Where Strength Meets Courage

There are moments throughout our existence that splits lives in two: before and after. I was seventeen when that line in the sand was drawn for me. My grandmother—my one true grandparent—had just been diagnosed with lung cancer. I remember watching her body shrinking into the bedsheets, folding into itself like soggy paper left out in the rain. Her once lively spirit withering away to bed-ridden dust. Sure, the cigarettes were gone, but so was she—slowly, painfully, piece by piece. Traumatizing to say the least.

Just as I was beginning to catch my breath—barely, just barely, starting to process the grief of my closest caregiver inching towards death—life struck again. My mother, a woman who I always struggled to understand—so nurturing and generous in one breath and unrelentingly authoritative in the next—was diagnosed with thyroid cancer.

My mother’s diagnosis came like a second wave, and little by little, day by day, my home was drowning under the weight of the swell.

Not too long after my mom’s diagnosis, my parents were locked in a painful dance constantly trying—and failing—to find their way back to each other. My mother, fighting her own battle with illness, wanted to place my withering, terminal grandmother in a nursing home so she can focus on her recovery. But my father, who was raised by his single mother, and who carried a deep sense of loyalty to her refused. He saw it as a betrayal.

For weeks, there was a clash of values—my mother’s need for healing and my father’s unwavering devotion to the woman who birthed, raised, and faced poverty on her own. From what I remember, the accusations were rampant: that my father put his mother before the family he’d built and the woman he had chosen to spend his life with, and so on and so forth. The pressure of the ocean—the weight of the caregiving, illness, resentment, loyalty, financial burdens, and child-rearing—pressed down and finally crushed us.

As a family unit, we were falling apart, unravelling, and nothing felt solid anymore. I didn’t know how to process the weight of the world pressing onto my lungs. I watched my fairly normal childhood home descend further and further into the depths, and while up to this point in my life I had only ever experimented with drugs, I needed something, anything, to drown out the noise, and drugs became a language I understood fluently.

Escape. This became the one and only thing that I wanted to achieve. I wanted to numb out the pain, to not feel my heart beating intensely from within the confines of my chest, and for this nightmare to wash over me so I could slowly float above water and breathe again. But we aren’t at that part of my story, just yet.

Instead of floating, I sank. With each pull of purple haze, I was pulled further and further from the surface—first my feet, then my lungs, and finally, and most tragically, the light I once had in my eyes. I told myself I was swimming towards relief, but if I am being totally and completely honest, I wanted, no needed, to feel nothing.

It started with smoke—ironic, isn’t it? Slow, hazy escapes that wrapped me in momentary calm. But soon, that calm wasn’t enough, and I sought sharper, quicker hits. It was the kind of hit that didn’t just quiet the noise, it was the type that erased the room altogether, and by this point, it wasn’t an escape anymore, it was a habit—one I quite literally was unable to afford.

Somewhere along the way, that growing sense of desperation—fueled with emotions that I wasn’t ready to unpack and sealed with the finality of my grandmother’s death—became the curtain call for Act I. And so, Act II began.

Act II was where the proverbial shit didn’t just hit the fan, but it coated everything around it. When I hit the ripe age of eighteen, I found myself in the middle of my parents’ trial separation, living with my dad, untethered by rules, structure, or consequences for that matter. And then, the final blow: I got a job. For the first time in my entire young life, I had money. With money, I no longer had to scrape by. I now had access and the freedom I craved—the kind of freedom that in the wrong hands was gasoline to an already burning fire.

Then, I met him.

And before you say anything, I know what you’re probably thinking: “how cliché—a boy swoons in just in time to save her like a knight from those medieval tales”.

Well, let me stop you right there. That boy, ladies and gentlepeople, wasn’t a boy at all—he was a man. Eleven years older than me, with more issues than Vogue could print in a year. He wasn’t a savior. He was a storm dressed in charm, personality, and I was already too far gone to notice the forecast.

In short, I was fucked.

Within a few—read: two—months on my fall from grace, my father had finally had enough of my shit. And for some reason for which I fully can’t explain, I thought that moving in with that man was a good idea.

After all, in my mind, I thought I had nothing left. I wasn’t speaking to my mother after a blowout fight. My brother, my closest confidant, barely spoke to anyone—he was grieving in silence, working at a local fast-food chain to keep his mind off of our grandmother’s death. My sister and I were estranged, the space between us thick with an old grudge which I wasn’t ready to let go of. And my father—the man who had once been the light of my life—gave me an ultimatum which I was not ready to abide by.

The truth was simple: The drugs were winning.

I started this new life with the so-called love of my life—I was eighteen, so really, what did I know?

It was poetic at the time. He came into my life when everything was falling apart, and in my eyes, he rescued me. Never mind that our castle was a 300 sq foot efficiency with a twin mattress on the floor. It was in a nice neighborhood and that had to count for something, right?

He didn’t take the pain away—far from it. But back then, he was a distraction, and that felt like enough.

From the very beginning, I should have accepted him for what he was: an explosive villain who preyed on a grieving girl. It’s not like he ever bothered to hide it—there was no mask, no cloak, or elaborate disguise. And I wish I could say “I didn’t see the signs.” But, again, if I am being completely transparent—I did. I saw all of them.

I was just too stubborn, too prideful, too determined to avoid the complete and utter humiliation of running back to my parents’ house—defeated, restricted, and forced to live under someone else’s rules again.

