually be practiced. At first, that realization was humiliating. Then it became clarifying. She was not discovering that she disliked rope. She was discovering that she had barely been introduced to it. She was not looking for another Jerry. She was not looking for someone to take his place, or another man to explain this world to her.

Chapter 29: Violet’s Reflection — The Sharp Edges of Danger

Jerry had told me enough to change everything, but not enough to make anything clear. He was still deciding what I knew, when I knew it, how much context I had, and what parts of his life stayed hidden. That meant I was still inside the dynamic even while I was beginning to see it. I knew more than I had before, but I was not free of his version of events. I was trying to understand the danger while he was still controlling the map.

Chapter 28: Violet’s Reflection — Come and Cuddle (please)

Jerry had withheld information that mattered. He had let me believe I understood the situation when I did not. He had allowed me to make emotional and sexual decisions without the basic transparency I had asked for again and again. Then, when the truth started to come out, he did not move toward accountability. He moved toward performance. He offered sadness instead of repair. He offered woundedness instead of responsibility.

Chapter 26: Violet’s Reflection — I’m Very Fragile

Jerry had seemed to say the right things in the moment, but afterward the pattern continued. He disappeared, reappeared, suggested plans, changed plans, turned frustration into sexual teasing, and let long gaps sit between moments of warmth. I was still interpreting each exchange individually. He had reasons. Some of those reasons may have been real. But the pattern was real too.

Violet & Jack: Chapter 25 – Get the Ropes Ready, Jerry

The conversation kept sliding from ordinary logistics into sexual charge, then back again, as if dinner, therapy, Cindy, and rope all belonged naturally in the same plan. By afternoon, Jerry pushed it further. “You don’t intend to go to therapy with panties on, do you?” He sent a gif of a man in a suit sitting on a bed tapping on his leg in a dominant “come” motion.

Violet & Jack: Chapter 19 – Prove It, Jerry

The rope came out again. So did the blindfold. Violet had experienced most of this with Jerry before. That made a difference. The first time, everything had felt new. This time, there was anticipation, but also recognition. She knew the feel of the rope. She knew the vulnerability of being blindfolded. She knew the shift in his voice. But he also introduced something new, a spreader bar

Violet & Jack: Chapter 18 – Unlock the Door, Jerry

Violet had already told Jerry he made her feel safe. After sex, there was usually tenderness and quite often snacks of the bachelor variety - random junk food or candy. More often, they stayed close afterward, quiet and tangled together. Sometimes they talked. In the mornings, when they woke up, he would almost always press up against her and kiss the back of her shoulder. Sometimes they woke up wrapped tightly together in a sweaty cocoon.

Violet & Jack: Chapter 17 – Juggle the Plates Jerry

The possibility appealed to her because it felt light, not heavy. Sex with Jerry seemed like it could be playful and creative, a place where curiosity did not have to become commitment. There were things Violet had not explored before, and with him, it seemed like there might be room for that. There was chemistry, trust, imagination, and enough shared mischief to make her think they could have a lot of fun.

Violet & Jack: Chapter 15 – Thread the Needle

By January 22, Violet was exhausted. Then Jerry asked her to come over and thread a needle for him. Violet had no idea what he meant. She stared at the message for a moment, trying to decide whether he was being literal or making some kind of strange reference she was supposed to understand. With Jerry, either seemed possible. He could be playful, cryptic, oddly specific. He could say things that sounded like jokes until they weren’t, or like invitations until they turned out to be something else.

Chapter 7: Violet’s Reflection — Ground Shift

At the time, the messages between the sermon date and the sunset date felt like connection deepening. Jack Stallings was attentive. He was specific. He noticed things about me that felt small enough to matter: baseball, my credo, my humor, my socks, the way I kissed him, the way I held him. He seemed interested in more than my body. He seemed interested in how I thought, what I believed, what I loved, what I was searching for.

Chapter 6: Violet’s Reflection — The Counterweight

At the time, the messages between the sermon date and the sunset date felt like connection deepening. Jack Stallings was attentive. He was specific. He noticed things about me that felt small enough to matter: baseball, my credo, my humor, my socks, the way I kissed him, the way I held him. He seemed interested in more than my body. He seemed interested in how I thought, what I believed, what I loved, what I was searching for.