“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I change.” ~Carl Rogers

For over a year, I woke up at 3 a.m. almost every night.

I would lie there in the dark, my heart pounding, my mind sprinting through the same loop: What if I can’t handle my job? What if I lose my income? What if I spend the rest of my life alone?

Eventually I would fall back asleep around dawn, then drag myself through the workday like a ghost—exhausted, flat, and pretending to be fine.

I wasn’t just going through a bad patch. I was a highly sensitive person who had spent a lifetime being afraid of other people’s opinions, and in 2019, the ground finally gave way.

The Sensitive Kid Who Grew Up Scanning Faces

I’ve been sensitive for as long as I can remember. After meeting someone new, I would replay the entire conversation in my head—every expression, every pause, every word—trying to calculate what they thought of me.

Did they like me? Did I say something stupid? Did they notice my flaws?

In daily life, I didn’t dare to speak freely. I was terrified that if people saw the real me, they would look down on me. Socializing wasn’t connection; it was an exam I kept failing.

It was exhausting. But for years, I coped. I studied psychology. I traveled. I pushed myself to join social activities. Life wasn’t easy, but it was under control—until it wasn’t.

When Everything Fell Apart at Once

In 2019, I ended a fifteen-year relationship. Around the same time, I moved to a new home and started a new job.

In a matter of months, the three pillars of my life—love, home, work—were all gone or rebuilt from scratch. I no longer knew who I was or where my life was going.

That’s when the anxiety I’d carried quietly for years grew teeth. It stopped being background noise and became a full-time companion.

My sleep collapsed first. Then my energy. Then my interest in almost everything. I went to work, answered emails, smiled at people, and felt nothing.

Here’s the part that’s hard to admit: I knew exactly how bad things had gotten, in body and mind. I had studied psychology. I could have diagnosed myself on the spot.

But understanding the theory and actually acting on it were two entirely different things. I didn’t have the strength to cross that gap.

I Stopped Trying to Get Better

The strange thing is, the shift began when I quit trying.

I stopped pushing myself to recover quickly. I stopped treating healing like a project with a deadline. If I couldn’t fix myself, I decided, I could at least look after myself.

So I did small, almost silly things. I took myself out to eat alone and ordered the food I actually wanted, as long as I could afford it.

I bought myself clothes. I bought myself little gifts for no reason at all.

Slowly, I stopped being my own enemy. And one ordinary day, a stubborn strength rose up in me out of nowhere and said, “Okay. Now I want to fight back.”

The Punishment Cushion

I read self-help books. I watched videos. I tried techniques. And I started meditating—which, at the beginning, felt like pure punishment.

I would sit down, and my mind would erupt. Old conversations, future disasters, random itches, grocery lists. Five minutes felt like an hour. Every cell in my body screamed, “Get up. This isn’t working.”

But something in me knew this was the right door, even if I couldn’t open it yet. So I kept going.

Three to five times a week, I sat. Five minutes became ten. Ten became twenty. Twenty became forty. No breakthroughs, no bliss, no glowing white light. Just me, practicing the art of staying.

The Moment I Found the Watcher

About a year in, something shifted.

A wave of anxiety rose up one day, as it always did. But this time, instead of drowning in it, I noticed something strange: there was a part of me watching the wave.

The anxiety was there—hot, tight, familiar. But so was the one noticing it. And the one noticing it was calm.

It was the first time I understood that I was not my anxiety. My anxiety was an object moving through me, like weather moving through the sky. The sky doesn’t fight the storm. It doesn’t have to. It just holds it.

Around that time, I picked up a book about Morita therapy, a form of psychotherapy created over a century ago by Japanese psychiatrist Shoma Morita. It put words to everything I had been stumbling toward.

The Therapy That Told Me to Stop Trying

Morita’s core idea shocked me with its simplicity: feelings are not something we can control. We can’t argue ourselves out of anxiety, motivate ourselves out of sadness, or willpower ourselves into calm.

Trying to eliminate a feeling only feeds it. The more you stir muddy water to clean it, the muddier it gets.

What we can control is what we do. Morita called this accepting things as they are—arugamama—and then taking the next action anyway. Anxious? Fine. Take the anxiety with you and send the email. Go to work. Wash the dishes. Live your life with anxiety sitting in the passenger seat instead of waiting for it to get out of the car.

I had spent years waiting to feel better before living better. Morita told me I had it backwards: live first, and the feelings follow.

What This Looks Like in Real Life

This isn’t a story where the ending is “and then I never felt anxious again.” I’m still highly sensitive. I still occasionally wake at 3 a.m. The difference now is what happens next.

Here’s what actually helps me, in practice:

1. I sit without trying to get anywhere.

I don’t meditate to become calm. I sit to practice watching. Some sessions are peaceful; some are chaos. Both count. The goal isn’t a quiet mind—it’s a steady witness.

2. I let the feeling stay.

When anxiety shows up, I say to it, “You can be here.” This sounds passive, but it’s the most powerful move I know. What we allow loses its grip; what we fight digs in. Most of the time, the feeling burns through itself in minutes once I stop wrestling it.

3. I act alongside the anxiety, not after it.

Instead of asking, “How do I get rid of this feeling?” I ask, “What needs doing right now?” Then I do that one small thing—anxious, scared, imperfect, but moving. Action doesn’t require courage first. It creates it.

4. I stopped fighting the 3 a.m. wake-ups.

When I wake in the night now, I don’t panic about being awake. I lie there and watch my thoughts the way I’d watch rain on a window—no wrestling, no catastrophizing about tomorrow’s tiredness.

Sometimes I even get up and meditate. I sit until my body grows heavy, and then sleep comes quickly. It turns out that the fastest way back to sleep is letting the night be what it is.

What I Want You to Know

Years later, I became a psychological counselor. Now, when clients sit across from me desperate to delete their anxiety, I recognize that look. It’s the look of someone stirring muddy water with everything they have.

I tell them what I wish someone had told me: You don’t have to win against your own mind.

Your feelings are weather. You are the sky. The anxiety, the 3 a.m. dread, the fear of what people think—none of it is the enemy. It’s just something passing through something vast.

You don’t need to fix yourself before you live your life. You can take the whole messy bundle with you, one small action at a time.

And one day, maybe a year from now, you’ll notice the watcher too—the calm one who was there all along, waiting for you to stop fighting long enough to see it.

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In my second year of Ayurvedic medical school, my eyes started burning around nine o’clock every night.

I did what most students do. I rubbed them, blinked hard a few times, and went back to the screen. Exams were close. The lecture slides were on my laptop, the reference texts were PDFs, and the practice questions were on my phone. My whole education had quietly moved onto glass, and I was reading it for twelve or thirteen hours a day.

The irony took me an embarrassingly long time to notice. By day I was memorizing Shalakya Tantra, the branch of Ayurveda that deals with the eyes and the head. I could recite the old lists of what aggravates the eyes: too much close focus, too little rest, dryness, grief, staying awake into the night. By night I was doing nearly every one of those things, with the textbook open in front of me telling me not to.

I treated my eyes as equipment. They were the instruments that moved information from the screen into my memory, and when they hurt, I filed the pain under friction. Something to push through.

If you had asked me, I would have told you I was paying attention better than at any point in my life. Twelve hours a day. Total focus.

But I was not paying attention. I was narrowing it.

One night that winter the power flickered, and I looked up from the laptop into the sudden dark. When the light came back a moment later, I could not quite focus on the far wall of my room. Everything past arm’s length stayed soft, like a photograph taken in a hurry. It sharpened again within a few seconds, the way it always does, and there was nothing medically dramatic about any of it. Still, those few seconds frightened me, and the fear was not really about my eyesight.

It was the realization that I could not remember the last time I had looked at anything far away.

My desk sits beside a window. Past it there is a neem tree, a water tank, and a long view over rooftops that turns pink for about ten minutes every evening. I had not seen that view in weeks. The sunset had been happening at the edge of my vision, six feet from my chair, while I stared at a rectangle forty centimeters from my face. Nothing had blocked the window. I had simply stopped being a person who looked.

That was the part that stayed with me. Nobody takes your attention from you. You hand it over in small amounts, without ceremony, until looking at one small bright thing feels like the only kind of looking there is.

And the narrowing had not stopped at study. I was eating at the desk without tasting much. Friends’ messages got skimmed and half-answered. My mother would call, and some part of me would keep scrolling while she talked. The eyes were only where the constriction finally became painful enough to notice.

I started with them because they were what hurt. Ayurveda keeps a set of small, undramatic practices for the eyes, and I tried the ones my professors had described. Palming: rub your hands warm, cup them over closed eyes, and sit inside the dark of your own hands for a minute.

Distance gazing: lift your gaze from near work and let it rest on the farthest thing available, without hurrying it.

Splashing the eyes with plain cool water in the morning.

Closing them fully, several times an hour, instead of the shallow half-blinks a screen trains into you.

I want to be careful here, because honesty is the habit my education is supposed to build. I cannot tell you that these practices are proven therapies. Some have barely been studied at all. What I can tell you is what happened when I did them, and it had less to do with my eyes than I expected.

Palming turned out to be the first time in months I had been in darkness while fully awake. A minute is long when there is nothing to look at.

I could feel my heartbeat in my palms, and underneath it, how fast I had been going. My jaw was clenched. My shoulders were up near my ears. My breath had gone shallow in the way it does when the body has quietly decided the whole day is an emergency. None of that was new information. All of it had been happening while I studied. I just had not been present for it, because every part of me was pressed up against a screen.

Distance gazing did something stranger. When my eyes settled on the far rooftops, my thinking loosened. Thoughts became slower and less insistent, the way conversation drops when you step out of a loud room. I do not believe this is mystical. The eyes and the mind seem to strain in the same posture: fixed, close, gripping. Offer one of them a horizon and the other appears to accept it too.

Slowly, I understood that my tired eyes had never been an obstacle to attention. They were a message about it. The strain did not come from seeing too much. It came from looking at one thing, too close, for too long, and calling that focus.

Whatever attention actually is, it seems to need what the eyes need: distance as well as closeness, darkness as well as light, and the regular admission that a world continues past the edge of the current task.

My eyes still get tired. I am still a student, the screens are not going anywhere, and I would not want them to. What changed is smaller than a cure and more durable.

When the burning starts now, I do not push through it, and I do not resent it either. I close my eyes for a while, or I go find the neem tree, and I take the interruption as what it is: one of the more honest parts of me, reporting where my attention has been.

I used to think rest was what attention cost. Now I think rest is what attention is made of.

The pink light over the rooftops still lasts only ten minutes. Most evenings now, I am at the window for it.

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For most of my career, I trusted my ability to assess risk.

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“What stands in the way becomes the way.” ~Marcus Aurelius

I’ve had two strokes, and after each, there were things I had to relearn. Walking wasn’t what it used to be. My balance became a problem. There are days when my head is foggy, and I have trouble concentrating. My body doesn’t always cooperate with what my mind wants to do.

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“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” ~C.S. Lewis

I’m not sure why some of us have a tougher journey than others, but I can say I wouldn’t be who I am today if I hadn’t loved a narcissist.

Most days now are filled with love from my three little rescue doggies. But there are days I am teleported back in time.

Just the other day, I was standing in my kitchen on a quiet Tuesday afternoon when a familiar smell caught my attention.

I had the window open, and someone passed by wearing patchouli.

That was the essential oil my ex-partner wore.

Without warning, my breath caught in my throat. My chest tightened, my heart began to race, and tears flooded my eyes. Suddenly, I wasn’t in my kitchen anymore. I was back in a past relationship, engulfed in the familiar, suffocating fog of walking on eggshells.

I stood there thinking about the hike he took me on deep in the woods and the great photos I took. And how when we returned home, I was sharing the photos with him instead of preparing dinner, and he suddenly grabbed my phone and smashed it on the table. As I knelt to pick up the shattered pieces, he said, “Chrissy, I don’t know why you make me so angry. But I forgive you. Let’s just go get a pizza tonight.”