Oh—and did I mention? Just as I was clawing my way towards some semblance of independence with the monster who I thought to be my knight with shining armor, my parents somehow found a way back to each other.

The timing: impeccable if I do say so myself.

So, naturally—like every good coming-of-age story—I blamed myself.

I saw my stubbornness as the spark that lit the match, the reason my parents fell apart. In my mind, that made me a villain. And villains … well they don’t get mercy.

So I took the punishment.

I endured every raised voice that shattered the silence like glass. Every shove into the walls that didn’t care if I was bruised or broken. And the punches? They weren’t always fists—sometimes they were words sharp enough to leave invisible wounds that ached longer than they bruised.

And then there were the nights.

The nights were where the word “no” fell from my lips like a suggestion only to be ignored. The nights were when I felt my body becoming a battlefield he thought he had the right to conquer. The nights were when I stopped fighting back because it felt exhausting to explain my humanity over and over again. The nights were when he took and took until I shrunk myself so that he would have less to destroy. The nights were where I learned to flinch before the impact. To stop crying because my tears would upset him “and kill the mood”. To breathe shallowly so he wouldn’t hear me. I took it—every violation and every betrayal of trust because down to a cellular level, I believed that this was the price I had to pay for being the reason that everything had fallen apart.

And then, life did the thing it always does—it threw a curveball in the form of a plus sign on a test I took alone in the urine encrusted stalls of a Denny’s.

I was pregnant.

Fuck.

Me.

Exit stage left and applaud for Act III—the final Act.

For the briefest of moments, I let myself believe that this would be the thing that saved us. I naively thought that this one, singular revelation would patch the crumbling walls of our homes’ foundation. That maybe, just maybe, he would soften and become the man I once knew him to be. That this would heal every wound I had endured. That this would make everything worth it, but I was twenty by now—and what do twenty year olds really know after all?

The months leading up to it felt like a smear on the classic film reel of my memory: doctors’ appointments that I went to all alone, baby books I never got around to reading, little, tiny, butterfly kicks that reminded me to stay alive. To endure. To survive.

But the violence? The violence hadn’t stopped. It was just rebranded and took on a new face. There were less fists now, but there was more manipulation. He started to see that I was slowly finding a way back to my voice, and so with each retort I made, he made it a point to remind me that I was the reason that my family had abandoned me.

And then I blinked and I was in labor.

The day I gave birth wasn’t mine. He made sure of it.

While I pushed life into the world, he made sure to steal the air right back with his hysterics. He cried louder than I did. He paced the maternity wing’s floor as if he was the one in pain. He made calls to everyone and their mother, narrating tales of his heroism and thus making me a footnote in my own story.

When they released me from the hospital, no one warned me how heavy the drive back to that 300 sq foot apartment would feel. I had a diaper bag, a sleeping newborn, and a body that didn’t feel like mine anymore—not like it had for a while.

Crossing the threshold felt like stepping back into a nightmare. I was just as broken as the first time he hit me—maybe more. Because now, I wasn’t alone. I had her.

Sleep deprivation blurred the days, her cries echoing in the cramped space while I moved like a ghost, desperate to soothe her. Then one night, with her latched to my breast and tears streaming down both our faces, he hit me. Again. And again. And again. And again. All because I couldn’t get her to stop crying.

That was the moment something shifted. Maybe this time, I’d find the courage to do for her what I couldn’t do for myself.

This is where my exit strategy began.

Months came and went. The abuse didn’t stop— I was biding my time, counting shadows on the wall, waiting for a crack of light. But truthfully, I was on the verge of breaking again. It all just felt so hopeless.

Then the plot thickened.

I found out I was pregnant—again. I didn’t tell anyone. Not him. Not my family. Not even myself, really. I carried the truth like a quiet, shameful secret, hoping—if I ignored it long enough—maybe my body would take care of it on its own. Maybe it would end before it began.

But it didn’t. And the thing is... I loved being a mother.

No matter how much pain surrounded me, no matter how tired or torn I felt, holding my daughter reminded me that something good had come from all the wreckage. So instead of spiraling, I used that second heartbeat as fuel. If not for me, then for them.

This wasn’t just survival anymore. It was legacy. And I knew I had to fight my way out—for both of them.

But then, as if the universe heard my silent screams, there it was. He left for a trip—a quick one, just a few days for work. I smiled like I always did, folded his clothes, kissed him goodbye with lips that had gone numb months ago, and made it point to not look too excited because I didn’t want him to get not even an inkling of a feeling that I was going to do something radical. The door clicked shut behind him, and the moment it did, I crumpled to the floor, shaking.

Then, after realizing that this was happening, that it wasn’t just a dream, I got up and moved like I was a little tornado on borrowed time.

The baby was still asleep in her bassinet. I packed fast—diapers, two bottles, and a handful of baby clothes. I didn’t bother with my own things. I grabbed my ID and the emergency stash of cash I’d saved from grocery money. I wrapped her tight in a blanket, kissed her forehead, and whispered, “You are my strength,” into the lilac scented crown of her tiny head. “And your sister… she’s my courage.”

I once again stepped over the threshold, my heart thundered—not with fear, but with the quiet, steady beat of resolve and I didn’t look back because everything I needed—everything that mattered—was finally in my arms, not behind me.

Forward was the only direction left. And this time, I wasn’t walking it alone.