Good Luck Understanding This

There’s a difference between surviving and actually living. Surviving is quiet, mostly invisible work. It’s holding yourself together just enough so the world doesn’t notice you’re cracking. But, of course, it comes with a cost. It settles quietly in the corners of your life no one sees - the pieces of yourself you give up just to remain present, and the relief that never quite comes. That’s a truth I’ve carried with me for years.

You’d think surviving would make you ready for anything. But at twenty, sure I understood everything about myself, I found out just how wrong I was - being in a relationship with a man fifteen years my senior made that very obvious. My boundaries weren’t nearly as clear as I believed, and inexperience naturally meant I went along with whatever seemed “normal” at the time. Looking back, the version of myself I thought was “normal” had been rewritten for someone else’s comfort, a script I didn’t know I was following.

Normal was him telling me my discomfort was just “insecurity,” insisting every man looks at women that way, like it was a law of nature I was too naive to understand. Normal was him questioning why I’d lost interest while pointing out my boobs were sagging, claiming it was fair game because I had made him think of it. Normal was being told my reactions were unstable and overblown, backed up by stories of what his friends and family supposedly said about me, framed as proof that I needed to “get myself together,” even though none of them had ever spoken to me directly. Normal was him using my distress as evidence of my coldness, acting offended when I couldn’t perform the comfort he demanded. Normal was all of that and more, and it left me stunned at the casualness of cruelty, wondering how someone could make your life feel like a set of examples in a lesson you didn’t ask to attend.

The hardest part wasn’t realising I’d been manipulated - it was how slowly it happened. Nothing happened all at once, no neon sign lit up “this is bad,” at least from where I was standing. People noticed the tilt of the scales long before I did - but whenever they tried to tell me, I brushed it off. To me, the warnings were subtle: a joke with a sting, a story twisted to shame, a comparison that made me doubt myself. Piece by piece, they built a case where my own emotions were the crime.

By this point, my mental health was declining, and to top it all off, my brother’s addiction tugged at whatever scraps of me remained. Everything seemed to demand more than I could give, and yet I still had to show up while feeling like I was being pulled apart from all sides. Nobody hands out medals for that kind of exhaustion, and it doesn’t make you strong - just drained. And apparently selfish, too, if you ask someone who has no idea what dealing with this kind of thing is actually like.

So it ended like a memo: packed my things, typed the text the next day, and sent it. A ridiculously long, overexplained text, because obviously it takes a novel to make someone hear what you’ve been saying for months.

Eventually, I realised the wreckage in my head wasn’t proof I was broken - it was proof I’d been through something. Nothing screams validation like hearing this from a psychiatrist of all people. The nightmares didn’t go away, and the shame was still there, but somewhere in the mess, I finally caught a glimpse of clarity. Therapy anchored me, and having a support system let me work through it all privately, on my own terms. I feel proud I let myself take that time.

After all that noise and quiet, I’m finally carving out a corner of my own. A corner where I can sit with what happened without trying to justify or explain it. People might only know the version of me rewritten to suit someone else’s, but that’s not me. That version doesn’t hold the weight of the moments I actually lived. Some might think laughing at it means I don’t care. Far from it. I care so much that I have to step back and laugh, or I’d probably collapse under the weight of it. Reclaiming my story, messy as it is, is the first time it feels like it actually belongs to me.

Turns out reclaiming your story doesn’t come with fireworks or applause. No one sends a parade, and the world mostly keeps scrolling. But somehow it still matters. And if anyone doubts me, well - at least I get the last word. Someone else clearly won’t - hard to argue when credibility was never on your side.