As I was wiping tears from my cheeks, a wave of familiar shame washed over me. “Why am I crying?” I asked myself, feeling angry and defeated. “I left that toxic situation long ago. I know they weren’t good for me. I should be over this by now.”

If you’ve ever found yourself weeping over a song, a scent, or a sudden memory of a past relationship or parent who harmed you, you know the crushing weight of that shame. It makes you feel like you’ve taken ten steps backward—like all your hard work and healing vanished in a single second.

As a registered nurse and psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner student, I thought I understood how trauma worked. But in that moment, I realized there was a huge gap between what I knew in my head and what I felt in my body.

Only by exploring the neuroscience of emotional abuse did I realize the truth: my reaction wasn’t a personal failing. It was an automatic reflex of a nervous system designed to protect me.

Your Brain Isn’t Damaged—It’s Protecting You

When we think of abuse, we usually imagine physical scars. But psychological and emotional abuse—any repeated behavior meant to control, isolate, or scare you—leaves deep invisible tracks on the human nervous system.

When you live through repeated emotional harm, three key areas of your brain adapt to keep you alive:

The Alarm System (Amygdala):

This tiny part of your brain detects danger and triggers your fight-or-flight response, sending your heart rate soaring. After repeated abuse, your amygdala gets stuck on high alert, mistaking old memories for active threats in the present moment.

The Memory Filing Cabinet (Hippocampus):

Trauma makes it hard for your brain to file memories neatly by date. Instead of storing a toxic relationship safely in the “past,” memories are saved as raw emotions and bodily sensations.

The Logic Center (Prefrontal Cortex):

This is the part of your brain that reasons through problems. Under extreme stress, the logic center slows down, making it almost impossible to convince yourself in the moment that a sudden memory isn’t real danger.

When that scent wafted into my kitchen, my brain didn’t process it as harmless essential oil. My amygdala recognized a pattern from my past, sounded the alarm, and flooded my body with stress hormones before my logical brain could step in.

I wasn’t relapsing. My brain was simply firing an old survival reflex.

The Chemical Addiction of Trauma Bonding

The hardest part of recovering from emotional abuse is the confusing grief that comes with it. We ask ourselves: “If they treated me so badly, why do I miss them?”

The answer lies in how trauma bonds are formed.

Relational abuse rarely stays in a constant state of chaos. Instead, it moves through a predictable four-phase cycle: Tension, Escalation, Reconciliation, and Calm.

During the reconciliation phase—when the abuser suddenly apologizes, acts sweet, or pretends nothing happened—your brain experiences a sudden surge of dopamine, the brain’s relief and reward chemical.

This sudden release of dopamine after high stress creates a powerful, physiological high. Over time, this emotional rollercoaster creates an involuntary physical attachment that is biologically similar to an addiction.

When you miss an ex or a toxic family member, you aren’t missing the harm they caused. Your nervous system is simply remembering the chemical relief after the storm. Recognizing that it wasn’t love—just biochemistry—helped me forgive myself for grieving over people who weren’t good for me.

How Writing Rewired My Recovery

Understanding the science of my brain was comforting, but I still needed a way to calm my nervous system when emotional triggers surfaced.

That was when I turned to expressive writing.

Decades of research show that putting your raw, unedited feelings onto paper does something remarkable: it forces the emotional right side of your brain to collaborate with the logical left side.

When you write down what you are feeling without worrying about spelling, grammar, or neatness, your prefrontal cortex steps in to label your emotions. This simple physical act sends a direct message to your amygdala: The threat is over. I am safe right now.

Writing became the bridge that allowed me to process my own story, transform my raw memory fragments into a coherent narrative of strength, and eventually share my journey in my book.

On the page, I finally stopped censoring myself. For a long time after leaving, I carried a heavy blanket of secret shame.

I was ashamed that I still grieved someone who had harmed me, and angry at myself for not “moving on” sooner. But when I put pen to paper, I gave myself permission to write the raw, unvarnished truth. I wrote unsent letters—unfiltered confessions of my grief, my rage, and the agonizing confusion of loving someone who made me feel so unsafe.

I poured out the memories that once trapped me in sudden panic: the quiet cruelty of the silent treatment, the subtle ways my reality was rewritten, and the constant, suffocating feeling of walking on eggshells. I wrote about the chemical high of reconciliation, acknowledging how desperately I had craved those brief moments of relief amid the storm.

As I watched those chaotic, terrifying memories take shape as neat lines of ink on the page, a profound shift occurred in my body. The trauma was no longer spinning uncontrollably in my head or coiled as a tight knot in my chest. It was outside me. By naming the subtle tactics of control, honoring my nervous system’s survival responses, and giving my grief a physical place to rest, I stripped the past of its power to hijack my present.

A 3-Step Practice for When a Trigger Hits 

The next time a scent, song, or sudden memory pulls you back into old pain, try this short fifteen-minute grounding practice:

Somatic Check-In:

Grab a pen and paper. Ask yourself, “What am I feeling in my body right now?”Write continuously for fifteen minutes without editing yourself. Let the raw emotions flow out of your body and onto the page.

Name the Feeling:

Remind yourself softly: “This is a memory and a biological reflex, not my present reality.”

Anchor in Truth:

Place your hand over your heart, feel your feet on the ground, and state out loud: “I am safe in this moment.”

Healing Isn’t a Straight Line

Healing from emotional harm doesn’t follow a neat checklist. There will be days when you feel invincible and clear-headed, and there will be days when a random memory knocks the wind out of you.

When those hard days come, remember this: You are not starting over from scratch. You are simply processing old pain from a new level of wisdom, safety, and self-compassion.

Writing didn’t erase what happened to me. Still, it allowed me to finally reclaim my narrative—turning what felt like brokenness into an undeniable story of survival.

Your brain isn’t broken; it is healing, one page and one moment at a time.

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“Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are.” ~Squire Bill Widener

For years, I had a private deal with myself: I would really change when life became manageable.

