Unlearning the past is harder than anyone ever tells you.

I thought once you forgave the people who hurt you, that would be the end of it. Like flipping off a light switch.

Forgive.
Heal.
Move on.

Simple.

But healing doesn’t work like that.

It’s slower.
Messier.

A process that circles back on itself just when you think you’ve finally outrun it.

Some days I feel proud of how far I’ve come.
Other days I realize there is still so much inside me that was shaped by things a five-year-old should never have learned.

Those memories live quietly inside me. I rarely speak them out loud.

For most of my life I believed that if I locked them away carefully enough, they might disappear.

But they never did.

Before I was five years old,
I learned that love sometimes sounded like fists through walls and crying behind a locked bedroom door.

I learned that monsters were real— not under the bed or hiding in the closet— but standing in the hallway.

I learned that addiction could turn parents into strangers and that a small girl could somehow be blamed for things like unfinished peas on her plate. To this day, I still can’t stand the smell of them.

I learned that I was inconvenient.
Too loud.
Too emotional.
Too much.

Eventually my grandparents rescued me from that world.

With them, life looked different.

They spoke a language I didn’t understand at first— one made of patience and kindness.

They told me I was smart.
Capable.
Funny.
Beautiful.

They hugged me even when I didn’t know how to accept it.

Little by little they tried to rewire a brain that had been taught the opposite of love.

But healing was confusing because I lived between two different worlds.

One full of safety and warmth.

And another where love depended on whoever happened to be standing next to my mother.

So I learned something else instead.

I learned how to become whoever people needed me to be.

If I was perfect enough, useful enough, lovable enough—maybe they wouldn’t leave.

At eighteen, I left home believing I had finally figured everything out. Most eighteen-year-olds believe that. College was bright and loud and full of possibility. Friends everywhere. I became a different version of myself for each of them. