“When I was a little child, it was clear to me that life was not worth living if we did not know how to love. I wish I could testify that I came to this awareness because of the love I felt in my life. But it was love’s absence that let me know how much love mattered.”
For the past year or so, I’ve worked tirelessly to put myself back together piece by piece and articulate what this very specific feeling was. And what it was about the relationship in my life that made this feeling of loss so incredibly painful. Why the pain I was experiencing didn’t quite match the magnitude of the relationship I had lost. Then it finally clicked. It all made sense.
In my 27 years of life, I spent 22 of them surviving any and every kind of domestic abuse. While it’s so easy to say that abuse should never define you, it would be foolish of me to assume that it has not affected the way I interact with people, the way I approach personal relationships, and how I make sense of my world. The relationship I had lost at this time last year wasn’t abusive. It was actually quite the opposite. For the very first time in my life, I opened my heart to the possibility of love. What a monumental moment for someone that spent her entire life deeply terrified of intimate personal relationships. For the first time in my life, I felt safe.
I cannot pinpoint exact moment in my childhood when my abuser realized that I was no longer worthy of love. I guess somewhere in that process, I started to believe him. Love and care quickly turned to hatred and neglect. I didn’t understand. So I spent the next 20 years of my life finding every possible way to survive in this feeling of nullity. In retrospect, I find that impenetrable walls were the only way I’d make it out alive. So for 20+ years, I felt nothing - joy and even sadness and pain felt like foreign concepts to me. It’s so odd for me to look back and realize that for 20+ years, I truly did not feel anything.
But there as one definitive moment in 2015 when I genuinely felt like I had a second shot at life. For the first time in 22 years, I felt hope for a future where I could experience life without shame again. So I took the time to dig deep and unearth the hurts and traumas that ultimately became my inescapable truths. As survivors, we often bury them deep in fear that if our partners were to ever discover them, we would simply would not be worthy of love. That was my biggest fear, to be honest. For someone to see the darkest and most damaged parts of me and believe that I was either ’too much’ or just ’not enough.’
In December of 2019, I fell into one of the deepest depressions I had ever experienced. I lost my job. The uncertainty of not knowing what would come next gave me crippling anxiety. My mother had broken her leg in several places. An opportunity that fell on my lap became one of the most difficult professional experiences I’ve had to deal with as I spent the first few months of a pandemic to going back and forth with the Department of Labor, trying to sort out why it was that I wasn’t getting paid the thousands of dollars I was owed. So I went from a normal, structured life, to being responsible for managing how I would navigate my career moving forward, dealing with depression and anxiety, traveling for work and being home for 3 days a month, and caring for an entire family. I was publicly humiliated in the office in front of my peers. They had no idea what was going on in my life. And my partner at the time was getting increasingly frustrated with my inability to identify actionable items that would just somehow magically fix everything. In the blink of an eye, my entire life fell apart in front of me. And I just couldn’t stop it. On this day a year ago, after having not heard from my then partner for 48 hours, I received a phone call. We were done. And it was ended with the words, ‘It’s just not enough for me.’
What I didn’t anticipate were how those words would stay with me and swirl around in my head for the months to come. My biggest fear became my reality. I opened myself up for the first time in my life, only to be told in the middle of my deepest depression, that I just wasn’t enough.
What I’m sure to him were just a few words spoken hastily as they came to mind, I like to think that it happened that way for a reason. As so quickly did I realize how much I based my identity and self-worth on the love and approval of someone other than myself. While I can say now that I have taken the time to heal the parts of me that needed the most love, I now know that I am worthy of being loved for my whole self. And not just the parts of me that are palatable.
Funny, I once wrote a letter to myself that read, ‘Find comfort, solace, and peace in solitude. You can't buy, achieve or date serenity and peace of mind. It’s an inside job. And it’s not a 9-5. It’s a job that runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year. You have to face your own fears, answer your own questions, and supply your own love.’ How easy it was for me to forget those things. But such a sobering reminder that progress is not linear.
When I looked back at the relationship I had, I wondered if he loved me. For months afterwards, I asked myself this everyday. But I realized that it was not love, but rather adoration. And as it turns out, adoration is not love. Adoration is a projection onto you of someone else’s need for you to be perfect. And I will forever be a work in progress. And that idealized image and love for my potential was just not for me.
Looking back, the abuse I endured ended when I was 22. But it never really ended. It changed who I was. And it wasn’t until this past year that I truly felt the effects it had on me - the anxiety, guilt, and shame that I felt every single day. How often intimacy gave me a sinking feeling in my gut. Growing up, I always asked myself what it was that I could have done better to perhaps be loved or treated better. 'Did I do enough?’ was a question I had always asked myself. So I’ve spent majority of my life grappling with feelings of inadequacy.
In both instances, I waited for apologies that never came. So instead, I started to write. I found meaning in my experiences, the hows, and the whys in an effort to move forward. I wrote my own apologies. Because what some people forget about forgiveness is that it’s not always about another person. Sometimes it’s about forgiving yourself. And through this process, I learned that the liberation is in the details.
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In August of 2015, I was given a second shot at life. And if there is a promise that I have made, it is to love myself enough and to know that I am always going to be enough. Because sometimes the hardest part about the recovery is convincing yourself that you are worthy of love. Even if it’s the love that you give to yourself.