When work slowed down. When the family was okay. When I had more energy. When there was less stress. When I could finally focus.

The problem was that life never signed that deal.

At my heaviest, I weighed 465 pounds. I had learned how to live inside a body that made almost everything harder while also becoming very good at explaining why now was not the right time to change it.

Some of my reasons were excuses. Some were completely real.

My life has included homelessness, public failures, business pressure, family loss, and the kind of responsibilities that do not disappear because you are trying to work on yourself. In 2022, my family lost our three-year-old daughter, Katana Rose, to acute leukemia.

There is no sentence after that which makes it smaller.

And there was no moment when somebody came to us and said, “Everything else can stop now. Take all the time you need.”

The house still needed things. The children still needed their father. Bills still arrived. Work still existed. My body was still the body I woke up inside every morning.

For a long time, I thought self-improvement required a clean runway. I imagined discipline as something people did when they had meal-prep containers lined up, a perfect sleep schedule, and enough emotional space to think clearly.

My life did not look like that.

Eventually I had to accept something less inspirational and more useful: if I could only change under ideal conditions, I was probably never going to change.

So I stopped trying to build the perfect plan and started asking a different question.

What can I still do when the day is bad?

That question changed more for me than any dramatic promise ever did.

I could still move.

I could still train for a little while.

I could still make one better decision with food even if the previous decision was terrible.

I could stop turning one bad meal into a three-day excuse.

I could stop using Monday as a fictional country where a better version of me supposedly lived.

Slowly, the numbers changed. I went from 465 pounds to about 280 without weight-loss surgery, GLP-1 medication, peptides, or steroids.

But the number is not the part I think about most now.

What changed was my relationship with interruption.

Before, interruption meant failure. If I missed the gym, ate badly, had a terrible week, or got hit with another problem, I felt like the whole attempt had been ruined. Starting over felt easier than continuing imperfectly.

Now I understand that continuing imperfectly is most of the work.

That lesson started showing up outside the gym.

I built a company in Las Vegas. I began speaking publicly. I kept putting myself in situations where I had to be visible before I felt finished.

That was uncomfortable because I had spent years thinking I needed to become the final version of myself before I had earned the right to stand in front of people and talk about rebuilding.

There is no final version. There is only the version who showed up today, carrying everything that happened before today.

Grief taught me that more brutally than fitness ever could.

You do not “complete” grief. You do not get a certificate saying you handled it correctly. You learn how to carry love after the person you love is no longer physically where they should be.

Some days that carrying looks meaningful. Some days it looks like getting through breakfast.

The same principle became true for almost everything I was trying to rebuild.

I did not need to conquer my entire life. I needed to stop abandoning myself every time life became difficult.

That does not mean pushing through everything. Sometimes the right decision is rest. Sometimes it is asking for help. Sometimes it is admitting that today is not a productive day.

But there is a difference between rest and surrender, just as there is a difference between making a bad choice and deciding that the bad choice defines the week.

I had spent a long time confusing those things.

One of the biggest changes I made was removing drama from the restart. I no longer needed a speech to myself. No new identity. No “this time everything changes.” No punishment. Just the next useful action.

That idea sounds small because it is small. Small is why it works.

When my life becomes chaotic now, I still fall out of routines. I still make decisions I would not recommend. I still have days when the person I want to be feels very far away.

But I do not treat distance as proof that I cannot get there.

I have already spent years walking through versions of my life I once thought would destroy me.

The lesson I keep coming back to is not that I am unusually strong.

It is that human beings can keep rebuilding while the construction site is still a mess.

You do not have to wait until your life becomes quiet.

You do not have to wait until you are less sad, less busy, less embarrassed, more motivated, or more certain.

You can make one decision from the life you actually have.

Then another.

And if tomorrow is terrible, you can make another one from there.

That is not the dramatic version of transformation.

It is the version that finally worked for me.

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“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” ~Carl Rogers

There is a part of me that really, really loves vitamins.

Like…a lot.

I have always been endlessly fascinated by health, which means I can spend a wildly unreasonable amount of time talking about inflammation, mitochondria, blood sugar, nervous systems, magnesium, and all the other things that make most people’s eyes glaze over while my little heart lights right up.

So the vitamin-loving part is real.

Very me.

And, as I recently discovered while sitting beside my swollen-faced fiancé in urgent care, capable of going a little too far.

Because sometimes something authentic can tip sideways into a persona.

And when it comes to the health of the people I love, that persona for me is the Hero.

She is the over-helpful, overfunctioning, deeply sincere part who is absolutely not trying to control anything or anyone. (Wink, wink.)

She first clocked in when I was a teenager and found out that my mom was an alcoholic.

The news came as a complete shock. My mom had hidden her drinking so well that I had no idea what was happening beneath the surface.

So my very concerned and loving dad took me to see a therapist, who showed me the stages of alcoholism, explained that the final stage was death, and told me my mom was dangerously close to it.

I left that day sobbing, terrified she was going to die.

And because I did not know how to be with that fear, some part of me made a decision:

I would keep her alive.

Without realizing it, I appointed myself Protector-in-Chief—not only of my mom, but eventually of nearly everyone I loved.

Add in being the oldest child, several other people in my life struggling with addiction, and my natural talent for second-mom-ing anyone who would allow it, and boom:

Hero Mode, activated.

After years of Al-Anon and therapy, I understood this pattern intellectually.

But it wasn’t until I began listening to my body and allowing myself to feel the fear beneath the pattern that my Hero became much quieter.

So when a recent health scare landed my fiancé, Zach, in the ER—and my inner Hero suddenly came roaring back—I was completely caught off guard.

Ultimately, the tests showed that Zach was in tip-top shape and the whole thing had been a false alarm.

My nervous system, however, did not get that follow-up memo.

Afterward, I became a little more focused on Zach’s health.

A little more “helpful.”

And before long, I was giving unsolicited advice and reminders and offering the kind of support that was beginning to look suspiciously like all-out control.

To be fair, I had asked Zach whether he wanted that “support.”

