Content Note:
This piece addresses themes of emotional abuse, coercion, self-harm, and relationship trauma.
I’ve written pieces like Sad Girl Dinner and Every November — written in moments where grief, pain, anger, were like a pot on a hot stove, boiling over. And though I’ve always been someone who naturally feels everything so deeply, I can’t help but wonder why does this all feel so heavy?
My feelings don’t feel “normal.” They feel like pain strewn across the stars, across light-years and galaxies. Buried, yet easily resurfaced. Echoes of every cry, wail, plea for help, all twisted into something unrecognizable.
As if tangled like a necklace, I’ve slowly started to trace the loops and knots, trying to recover its original form. Or rather, my original form.
Much like that process, I’m understanding that the untangling takes time and patience. And that even then, I may never return to my original shape. I’ve also questioned, how did I get here?
I’ve reached an epiphany that I never wanted to have, because that means I have to admit that I’ve played a part in my own betrayals.
Not in the sense that I caused the harm that was done to me, but that I stayed, adapted, and contorted myself in relationships that required self-erasure.
I’ve never had a soft love. Not from others; not from myself.
My first love wasn’t love at all. I can say that now, looking back with years of unwelcome wisdom. What it really was, was wanting someone who didn’t want me back in the same way. All-consuming. Confusing. Harmful.
I was only 13 — a time when I didn’t yet have language for power imbalances or emotional leverage. I only knew that being close to her felt electric, and being kept at a distance felt devastating. Affection came in small, fleeting doses. A hug (or more) if I was lucky, but mostly closeness that felt conditional.
I learned very early that love was something you earned. And when I couldn’t earn it, I turned to writing poetry and self harm to cope.
Her life at home was unstable. There was yelling. Cruelty. An environment where she was constantly criticized and made to feel small. She developed some unhealthy coping mechanisms of her own. She was always asking me if she looked okay, if I thought she was pretty, if I thought she was enough. And I became a soft place for her.
I thought that if I could love her more, be easier, prove myself, that she would eventually love me back. I did her chores. Paid for her lunches. Gave her endless affirmation.
Yet by her, I was forced to dress, speak, and move a certain way. Limited in who and what I was allowed to engage with. Certain music, certain clothes, certain people were off-limits. Only “hers”. If I crossed those invisible lines, affection was withdrawn. Threats made. I was afraid to lose her entirely.
So I complied.
I grew very good at reading moods, anticipating withdrawal, making myself useful, quiet, desirable, agreeable. It was drilled into me that my needs were inconvenient, that my feelings were “too much,” that wanting reciprocity was a pipe dream.
And yet, I still loved her. Deeply. Desperately. In a way that completely overtook my adolescence.
There were boundaries that blurred. I let them be crossed just to stay close to her. Intimacy existed, but never equally. It came unpredictably, on her terms, without reciprocity. I took every breadcrumb I could get, because breadcrumbs felt better than starving.
That unpredictability trained me. It taught me to wait. To hope. To chase. To accept confusion as chemistry and scarcity as desire.
I stayed for five years.
I stayed because this was the only version of love I knew.
When I finally broke things off, I didn’t feel relief. I felt lost. My sense of self had been stripped by the control I had adapted to. Scared doesn’t begin to describe it. I was a stranger to myself.
So when someone else showed interest at a time I was looking for a way out, I latched onto him. Because I didn’t know how to exist without being attached to someone. Somehow, I thought he would be my escape.
Sex happened by coercion. In environments clouded by alcohol, heartbreak, jealousy, and shame. I told myself this was normal. That this was what relationships looked like when you were grown. I didn’t yet know how to tell the difference between desire and obligation.
He cheated on me more times than I will ever know. I felt it in my body long before I ever had proof. When the proof finally came, I should’ve left.
Instead, we talked about making it work.
At one point, he looked me in the face and told me he cared about me, but didn’t know if he was capable of real love. I don’t know why I stayed. But I’ve never forgotten the blank look in his eyes.
In the moments I wasn’t trying to convince myself this was fine, my thoughts drifted somewhere else. I thought about women. About what it might feel like to want instead of endure. Yearning for softness and mutuality, something I hadn’t known.
When he proposed, the feeling that rose in me wasn’t excitement, but fear. I noticed it immediately. I remember thinking how strange it was that I wasn’t crying tears of joy.
When he was stationed in another state, the distance made the truth harder to ignore. When he finally came home for his father’s wedding, we stayed in a hotel together. We had sex. We talked. And somewhere in that conversation, it came out that he had a threesome during one of our “breaks.” He described it not just casually, but boastfully.
