A story about survival, self-abandonment, and finding the way back to myself.
one year ago
It’s been almost exactly one year since my life fell apart.
At least that’s what it felt like.
The truth is that my world didn’t collapse overnight. It exploded, like when you fill a balloon with too much air.
For years, I walked around with an invisible backpack full of super heavy things I didn’t talk about.
My marriage.
My health.
Financial stress.
Fear.
Loneliness.
My backpack became heavier by the day. But I kept going.
Most people didn’t even notice that I looked weighed down. I’m not sure if that’s because I hid it well, or because nobody around me actually saw me.
Eventually I couldn’t carry it anymore.
That’s when it finally exploded.
I thought the hardest part would be surviving the collapse.
I was wrong.
The hardest part came afterward.
I didn’t know it then but I was about to enter the year of the glass wall.
behind the glass wall
When the noise died down and the dust settled, I found myself standing behind what felt like a giant sheet of glass.
I could see the life I wanted, and the people I loved.
I could see the future I was trying so desperately to build.
I could even see the version of myself I thought I wanted to become.
But I couldn’t seem to reach any of it. I couldn’t yell or scream loud enough to get anyone on the other side to see me over there.
No matter how hard I banged on the glass, I couldn’t move it. Couldn’t break it. I could not even get it to make a noise loud enough for anyone else to hear.
I fought against the glass wall for so long.
For a long time, I thought the wall was being held in place by other people.
I thought it was the circumstances.
My marriage.
The betrayals.
Disappointments.
The losses.
The people who couldn’t love me the way I needed to be loved.
The people who left, OR the people who stayed but stopped seeing me.
I thought if they would just change, apologize, choose me, understand me, then the wall would disappear.
But over the last year, I’ve started to realize something unsettling.
The wall wasn’t out there. The wall was inside me.
The wall inside
I couldn’t make the wall disappear until I realized what it really was. Where it really was.
The wall inside me was built from years of survival. People-pleasing disguised as love.
Self-sacrifice disguised as loyalty.
Hyper-independence disguised as strength.
Years of believing my worth depended on what I could do, fix, save, prove, or survive.
A lifetime of proving my worth through what I could carry instead of who I was.
And when everything else fell apart, I was left standing face-to-face with the one relationship I had spent the least amount of time nurturing.
The relationship with myself.
The hardest truth was realizing how often I had abandoned myself.
Not because I didn’t care about myself.
Because somewhere along the way, I learned that keeping everyone else comfortable was safer than being fully seen.
And that realization changed everything.
Because if I helped build the wall, then maybe I could help dismantle it too.
finding the key
For a long time, I thought healing meant getting back to who I was before everything fell apart.
I don’t think that anymore.
The truth is, the person I was before the collapse was exhausted.
She was carrying too much.
She was surviving more than she was living.
She was so focused on holding everything together that she rarely stopped to ask whether the life she was holding together was actually working.
The last year has been painful.
There have been losses I never saw coming.
Relationships that changed.
Dreams that died.
Versions of myself I had to grieve.
There have been days when I questioned everything.
Days when I wanted answers.
Times when I wanted someone else to tell me who was right, who was wrong, and how to make the hurt stop.
But somewhere in the middle of all that uncertainty, something powerful happened.
I started finding myself.
moving on
I started learning who I was.
Not the version of me that performed, fixed, rescued, achieved, or endured.
Just me.
The woman underneath the survival strategies and fear.
And while I still don’t have all the answers, I know this:
The glass wall is not as thick as I once believed.
Some days I still run into it.
Some days I still catch myself blaming circumstances, waiting for closure, or wishing someone else would hand me the key.
But more often now, I remember that the door was never out there.
It was always within me.
A year ago, I thought my life was ending.
Today, I think something else was happening.
I think I was being introduced to myself.
And for the first time in a very long time, that feels less terrifying than it does exciting.
🖤
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