He did say yes.

But I took that yes and ran with it, formally promoting myself to the role of Knowing What’s Best for Him.

Which is how, a couple of months later, on one very ordinary Sunday, I found myself handing Zach vitamins he had not asked for.

And before I could explain my very sound and deeply researched rationale—as a complete non-medical professional—he gobbled them down without thinking twice.

Thirty minutes later, his face had morphed into a puffy cartoon version of itself, and we were speeding toward urgent care while I quietly spiraled over the possibility that, in my desperate attempt to keep my beloved alive forever, I had accidentally taken him out myself.

An hour later, as we waited to see whether the Benadryl and steroids would stop the reaction, Zach—head in his hands, eyes basically swollen shut—looked up at me and began singing a little song he had made up on the spot:

“The hero-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo has gone too far…”

And despite the very real crisis we were still in, I burst out laughing.

There he was, possibly having a vitamin-induced allergic reaction, serenading me with a custom ballad about my own overfunctioning.

And somehow, instead of turning the whole experience into an all-out attack on myself, I got to laugh.

Eventually, that laughter loosened something just enough for me to see what was actually happening.

On the surface, I had been trying to help Zach. Underneath, I had gone somewhere much older.

Back to being a teenager.

Back to loving someone and feeling terrified that I might lose them.

Back to thinking I needed to save someone because I didn’t know what else to do with the fear.

Only this time, Zach didn’t need saving.

Just like, it turns out, neither did my beautiful momma way back when.

(She has now been sober for more than fifteen years, by the way—something I am very happy to report was entirely of her own doing.)

As I sat beside Zach that day, I began to see who actually needed my attention. And it wasn’t him or his supplement protocol. It was my inner Hero—the scared younger part of me who still believed it was her job to keep everyone healthy and alive.

She was the one who needed me to see her. To hold her. And, by God, even to laugh with her.

Not so she would disappear forever. But so I could notice when she arrived, feel the fear beneath her urgency, and choose whether I actually wanted to act on it or not.

So right there in urgent care, I turned inward toward this younger part of myself and breathed.

I let myself feel what she had been protecting me from: the ripping, pukey sensation in my gut that eventually softened into heaviness and sadness.

Sadness for the girl who believed love meant managing, watching, preventing, and fixing.

Sadness because beneath all that effort, that girl wasn’t really saying, “Let me help.”

She was saying:

Please don’t leave.

Please don’t die.

Please don’t make me feel how scared I am.

And when I could finally hear that, the vitamins, reminders, and perfectly reasonable suggestions began to look like what they really were: Fear in a very convincing Hero costume.

Zach is fine, by the way. The Benadryl-and-steroid cocktail did the trick.

And the irony of the whole thing?

Just as we were preparing to leave after our three-hour urgent-care adventure, I remembered one potentially important detail.

Immediately before the reaction, Zach had inhaled a rather heroic amount of mold from an old container.

Which meant the reaction may not have had anything to do with the vitamins.

And while the part of me that would very much like to be declared innocent loves this possibility, there is something strangely perfect about not knowing.

At this point, we still don’t know exactly what caused the reaction. We won’t unless Zach decides to pursue allergy testing.

And whether he does?

I have absolutely no idea.

Because, at least for today, I have handed the healthcare reins fully back to him.

And I will (probably) not be following up.

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“Don’t take anything personally. Nothing others do is because of you.” ~Don Miguel Ruiz

I used to walk into a room and check everyone else’s emotional temperature before I noticed my own.

A tightened jaw meant I should get quieter. A distracted answer meant I’d done something wrong. If my partner sighed while unloading the dishwasher, I’d go back through the last hour looking for the mistake that caused it.

I called this empathy. It felt like attentiveness, and honestly, I was proud of it, because I noticed things other people missed.

What I didn’t see was that I wasn’t only noticing other people’s feelings. I was borrowing them, wrapping a story around them, and then carrying that story as evidence about myself.

The Night

One evening I texted my partner, who was staying at his sister’s place that week, and asked if he wanted to talk. The reply came four minutes later: “Can’t talk tonight”

No period. I noticed that right away, and then I analyzed the absence of it, which tells you most of what you need to know about me back then.

I read those three words until they changed shape. Maybe he was angry. Maybe I’d asked for too much lately, or maybe “tonight” was a soft way of saying “anymore.”

I typed, “Is everything okay?” and erased it because it sounded needy.

I typed, “No worries!” and erased that too, because the exclamation point looked false.

Then I carried my phone from room to room for three hours. I washed a mug that was already clean. I opened the fridge, looked at a jar of olives, and closed it again.

Every so often I checked whether he’d been online. Whatever I found, or didn’t find, I filed as evidence in a case against myself.

By eleven I had a whole theory built out of nothing. It had a timeline, a probable cause, and a list of things I planned to say once he finally admitted what was wrong.

Near midnight I sent, “Did I do something?”

The answer came the next morning. He’d had a headache, gone to bed at nine, and hadn’t been thinking about me at all.

Relief came first. Embarrassment came right behind it, hot and fast.

Underneath both was something quieter. I’d lost an entire evening to a feeling that wasn’t mine and a story nobody had told me.

His maybe-disappointment had become my panic. His silence had become my verdict.

Where I Learned It

That night wasn’t an isolated overreaction. It was a skill I’d been practicing since I was small.

As a kid, I could tell what kind of evening it would be from the sound of keys at the front door. Whether a cupboard closed or got closed. Whether a question got a full answer or a clipped one.

Nobody told me to monitor the weather in the house. I just figured out that predicting a mood gave me a few seconds to prepare for it. My brother learned to leave the room, and I learned to stay in it and read the air.

That sensitivity came with me into adulthood, where it stopped protecting me and started running me. I was treating ordinary pauses like sirens.

From the outside I probably looked easygoing. Inside I was adjusting constantly, changing the subject when someone shifted in their chair, softening an honest opinion before anyone had objected to it.

The more attention I gave to everyone else’s mood, the harder it got to locate my own. If someone was disappointed, I felt ashamed. If someone went distant, I got frantic.

