I wrote about a heartbreak.

I sit to write on the couch that my now ex boyfriend has been sleeping on the last four nights.

I sit to write in my soon-to-be-not home office, surrounded by stacked boxes and an empty bookshelf.

I sit to write on my first night in my new apartment, fingers sore with new cuts, casualties of an overworked pocketknife that spent the day cutting open and breaking down boxes.

I sit to write a week after moving, settling back into a life on my own.

It’s been a confronting season. 

It’s hard for me to admit that behind closed doors, I’ve spent most of the last year outside of myself. A relationship with a safe, loving partner proved more pressure for parts in me not healed than I could have anticipated. Parts that due to early trauma, are distrusting of intimate connection, equating it with being trapped, controlled, objectified and abandoned. Those, and parts desperately needing intimate connection, for fear that without it I would cease to exist.

We began on a very different tone. I was the most in my body, the most in my power I’d ever been. I had spent a summer practicing doing nothing, learning to let my body relax and really enjoy the safety, the stability and the beautiful life I had created for myself. 

We met almost by accident. I was caught by his smirking, twinkly eyes. From go, it felt different. Sure, he was funny, smart, handsome, creative… but for the first time I wasn’t looking to check boxes. He happened to do so, but the process of engaging with him felt so good. There wasn't that drug-like rush, but it was warm, fun and intriguing. It was stable and consistent. He came correct. He courted me. He was also honest about factors that could impede his emotional availability. I listened. I voiced concern. I asked if he was going to get in therapy, and he did. But his words and actions never left me confused. And I saw what was in front of me. And it looked like, it felt like something that could work if we were patient, something that could be really wonderful. 

Historically, I am not one for pacing when it comes to these things. But I knew if I wanted different, I had to be different. I didn’t demand instant commitment from a person that didn’t know me. We took our time to get to know each other, we waited before getting into bed, and took months before saying “OK, we’re doing this”.

All the while, my anxiously attached thoughts and impulses were still there. The urge to rush, to force. But he was unlike any person I’ve ever dated. As I got to know and experience him, I felt he filled in, to every edge, what I’d been looking for. So instead of letting the swelling chaos in me spill onto our budding relationship, I quietly channeled it into poetry. I literally wrote over the course of those months, a poem about pacing.

But as love began to take more solid shape, that creative dam started flooding. My bone deep fear of being trapped, but also of not being seen and chosen forever converged with a lifetime of patriarchal conditioning that raises daughters not to be people, but wives. It arrested me. The me that writes this piece, the me that knows I was a safe adult in a safe relationship sat blindfolded, hands zip tied in the backseat as my youngest, most wounded and frenzied parts took the wheel. My ability to see my partner and my reality for what it was became a place I occasionally visited, rather than one I led from. 

This happened to be the same time he was house hunting. Every time he looked at a home, I reflexively found myself imagining living there, but at that stage in our relationship, I felt I had no place to voice real opinions on them. Who was I to assume any intention or timeline about cohabitation? But as he honed in on, and eventually purchased, a beautiful home with two units, both I knew damn well didn’t have enough space for both of us, I found myself hurt, like a future with me wasn't a point of consideration.

I was spending more nights at his place than my own. Living out of a bag was not helping my mental state, and my lease renewal deadline was approaching. I had such a limited ability to zoom out, to just enact better boundaries about sleepovers, self soothe and process in therapy about what moving in together should look like. Instead, I let my fear advocate for a situation that would allow me to more quickly enter a personal and cultural role I desperately needed to prove I could fulfill. 

When I, anxious and emotional, brought him this conversation, he agreed to move in together about five months down the line. Looking back, we both agree this was a mistake.

Once he closed on the house and started his move process the looming reality of living together in a space I knew I wouldn't fit in became real, and I really started struggling. July was hell. I was having more frequent and severe trauma flashbacks, more panic attacks, and I began unconsciously creating conflict as a means for connection. I was so consumed by my internal storm I couldn't step back and see what was so obvious, I just wasn't ready. Wrong place, wrong time. I wasn’t ready to trust him like that. 