A panic attack took over. Violent crying. The realization that the person who claimed to care about me could treat intimacy like something disposable, while asking me to commit my entire future to him. It was then I told him I would never see him the same again. And for once, I meant it.
I left. And even though I was proud for walking away, it wasn’t the end of the pattern.
After him, there were others. Not loves; more like places I tried to rest. None of them felt solid. None of them felt mutual. They were all variations of the same lesson: closeness without safety.
There were arrangements where I was wanted, but not chosen. Where my body was welcome, but my heart wasn’t. Where I was convenient, available, and disposable. I told myself this was better than nothing. That at least someone wanted me.
And then there was the first woman who felt real.
The first place where my queerness wasn’t just daydreamed, but lived. And yet, even that love had to be hidden.
She was younger than me. Closeted. I was in a position of authority. Everything about us had to stay secret — at work, at home, everywhere. Her family was deeply religious. When she finally came out, we were told we couldn’t see each other for a while.
I panicked.
Not because I didn’t care, but because I cared too much. Because control was taken away from me again. Because something I loved fiercely suddenly felt fragile.
Instead of saying I was scared, I said something else. I told her I didn’t know if I felt a spark anymore. The words left my mouth before I could stop them. I knew immediately I had made a mistake. By the time I tried to take them back, it was too late.
She walked away.
That loss still hurts. Not just because I loved her, but because I became the thing I had always been afraid of. I hurt someone I cared about because I didn’t yet know how to sit with uncertainty without self-destructing.
After that, I kept drifting. Back into dynamics where I was used instead of met. Where intimacy existed without intention. Where I was someone’s option, never their choice. By the time I met the next person, I was hopeless.
Exhausted.
Done.
I want to be careful here, because this next part of my story is not about a villain. It’s about impact, and the grief that comes when care exists without the ability to sustain it.
And then I met someone who felt different.
Not perfect. Not effortless. But present in a way I wasn’t used to. Attentive. Curious. Emotionally open. She asked questions and seemed to care about the answers. She took accountability in ways I hadn’t seen before. She apologized when she hurt me. She worried about losing me.
For the first time, I felt chosen.
I let myself believe that maybe this time would be different. That all the work I had done, all the awareness, all the growth, had finally led me somewhere safe. I felt seen not just for my softness, but for my depth. I felt met instead of used. Held instead of tolerated.
And because of that, I trusted her with everything.
I told her about my past. About the ways love had hurt me. About how deeply I feared abandonment. About how much consistency mattered to me. She knew what it had cost me to open like that. She knew how careful I was being with my heart.
At first, she met me there.
But slowly, something began to change.
There were moments of intense closeness followed by sudden distance. Warmth followed by withdrawal. Promises made and then quietly undone. Sometimes she could go deep with me, emotionally present and reflective. Other times she felt unreachable. Guarded. Afraid.
It felt like loving someone who could access closeness at times, and retreat from it at others — as if different parts of her were taking turns.
I tried to be patient. I tried to communicate clearly. I tried to hold space for her fear without silencing myself. I explained my needs gently and honestly, believing that clarity could create safety. Instead, the ground kept shifting.
I began to feel the familiar tightening in my chest. The hypervigilance. The waiting. The feeling of self-abandonment. I hated that feeling because I recognized it. I had been here before. I had promised myself I would never live inside this kind of uncertainty again.
And yet, I stayed.
Not because I was naive, but because when things were good, they were so good. Because the connection felt rare. Because she had shown me a version of love that felt real, and I kept hoping we could return to it.
Our separation felt final, but unfinished.
There was distance, then reaching. Boundaries, then softness. Silence followed by familiar words that reopened old wounds. It never stayed closed long enough to feel resolved, and never stayed open long enough to feel safe.
There was no true untangling. Just stretches of absence followed by moments of closeness that made me believe we were still holding something real. We struggled not to reach for each other, even when we knew we should stop. Periods of no contact felt unbearable, followed by reconnecting that felt stabilizing. Each return brought relief; each withdrawal brought despair.
I was left holding the weight of what we had built without ever being sure when it was actually over. Trying to understand how something that once felt mutual could keep changing shape. Never solid enough to rest in, yet never gone enough to release.
That loss broke me in a way the others never had.
I don’t think she meant to devastate me. I think she was afraid. I think she didn’t know how to stay present when things became real. I think her own unhealed parts took over.
But intent does not erase impact.
And the impact was this: the one person I trusted not to repeat the pattern still became part of it. Not by intention, but by limitation.
That is what shattered me. Not because she was cruel, but because she mattered. Because the love was real enough to hope for, and unstable enough to lose.