This didn’t make me kinder. It made my care anxious and a little controlling.

I don’t love admitting the next part. When my partner came home flattened by a bad day that had nothing to do with me, I’d keep asking what was wrong, in a softer and softer voice, until he ended up comforting me about his own bad day.

I wanted closeness, and my monitoring was the thing standing in the way of it. I was in a relationship with my predictions instead of the person in the kitchen.

What Actually Helped

The first thing that helped was small enough to feel like nothing. I started naming the feeling before I explained it.

When a message went unanswered, I’d try, “I feel anxious,” instead of, “He’s ignoring me.” One of those describes what’s happening in my chest. The other claims to know what’s happening inside someone else’s head.

Almost all of my suffering lived in the space between those two sentences. Anxiety can be felt without being obeyed. A story about rejection demands action immediately.

I also gave myself ten minutes before sending the anxious text. No scrolling, no rereading old conversations, no drafting a fourth polite version of the same question.

The feeling in those ten minutes was usually more specific than I expected. Tight chest, warm face, a dropping sensation like missing a step on the stairs.

And when I did reach out, I tried to ask one clean question instead of a loaded one. “You seemed quiet earlier. Is something on your mind?” leaves room for an answer I hadn’t already written for them.

“Are you mad at me?” doesn’t leave that room. It hands my fear across the table and asks the other person to hold it.

That’s the line I keep coming back to now: am I asking for support or asking for proof? Support sounds like, “I’m having a tender day. Can we talk when you have a minute?” Proof sounds like, “Tell me we’re okay right now.”

Nothing anyone says to the second one lasts. The calm it buys is gone by the next delayed reply.

A few months later my closest friend left me a voice message in a flat tone I didn’t recognize, saying she’d call me back when she had a minute.

I did the ten minutes. I did them badly. I sat on the kitchen floor with the timer going and mentally rehearsed apologies for things I hadn’t done.

At minute eleven I called her anyway, and the first sentence out of my mouth was, “Are you upset with me?”

She wasn’t. Her mother had been admitted to the hospital that morning, and she’d been on the phone with doctors since six.

So the pause didn’t save me that day. What it gave me was a place to notice, halfway through my own question, that I was turning her worst week into a referendum on me.

I said that out loud. “Sorry, ignore me. Tell me about your mom.” It wasn’t a graceful recovery, but it was a different ending than the one I used to get.

Then I apologized for the phone call twice more that week, which was its own quiet way of asking her to reassure me. Some of this I’m still learning.

I still notice moods fast. I still hear the pause before an answer, still catch the smile that doesn’t quite reach someone’s eyes.

I never wanted to be less sensitive. I wanted to stop confusing sensitivity with responsibility.

Empathy means I can see that someone might be hurting. It doesn’t mean their hurt belongs to me, or was caused by me, or is mine to fix before dinner.

There are still evenings when a short message sets off the old alarm and my mind starts building explanations before I’ve taken a full breath. Some of those evenings I still lose.

More often now, though, I put the phone face down and let the feeling be mine for a while.

Sometimes there’s a real problem waiting on the other side of the screen. Usually there’s just a tired person on one end of it and my old fear on the other.

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“When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.” ~Maya Angelou

In June 2011, I got a Facebook friend request from a guy I vaguely knew from college. We’d never dated, never even been close, but I knew him by reputation. Charming. Vain. The kind of guy who always had someone.

He’d just been hired to teach at my school, where I was about to start my fifth year as a counselor. He framed the request as wanting to connect as colleagues, so I accepted.

When school started that August, he made it a point to show up at my office constantly, even though his classroom was nowhere near mine. Weeks of him asking me out.

I finally agreed to one drink. Not a date, I told myself.

That night, I planned to tell him I have herpes, figuring it would scare off someone so concerned with his image. Before I got the words out, he said it for me: “I know what you’re going to tell me. You have herpes.”

I was stunned. I’d shared my diagnosis with a few friends in college years earlier, and because he and I had overlapping social circles, I could only assume the information had eventually made its way to him. He never told me exactly how he knew.

And then, strangely, I felt relieved.

He knew, and he still wanted me.

Looking back, the red flag wasn’t simply that he knew. It was the way he used that knowledge. He could have let me tell him something deeply personal in my own time. Instead, he took the disclosure out of my hands.

At the time, though, I didn’t see it that way. I saw acceptance.

It felt like magic.

The Unraveling

We moved fast. By October, he’d left so much of his life at my place that, without either of us ever really deciding it, he’d basically moved in.

I was direct from the start about what I wanted, what I expected, and that if he ever wanted something else, I’d rather know than be lied to. For a while, it seemed like he heard me.

By the fall of 2012, he’d started his master’s program. That December, something happened that made the uneasiness I’d been feeling impossible to ignore.

During sex, he suddenly put his hands around my neck and began choking me. We’d never discussed it. I’d never expressed an interest in it. When I demanded to know why he thought I would want that, he said he thought I’d like it.

Something in me knew there was more to that answer.

Then came the nights he didn’t come home, even though he was living with me. No call. No text. The next day, he’d explain that he’d been studying with classmates.

I couldn’t prove he was cheating, but I became convinced he was.

When I got the flu that same month, the man who once nursed me through every cold suddenly wasn’t around.

There had been another moment I wouldn’t understand until later.

We were arguing one night, probably about whether he was cheating. I was standing at the kitchen sink doing dishes while he paced behind me, his voice getting louder.

“I’m going to take a walk before I do something I regret.”

My body registered those words before my mind did. Something about them felt wrong.

But then he did exactly what he said he was going to do. He left. He took a walk. When he came back, he’d cooled down. Nothing happened.

I told myself maybe that was healthy. He’d recognized that he was angry and removed himself from the situation rather than escalating it.

Years later, that is one of the moments I return to most.

At the time, I couldn’t see the warning inside the sentence. I was in love with him, and the feeling of being accepted by someone who already knew the thing I’d once feared would make me unlovable was overwhelmingly blinding.

