A month ago, I was still writing about him. Why he did what he did. Why I stayed. Why I wasn’t enough for him to stop. Why he couldn’t become the person I knew he could be. How the fuck someone who loved me could also be the person who hurt me so badly.
Somewhere in the last month, though, the questions changed. Now I’m asking what the fuck happened to me in there.
Because I don’t think the person I became in that relationship is entirely who I am. That doesn’t mean I get to excuse the parts of myself I don’t like. I became controlling. I micromanaged. I didn’t trust him. I said horrible things sometimes. I tried to manage everything around me because somewhere along the way I convinced myself that if I didn’t, everything would fall apart.
I own that. But I’m also finally realizing that I didn’t just wake up one day and become that person.
I learned his tells. I learned what it felt like when something wasn’t right. I learned that sometimes when I was being questioned, accused, or made to feel like I was the one who couldn’t be trusted, there was something happening on the other side that I didn’t know about yet.
Eventually I stopped trusting the peace. If things felt okay, I was waiting for them not to be. I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop, and then I hated myself for becoming the person who was always looking for it.
That’s the part I’m starting to understand differently. There is a difference between who I am and who I became trying to keep something alive that probably should have ended a long time ago.
For so long, I’ve looked at every fucked-up situation in my life and thought, “what’s the constant variable?” Me. And there is still truth in that.
I am responsible for myself. I’m responsible for the things I did wrong, the things I tolerated, the times I should have walked away and didn’t, and the ways I hurt someone I genuinely loved. But accountability doesn’t mean every single thing was my fault. Apparently I’m just now figuring out that those are two different things.
I don’t have to make him a monster to admit that he hurt me. I don’t have to pretend I did nothing wrong to acknowledge that some of the worst parts of me came out because of what was happening between us. And I don’t have to erase eight and a half years of genuinely loving someone to admit that eventually we became something neither of us knew how to be okay inside of anymore.
But now I have a different responsibility because I cannot carry that version of myself into whatever comes next. I cannot meet someone new and make them prove they aren’t Anthony. I can’t punish someone for lies they haven’t told me, betrayal they haven’t committed, or trust they haven’t broken. I don’t want to constantly look for something to be wrong and convince myself that’s my gut telling me something. And I sure as fuck don’t want to believe that being loved means I’ve somehow guaranteed that I won’t get hurt again.
But I also refuse to go back to being the woman who explains everything away because she loves someone. I don’t know exactly what the middle of those two things looks like yet. I think that’s what I’m learning now.
How to trust someone without ignoring what is right in front of me. How to have boundaries without building a fucking wall around myself. How to love someone without disappearing into them. And how to hold myself accountable without automatically deciding that everything is my fault.
That’s probably the biggest difference between where I was a month ago and where I am now. I was trying so fucking hard to figure out what happened to us. Now I’m trying to understand what happened to me and what I’m supposed to do with everything I learned from it.
Whatever comes next, whether that’s another relationship eventually or just this life I’m finally learning how to live on my own. I don’t want to drag eight and a half years behind me and use it as proof that everyone is eventually going to hurt me. I also don’t want to forget it and repeat the same shit all over again. I want to take what it taught me and leave the rest there.
I don’t want to become who I was before him again. Honestly, I don’t even know if I want her back. I’m not trying to get back to some version of myself that existed eight and a half years ago.
I want to find out who I am after.
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