I'm Italy Mone, and this is The Slowdown.

Lately, I've been hearing a lot of discussions about what constitutes violence.

I have a friend who is a professor who says violence is violence.

And he says it as a way of telling his students that to use the word violence in a hyperbolic way can actually dampen your point.

Can language be violence?

I don't know.

I know I worry about hyperbole all the time in my own writing.

I can recast things in my past for the sake of storytelling.

Make something feel dramatic when it was actually just difficult or a challenge that I managed to rise to.

I always want to make sure I'm staying true to the facts and not just letting my emotions run rampant on the page.

But it's important to acknowledge that not all abuse is physical.

So many of us have been a victim of or a witness to the terror and tight grip of emotional abuse,

whether in a personal relationship or in a public setting.

How many times have I had late night discussions with friends determined to extricate themselves from a toxic relationship

only to have them return the next morning because they say it's really not that bad, even if it is.

What I mean to say here is that there are many ways that emotional abuse has been normalized in our relationships.

I worked with a friend once who was in a relationship that was clearly unhealthy.

Everything she did was for the sake of pleasing him.

He never raised his voice or lifted a finger to hurt her physically.

But her life was a daily tangle of stress trying to make sure he was happy, placated, subtly soothed so he didn't lose his temper or cause a fight.

When they finally split, she cried for weeks until she came in one day and said,

I've forgotten what my mind felt like without him in it.

...