So I explained away what my body had already noticed.

I finally told him to leave in January 2013.

What I Wasn’t Ready to See

I confronted him before I made him leave. He never admitted to cheating, and I never had proof. But by then, I trusted what his behavior was telling me.

There was an irony I couldn’t ignore. I had entered the relationship terrified that my STI would make me undesirable. I’d been vulnerable and honest about my sexual health from the beginning. Now I was with someone who knew my status and whose behavior left me wondering whether he was putting my sexual health at risk.

It took me longer than I’d like to admit to end things.

He was persuasive. Charismatic. Even his own fraternity brother had warned me: “Don’t date him. He’s a dog.”

When he still wouldn’t leave, I called two of his friends, including one who was also my friend, and asked for their help. They eventually convinced him to go. I put his belongings outside my door for him to collect.

I thought that was the end.

It wasn’t.

He kept showing up. If I didn’t respond to a text, he’d be at my door.

I mistook his refusal to let go for love.

I didn’t yet understand that someone can desperately want access to you without actually knowing how to love you.

The Second Chance I Shouldn’t Have Given

For the next few months, he kept baiting me with texts, calls, and showing up uninvited. In April 2013, I finally took the bait.

I offered him one last chance, an olive branch I now understand I never owed him. We went to a jazz festival together, one with a lineup I genuinely loved: India.Arie, Anthony Hamilton, artists whose music I’d play for years afterward without a hint of resentment.

For a few hours, standing in that crowd, it felt easy again.

On the drive home, I watched him text another woman, arranging to meet up after dropping me off.

I told him I was done.

When we got to my place, I asked for my key fob back. He wouldn’t give it to me.

I was frustrated, not violent, not dangerous, just done. I tapped his car’s bumper with my shoe to get his attention and demanded the fob again.

He hit me.

Closed fist, to the face.

Hard enough that the next thing I knew, I was on the ground.

What Happened After

I got up, ran for my apartment, and he followed. He pushed his way inside and immediately wanted to call his own father, like he needed a witness to explain himself before I could process what had just happened to my own body.

His dad’s reaction, when told what his son had done: “You are a monster.”

And somewhere in the shock, I remembered another sentence.

I’m going to take a walk before I do something I regret.

This time, I understood the warning.

I made him leave. I called 911. A friend took me to the emergency room, where I reported the assault.

Months of court delays followed: continuances, a lawyer stalling, him violating the restraining order more than once. Eventually, he was found guilty of misdemeanor domestic violence.

What stayed with me longest wasn’t the case.

It was the shame.

I’m a counselor. How did I miss the signs?

I was also ashamed because I had already done the work. From 2010 to 2011, I had invested so much in myself. I had spent the money. Gone to counseling. Asked hard questions. Learned to love myself.

How could I have worked so hard to find myself, only to lose myself again?

The Truth I Needed to Hear

Here’s what I know now that I didn’t know then: I didn’t miss all of the warning signs.

Sometimes I saw them. Sometimes I felt them in my body before I understood them with my mind.

And then I explained them away.

Rose-colored glasses are real. It is genuinely hard to see clearly when you’re in love, no matter how much training or insight you have in every other area of your life.

I had a strength, an ability to see the good in people, to believe people can change, that I used every day in my career to help teenagers. That same strength, turned inward without boundaries, helped me create explanations for behavior my gut was already questioning.

It let me go back, months later, to a story that had already told me its ending.

None of that makes it my fault.

Kicking a bumper is not an offense punishable by a fist to the face. Full stop.

If you take nothing else from this, take that sentence and read it again. An argument, a raised voice, a broken expectation, or something you did that your partner didn’t like does not make you responsible for their choice to become violent. Conflict is not permission for violence.

But I also had to learn that losing myself again did not erase the work I had done before.

It didn’t mean I had failed at self-love. It meant I was human. It meant I had entered a relationship believing I could love someone without abandoning myself, and I didn’t realize I was disappearing until I was already gone.

That realization hurt.

I was disappointed in myself. I was embarrassed by how much I had invested in becoming stronger, only to find myself back in a place of confusion and shame.

But I also knew something important: if I had rebuilt myself once, I could rebuild myself again.

Bulletproof

I didn’t let that year define me. I ran, literally.

Trail running and hiking became non-negotiable parts of my week, the way I regulated my nervous system so I could still show up steady for the students who needed me.

I also went back into counseling myself, almost immediately. Not eventually, not once I’d “figured it out on my own,” but right away.

I needed a professional to help me understand what had happened, why I’d missed what I missed, and how to rebuild trust in my own judgment.

It sucked.

It was hard.

There were days when healing felt less like rising and more like dragging myself across the floor. I had to grieve the relationship, the version of myself I had lost, and the belief that doing the work once meant I would never struggle again.

Slowly, with movement and with support, the wound became something I could carry without it carrying me.

And then something else happened.

I grew.

I became an even stronger woman, a brighter light than I had been before. Not because the abuse made me stronger. It didn’t. What happened to me was not a gift.

The gift was what I learned about myself afterward: what I wanted from life, what I wanted from people, what I wanted from experiences, and what I would and would not accept in relationships.

Sometimes the hardest seasons give you a perspective you could not have gained any other way. Not because suffering is required for wisdom, but because living longer, loving more, and surviving what you never thought you would survive can teach you things you could not understand before.

This past Saturday, thirteen years after that night at the jazz festival, I finally got the tattoo I’d been thinking about for all those years.

Just under my left clavicle, closest to my heart, are the words Bulletproof Soul.

The words come from Sade’s song “Bullet Proof Soul,” from her 1992 album Love Deluxe. I first heard the song when I was twelve, too young to understand it. At thirty-three, after everything that had happened, I understood it completely.

It became the soundtrack to putting myself back together. I played it on repeat while I ran, mile after mile, regulating my nervous system and learning how to trust myself again.

So when I finally put Bulletproof Soul on my skin, it wasn’t to memorialize what happened to me. It was to mark what I built afterward: the runs, the trails, the counseling sessions, the years of learning and unlearning, losing myself and finding myself again.

