My journey to wholeness began with her, and for that, I’ll always be grateful.

I see her strength even in the midst of pain. I honor her everyday by giving myself the love and care she deserved all along. I’m proud of how far we’ve come together, and my ability to show her now that where love starts is with me.

Looking back, I see the strength I didn’t know I had then. I honor the girl in this photo, the one who gave everything for crumbs in return, the girl who thought she needed to prove her worth through love and self-abandonment, who was so terrified of going on alone with no one to turn to. -

The most painful things I have ever been through were the catalysts to a literal transformation. And when I look back now, I don’t just see destruction. I see something almost sacred. I think, what a spiritual experience that was.

And somehow, even knowing that all of it was fake and none of it was real, except to me, doesn’t take away from the fact that I felt it; it doesn’t change the fact that I experienced it, this thing that I thought I was going to spend my entire life searching for and never find.

I now understand that this unconditional, enmeshed intimacy I craved was something I was supposed to experience in childhood. It’s not something I’m going to find in adulthood, because it doesn’t belong there.

That part of me that was searching so desperately for something so unrealistic has died. And though painful—excruciating, more accurately—that death has set me free.

So I grieved. And now today, a year and a half later, I see things quite differently. Oddly enough, even though he hurt me, it’s almost like he cured me.

There was so much to grieve— not just the loss of the relationship, and the person I had thought I’d come to know and love, and who I thought loved me, but of the way I saw the world, how I viewed connection, how I trusted other people and myself.

It took me 2 years to find out I had been hoaxed—to learn that my entire life as I had come to know it was a hollow pretense. That level of betrayal completely flipped my world upside down, and the PTSD that followed truly rewired my brain.

It was everything I had spent my life searching for.

I was 21 and he was 30. It was 3 months after a friend of mine had died, at a time when I had been drinking my life away and already in deep with stress-induced anorexia.

something I wasn’t even sure existed. Then, at the most vulnerable time in my life up to that point, I found it—that all-encompassing, expansive, life-breathing love I had been missing my whole life. For the first time, I felt completely seen, understood, heard, appreciated, cared for, loved. -

Even the simple fact that young women often seek romance as a primary life goal is an example of the reach of patriarchy.

It’s as subtle as ‘unisex’ clothing being in standard men’s sizing.

I’m sick to my stomach when I think about how engrained it is in men to exist in these ways, and of women to be subservient, whether mentally, emotionally, or physically.

Even the men you may not think participate in or uphold patriarchy because they’re kind or sympathetic to women still often do; I don’t know if it’s even possible for them to not.

This time last year I regretted my entire life up to that point. Today, I no longer carry any regret. I appreciate all that life has shown me, and despite it all, I still desire to love.

Now, I finally feel I’m in a space where, despite life not looking like what I had once thought or hoped it would, and my new life being built around what was once an insurmountable measure of grief, I can feel that I’m beginning to open back up to life, and the world.

world.

It took me the last year and a half of doing almost nothing but sitting and staring at my wounds— committing to reflecting and recovering—to begin to come out of that place.