I don’t know what was so broken in me that I sought brokenness in other people and formed unhealthy attachments so quickly. I became codependent. There were red flags from the beginning, and instead of running, I wanted to save him.

We had hung out in person one time. One fucking time. Then he told me he was going to take his life. I had never left work early before, but without hesitation, I left and drove to him. And then he stayed. He didn’t have a car. He didn’t work for a while. But in that moment, none of that mattered because I kept him alive. That was the most important thing. It was what I was supposed to do.

I can still close my eyes and picture that car ride. The silence. The songs that played. They were so sad and so broken.

There were signs even then. Facebook said he was dating someone, and when I asked him about it, he said they were just friends and she had a stalker, so he was pretending to date her to protect her. And I believed him because I had no reason not to. I have always trusted people until they give me a reason not to.

Then came the first time I knew something was wrong. I had never been someone who looked through another person’s phone. I don’t even remember exactly what happened or what tell he had, but something in my gut told me something was wrong. And I was right. That became part of the toxicity too. Instead of leaving when I knew something was wrong, I stayed and started becoming someone I didn’t recognize.

I should have fucking ran.

Even at the beginning, it was, “Well yeah, I guess I’m dating Kirsten now. I don’t know how it happened.” Except he had already moved in with me, and it didn’t cost him anything.

The jealousy started early too. I remember sitting at Salvino’s when a regular and an acquaintance came over just to say hi. Anthony freaked out and cussed me out in front of everyone. I paid my tab, held back my tears, and ran after him.

Then there was the Yelawolf concert. He got so drunk. At the time, he made me believe someone had drugged him. Maybe they did. I don’t know. But knowing what I know now about how he became when he drank, I don’t know that I believe that anymore.

It was one of the worst nights of my life. He screamed at me at the concert and took off, and I followed him around Grand Rapids begging him to get into the car. People were looking out of their apartments telling me to go home. Telling me not to let him talk to me like that.

But I stayed.

I finally got him into the car. He punched the interior lights and shattered them. He tried to jump out while the car was moving. I called his parents and begged them to help me calm him down. His dad came over the next day and stitched up his face because he’d fallen multiple times. He told him again that alcohol was poison.

Somewhere around then, he smashed my phone too. I have never broken a phone. Never even really scratched one. He grabbed mine and threw it straight into the ground.

I never told anyone that.

I remember wearing lingerie for him and somehow even that became something to be upset about. Then it became makeup. Doing my hair. Getting ready for work. “Who are you getting dolled up for?”

Then came the accusations that I flirted with everyone at work. I didn’t. I was there to fucking work. I picked on everyone and worked my ass off, but he told me I flirted, so eventually I started questioning myself too.

He didn’t like me bartending. He didn’t like me working at Salvino’s because there were people there I had dated or had some kind of connection with before him. He never technically told me I had to leave.

It was just easier to leave.

I could be friends with some people I had dated because when I was done, I was done. I didn’t go back. There were no romantic feelings left, and I trusted myself. I knew I wasn’t going to cross that line.

But apparently having male friends was crossing the line.

And there’s something else I never told anyone.

We were fighting at his parents’ house one day, out on their deck. His parents were trying to calm us down, which knowing their history is ironic. He was screaming at me and slut-shaming me again. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but it was so fucking hurtful that I pushed him away from me.

I had never put my hands on anyone. I shouldn’t have pushed him. But I was so angry and wanted him away from me.

He grabbed me and pushed me backward against the railing. His parents had to grab him.

Later, he told me he had wanted to throw me over it.

And I still stayed.

There are probably recordings on my old phones of the way he talked to me. And when I say talked, I mean screamed. Over the years, it became easier to just not say anything.

Then there was the Journey and Def Leppard concert. I spent around $600 on tickets. I was so fucking excited. We had a hotel. I was ten or fifteen minutes late leaving, and then we hit a huge traffic jam on the way to Detroit. He went off because I had been late.

We never went to the concert.

I sat there and bawled while he screamed at me.

And the next day, it was like nothing happened. No apology. Nothing. I shrugged it down and acted normal too.

I let all of this become normal.

The talking to other women never stopped. The talking down to me never stopped. The inability to trust me never stopped. And I believed every story he told me about every ex and everything they supposedly did to him.

Me now? I would really like to hear their side.

Because I don’t think I was the first.

I know I wasn’t.

I think I was just the one who stayed the longest.

The first time I broke up with him was because he still couldn’t stop seeking attention from other women. I had found recently saved pictures and videos of his ex-wife. There were other women too. Sexting. Topless pictures. All of it.

I remember crying to my mom and telling her why I had ended it.

She cried too.

She begged me not to take him back. Not to go back.

And she said, “This is Carl.”

I went back.