The tattoo didn’t hurt going in. It doesn’t hurt now. Most days, I forget it’s even there, which feels like exactly the point.

It’s not a wound anymore. It’s just part of me now, the way strength becomes part of you through everything you build afterward.

If you’re in the thick of your own hard lesson right now, still bleeding, still asking how you missed the signs: you didn’t fail. You were human, in love, doing the best you could with what you knew.

And if you once reached a place where you felt enlightened, whole, or deeply connected to yourself, only to find yourself in the dumps again, that does not mean you are back at the beginning.

You can rise again.

It may suck. It may be hard. But it can also become a blessing, not because what happened was good, but because you may learn more about yourself and gain a clearer perspective on what you want from your life, your relationships, your experiences, and the people you choose to let close to you.

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

And if you didn’t, if it took you a second chance to learn it, like it did me, that doesn’t disqualify you from healing.

You can heal. You can rebuild. You can become an even brighter version of yourself.

Not because what happened to you was a gift.

Because what you discovered in yourself was.

You just have to survive it first.

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“You don’t have to set yourself on fire to keep other people warm.” ~Unknown

Tomorrow, a court will grant me a divorce after eleven years of marriage. I’ve spent the last several months rereading a decade of my own life like evidence in a case, trying to understand how I got here. What I found surprised me: not one dramatic betrayal, but hundreds of small moments where I chose to make myself smaller so the relationship could stay intact.

I met my husband when we were teenagers, through a mutual friend, and fell for him the way you fall for someone you’ve never actually met—through harmless texts and inside jokes, before either of us had to be a real, imperfect person in front of the other.

When I finally tried to meet him in real life, a year into our texting, his response to my suggestion was a cold “Why do you want to meet?” I remember the specific feeling—like a rug pulled out from under me—and I remember doing what I would keep doing for the next decade: deciding it was probably nothing, and staying.

Over the years there were more moments like that. A cutting remark dressed up as a joke, followed by an apology that reframed the remark rather than took it back. A pattern where any insecurity I voiced got returned to me as evidence that I was “too much,” while anything he needed became simply true, simply obvious, simply mine to accommodate.

None of it, on its own, seemed like a reason to leave. That’s the trouble with slow erosion—it never hands you a single moment dramatic enough to act on. It just quietly recalibrates what you think normal feels like.

I want to be honest about something, because I think it’s the part most people skip when they tell stories like this: I wasn’t only patient and wronged. I fought back, sometimes unfairly. I said things in anger I later regretted. I leaned on him more than was fair to either of us, treating him as my only anchor when I should have built more anchors of my own.

A good closure story isn’t the one where you were blameless. It’s the one where you can hold your own mistakes and someone else’s pattern of harm as two separate, simultaneous truths—without letting the first one erase the second.

The end came, as these things often do, without a single triggering event. He told me, out of nowhere, that he’d stopped loving me the way he used to, that he felt numb, that he needed space to “reevaluate.”

I spent the months after that doing what I imagine a lot of people do—trying to find the thread that would let me pull the relationship back together. I went to therapy. I read everything I could about attachment and communication. I joined a support group for people healing from relationships with emotionally unavailable or narcissistic partners, and for the first time, my ten years of specific, small, hard-to-explain moments started to form a legible pattern instead of a fog of self-doubt.

Even so, I did one more hard thing before I let myself close the door: I met him in person, one last time, so I could hear whatever he had to say without a screen or a delay between us.

Everyone in my support group warned me this might retraumatize me. I did it anyway, because I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life wondering if I’d walked away from something salvageable, or building a story about him that was kinder than the truth.

He talked for over two hours. He barely made eye contact. He told me our relationship had felt transactional to him, that he couldn’t remember much we’d built together besides travel—conveniently forgetting the books we read aloud to each other before sleeping, the audiobooks on long drives, the music medleys we made up together, the movies we cried through side by side.

When I asked him directly what he thought the best version of himself looked like, hoping for some flicker of reflection, he said, “Honestly, I think I am already the best version of me.”

That sentence did more to end my marriage than anything else in eleven years. Not because it was cruel—it wasn’t said cruelly at all—but because it told me, plainly, that there was no one on the other side of this relationship willing to keep growing alongside me. I had spent a decade trying to hold two people’s emotional development. I couldn’t keep doing that and remain a whole person myself.

Here is what I wish someone had told me earlier and what I hope reaches whoever needs it now:

A pattern is not the same as a phase.

If you find yourself, years into something, still waiting for someone to become emotionally available “once things settle down,” pay attention to how long “settling down” has already taken. Time doesn’t fix a capacity someone doesn’t have. Only they can build that, and only if they’re willing to look honestly at themselves—which is a decision no amount of your love can make for them.

You are allowed to trust your own memory.

For years, I doubted things I clearly remembered because they were met with confidence, or reframed, or simply denied. Writing my story down, in detail, with dates, was the thing that finally let me trust myself again. If you’re in something confusing, write it down as it happens. Future you will need the evidence, even if it’s only to convince yourself.

Protecting your peace is not the same as abandoning people who love you.

When my decision to divorce became final, friends and family, with love in their hearts, wanted to intervene, to talk to him, to try one more time. It hurt to say no to them. But I’ve learned that you can accept someone’s love without accepting their plan for your life. You’re allowed to say: I need you to trust that I’ve thought about this longer and harder than anyone else has. What I need from you now is support, not a rescue mission.

You can grieve something and still know leaving was right.

These aren’t in conflict, no matter what your last few doubt-filled nights tell you. I loved the version of us that existed in the good moments, and I also know that version was never going to be sustainable on its own. Holding both truths at once, instead of forcing myself to pick one, has been the most honest place I’ve found to grieve from.

Tomorrow, on paper, my marriage ends. In every way that matters, it ended months ago, in a park, in a two-and-a-half-hour monologue that finally gave me the clarity years of hoping never could. I’m not walking away from a marriage that could have been saved. I’m walking toward a version of my life where I stop being the only one doing the saving.

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