Less than a week before my lease ended, we sat on the dinky little mustard yellow couch the previous owner had left in his living room, and he asked if we should reroute. He asked if this was truly what I wanted, or if we could stay together and find a way for me to either stay in my old apartment or get a new one, would I like to do that instead. I felt the surge in my body of knowing, knowing he was right about the turmoil I was in. But when I weighed the option of pivoting, I felt panic, like it would absolutely break me. I felt the train had already left the station, despite it being there in front of me on the platform.

So onward it went. And my stress started manifesting physically as well. I started getting physically sick for about 4-6 days, every 2-3 weeks from the end of July through November. And with zero suggestion or implication from him, I found myself shrinking to fit the version of me I thought he wanted me to be.

I started organizing my life and time in such a way so I could be permanently available during his free time. I felt like I needed to ask permission to do things, eating in ways I didn’t want to, dressing differently, shutting off my spiritual self, and spending nowhere near enough time in nature. I was hyper anxious about staying on top of laundry and dishes, and grew more and more resentful of him leaving signs of life (socks on the floor, water glasses in every room, etc.) anywhere in the home. And we continued to fight, often starting with me having my feelings hurt in some way, wanting this validated, and not receiving what I thought I needed. And no, he did not play his role perfectly, but I can not and will not speak on that. But the reality was I was hypersensitive. I was an emotional tyrant. The environmental and relational factors had me driven by an unconscious wound that mistook conflict for connection.

I knew our relationship wasn’t what we’d demonstrated it could be, but I was too caught in my own undercurrent that I didn’t realize how thin the ice was. And of course, there were stretches where I could come up for air, and things felt good, where we really felt like us. But I didn’t realize how long the tails on every argument were for him. He couldn’t give it to me straight, and what he did communicate, I did not register. What made the severity of the situation harder to fully clock was that it was entirely context specific. Sure, I had periodic spirals about the downfall of American democracy and exploitative patriarchy, but my relationships with my friends remained the same; safe, rich and supportive. I continued to have success in my career and show up effectively for clients, albeit with some imposter syndrome. 

Then finally, he said it plain. “I'm not happy.”  Testament to my unawareness, it was a shock. But I couldn’t not hear that. And immediately, I called on every resource I could think of to address every angle of our situation. I got back in trauma therapy, I sought a psychiatrist, we got a couples therapist. I listened to podcasts by relationship experts, and at a difficult culmination point, I knew, and he agreed, that if our relationship was going to have a chance, I needed to move out. 

We had a plan, but it would take time. There was too much distance to clear, and the Red Cross showed up five minutes too late. He was done.

This was not what I wanted. But I see the opportunity for what it is, and I’m meeting it. Once I heard him, I showed the fuck up. I was going to transform with or without him, because quite frankly, I’m sick of my own shit in my dating relationships. I’m sick of it not working. So I know I have to let this work me so that something more beautiful can take it’s place. And it’s fucking hard. 

I know that the process matters, that I have to chuck the handbook by which I’ve endured every previous breakup; the one that takes full blame for the relationship and crucifies myself for it, that manically pursues a “revenge body”, and immediately gets back on dating apps to source male validation.

I know I have to meet this moment instead with presence, radical self compassion, and gentleness. I know I have to feel my grief, and then do something with it- write, paint, draw, move. I see how that was the medicine I needed the whole time. That the chaos in me just needed somewhere to go other than on my partner. And I know I have to arrive here with great patience as my psyche reaches for something no longer there, and starts to reorganize itself into that now empty space.

So here I am, writing. And I hate doing it. I avoid it a good bit, I scroll, I go for walks, I call friends or watch TV. And all that’s fine, normal, necessary. But when I come back to this, it does it’s job. When I have that ache, that yearning, I know the remedy is ultimately to get closer to me. And when I do, whether through journaling, drawing, painting, pecking away at this essay… It helps. It’s so annoying that it helps.

At first, the anxiety was gripping; fiercest in the morning and the instant my head hit the pillow at night. It still visits, but it’s improved. And every day, even on the more anxious ones, I find calm. A real calm, a place of acceptance and graciousness for this moment and myself.  Even in those first weeks before I moved out, as I folded a ghost’s laundry, the hamper not yet notified about the split. Even when I find his old watercolors and paper with my paints and have to go leave them on his porch. I feel so supported, and so present to the opportunity. And I cry every day. 

I look at myself in the medicine cabinet mirror in my new bathroom.

I see the face of a woman I love deeply.