What hurts looking back is that he never really apologized. He hurt me so much. The way he spoke to me. The way he treated me. The other women. The pictures. The sexting. I could be standing there crying, completely broken by something he had done, and somehow my pain never seemed to affect him.

Somehow it would get turned back around on me, and I would be the one sleeping on the couch for days.

Nothing changed.

He just became more and more like Cliff.

And then came the day he put the gun to his head.

That’s the day I froze.

The entire time, he wanted to die. He drank every day. He was drunk or high every day. Maybe it wasn’t the 12 to 15 drinks he can put away now, but it was always there. And I begged him to stop because I couldn’t stand watching someone I loved slowly kill himself.

But that’s just how it started.

Everything I just wrote happened within roughly the first three years.

And I stayed for eight and a half.

I always wondered why I hated myself.

Maybe this is part of the answer.

My mom saw something I couldn’t see yet when she looked at me crying and said, “This is Carl.”

I found a man like my biological father. The original man who didn’t want me.

A man who could charm anyone. Someone other people could look at and see one person, while there was an entirely different, darker side that only the unlucky ones ever got to see.

And instead of leaving when I saw that side, I kept trying to make him want me.

Maybe because somewhere in me, getting him to love me felt like I could finally prove that I was worth loving.

But that’s how you learn to hate yourself.

You don’t wake up one morning and suddenly hate yourself. You learn it slowly. You learn it every time someone hurts you and you convince yourself it’s okay. Every time you cry and then pretend nothing happened. Every time you make yourself smaller because it’s easier than another fight. Every time you accept something you know you shouldn’t because losing them somehow feels scarier than losing yourself.

You learn it when someone screams at you and you run after them.

When strangers tell you that you don’t deserve to be spoken to that way, and you still get him into the car.

When someone smashes your phone and you don’t tell anyone.

When you stop doing things because it’s easier than being accused of something you didn’t do.

When someone pushes you against a railing and later tells you they wanted to throw you over it, and you still stay.

When they hurt you and you’re the one who ends up questioning yourself, sleeping on the couch, or pretending everything is fine.

I wanted so badly to save someone who was broken that I didn’t realize what it was doing to me.

I kept him alive.

And somewhere along the way, I stopped knowing how to live.

That’s how you learn to hate yourself.

Walking into a new church alone is still scary. I’m carrying a lot of sadness and I’m still angry with God. I don’t understand why someone as devoted to Him as my mom was had to suffer the way she did. I know she’s with Him now, but that doesn’t make the anger disappear. Maybe going back means accepting that I can be angry with God and still try to find Him again.

A friend recommended The Refuge, so today I went. There were maybe 30 people there, and nearly everyone made a point to welcome the new face. I cried, which I fucking hate doing in front of anyone, let alone strangers, but something about this place kept pulling me in.

I’m looking for somewhere I can belong without becoming a different version of myself. I want a family, and I’m realizing that doesn’t necessarily have to mean a husband and kids. Maybe some of it can come through community. Maybe some of it can come through church.

And then the weird little connections started.

Before the sermon even began, they talked about an outdoor vertebrate study. Nature. Science. At church. Okay, you have my attention. Then the previous pastor spent several minutes talking about gypsum underneath the church. Rocks. Fucking rocks. Of course.

Then the sermon was about rebuilding.

Of course it fucking was.

The message that kept coming back was that faith has ample space for both grief and fear. I don’t have to stop grieving, stop being angry, or have everything figured out before I walk through those doors.

Then he talked about how they don’t always fit what people expect a church to look like. Sometimes people think they’re weird.

Come be weird with us.

Science. Nature. Rocks. Grief. Fear. Rebuilding. Being weird. No masks. Come exactly as you are.

All of that in one hour.

I’m not going to throw myself into everything or decide after one Sunday that I found exactly where I belong. I’m just going to go back next week.

But I know I was supposed to be there today.

I went looking for some kind of connection with God, and for the first time in a very long time, I felt like He knew exactly how to connect with me.

I’m finally realizing I spent a lot of my life believing it made sense because of the people in it. Who loved me. Who stayed. Who left. Who hurt me. And somewhere in all of that, I forgot that this was supposed to be my life.

I’m not trying to put everything back together anymore. I don’t even want it back the way it was. I want to find out who I am when I’m not building my life around keeping someone else in it.

She jumps out of airplanes. She wants to go places, try things, scare the shit out of herself and find out what’s on the other side of fear. She’s learning how to be a better friend. She’s learning boundaries. She’s learning that she can deeply want people in her life without needing them to become her life.

I still don’t know what happens next. I don’t know whats going to happen with the house, who will be beside me,  or what ridiculous thing I’ll decide I need to do next.

And for once, I don’t need to know.

This part isn’t about finding the next person, fixing the last chapter, or racing toward an ending where everything finally makes sense.

Maybe it’s just about finally being here for my own life.

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.