Getting lectured by a recovering heroin addict about how the chemicals in bug spray are bad for your body is WILD. 😭
Ma'am… I support your recovery, but DEET is not where your liver's villain origin story began. 💀
Chad,
This letter isn't for you.
It's for me.
Because there are words trapped inside my chest that have nowhere else to go.
I am angry.
I am heartbroken.
I am disappointed in you.
And I am disappointed in myself for spending so many years trying to convince someone to love me the way I loved them.
Do you have any idea what it feels like to spend years wondering if you're too much? Too emotional. Too needy. Too loud. Too broken. Too suspicious. Too sensitive!
Do you know what it's like to slowly lose yourself because you're constantly trying to become someone easier to love?!?
I do.
I lived it.
Every time I cried, I hated myself for crying because I knew it pushed you farther away...
Every time I needed reassurance, I hated myself for needing it because I knew you were exhausted by it...
Every time I brought something up that hurt me, I somehow walked away feeling like I was the problem.
I stopped trusting myself.
I questioned my own instincts.
I questioned my own sanity.
I questioned my own worth.
That is what I carry now.
Not because we broke up.
Because somewhere along the way, I forgot who I was.
I miss the woman who believed she was enough.
I don't even know when she disappeared.
Maybe it was after the hundredth argument where I begged you to understand me.
Maybe it was every time I looked at your face searching for warmth and found distance instead.
Maybe it was every time I wondered if I was competing against someone else, against your phone, against your silence, against your inability or unwillingness to let me in.
I don't know.
What I do know is that loving you became lonely.
You could be lying right beside me, and I still felt alone.
That's the part that hurts the most.
Not the breakup.
The loneliness.
You were supposed to be my safe place.
Instead, I became afraid of your moods.
Afraid of your silence.
Afraid of bringing up my feelings because I already knew how it would end.
You withdrawing.
Me crying.
Nothing changing.
I know I wasn't perfect.
I know my anxiety spilled over.
I know I asked questions you were tired of answering.
I know I chased reassurance when I should have been protecting my own peace.
But do you know why?
Because somewhere inside me, something never felt settled.
I spent years trying to quiet a voice that kept saying, "Something isn't right."
Whether that voice was right or wrong almost doesn't matter anymore.
Living with it every day changed me.
I wish you understood what it felt like to watch the person you loved become emotionally unavailable while still expecting you to keep loving them with your whole heart.
I wish you understood what it felt like to be the one constantly trying.
Constantly hoping.
Constantly believing tomorrow would finally be different.
I kept waiting for a version of you that only showed up in flashes.
Just enough to make me stay.
Just enough to make me believe.
Just enough to keep my hope alive.
Hope is a cruel thing.
It kept me here long after my heart had started bleeding.
And now...
Now I have to rebuild everything.
Not just a home.
Not just a life.
My confidence.
My ability to trust.
My ability to believe someone can love me without making me question my value.
I have to teach myself that I wasn't impossible to love.
That I wasn't asking for too much.
That wanting honesty, consistency, affection, and emotional safety doesn't make me needy.
It makes me human.
The hardest part is that I still have love you.
I wish I didn't.
It would be so much easier to hate you.
Instead, I miss you while grieving the relationship I desperately wanted but never truly had.
That's a special kind of heartbreak.
You were my best friend.
You were my home.
You were the person I wanted to tell everything to.
And somehow you also became the person I felt most alone with.
I don't know if you'll ever understand what this cost me.
Maybe you will.
Maybe you won't.
But I need to stop waiting for you to understand before I allow myself to heal.
Because healing was never going to come from you.
It has to come from me.
I hope one day I look back on this version of myself with compassion instead of shame.
She wasn't weak.
She loved deeply.
She believed fiercely.
She stayed because she saw the good in someone she loved.
Maybe she stayed too long.
But she stayed because her heart was genuine.
That isn't something I want to hate about myself anymore.
So this is where I leave all the words I swallowed.
The tears I cried where you couldn't see them.
The dreams I built that never came true.
The life I thought we'd have.
I'm done carrying them for both of us.
They're yours to answer for in your own heart.
They're mine to heal from in mine.
Goodbye.
P.s. you always said it sucks knowing that I have no one to turn too. That is absolutly the furthest thing from the truth.
Then I remembered...
I have someone in my circle who genuinely wants to see me happy. Someone who celebrates my success instead of competing with it. Someone who protects my peace instead of disturbing it.
Perhaps the most beautiful part is this
He's willing to help put me back together, even though he wasn't the one who shattered me into pieces.
He is the kind of man I've always dreamed about... The kind that doesn't create wounds...it patiently helps them heal.
He gives me the space I need when I need it, doesn't push other than in positive ways, and could spend all day talking to him and still want to talk some more.
I think I've really got something here. I truly believe that this is the start of something so great, things I never thought were available for me are.. and I still can't get my head around it.
I love it, and want more of it
I'm so tired of constantly rearranging my plans, changing course, adapting to everyone else's chaos, and feeling like I have absolutely no control over my own life.
I keep asking myself if this is some kind of punishment or test. How are other people allowed to disappear, reappear whenever they want...create chaos... somehow I'm the one who has to keep adjusting?
What's making me even angrier is that for the first time in my life, I found someone incredible. Not good enough. Not "potential." Not someone I have to convince to love me.
Someone who checks boxes I didn't even know existed. Someone who wants me back just as much as I want him.
And yet it feels like every obstacle imaginable keeps showing up.
If it's not depression, it's anxiety.... If it's not anxiety, it's work. ...If it's not work, one of my kids gets sick. If it's not that, it's some new crisis. And then when there isn't actually a crisis, I create one in my own head.
I can get dressed. I can do my hair. I can get excited. I can be completely ready to leave the house.
Then the moment comes to actually go?
My brain suddenly starts telling me on like a repeat loop...
"You don't deserve this."
"You don't deserve to be happy."
"Stay home."
"Stay where it's safe."
And I listen.
That's the part that's making me rage.
Because nobody is actually stopping me anymore.
I'm stopping me.
I have the ability to change my life. I have opportunities in front of me. I have people rooting for me. I have every reason to move forward.
Yet somehow I keep choosing the familiar misery over the scary possibility of happiness.
I'm terrified that if I don't figure out how to break out of this mental prison soon, I'm going to lose something beautiful simply because I couldn't convince myself I was worthy of it.
How do you stop self-sabotaging when you've spent years surviving and suddenly you're being asked to actually live?
Today I made a call when he crossed my mind, it changed my perspective so much.
I wasn't asking him to buy me anything. I wasn't asking him to come help me. I was literally just making conversation while wandering around the store.
This man not only looked up whether the store had it, but started trying to figure out the exact aisle and bay location for me. When I couldn't find it, he casually informed me that he had two different kinds at home that would both work and I could just use one of those.
The thing that got me wasn't the grease...
It was the fact that helping me was his immediate instinct.
There was absolutely nothing in it for him. If anything, I interrupted his day and created a minor inconvenience. Yet somehow he treated my problem like it was his problem to solve.
I've spent so long being independent that I genuinely don't know how to react when someone consistently chooses to make my life easier.
Anyway, apparently the fastest way to make a grown woman blush is not flowers or fancy dinners.
It's white lithium grease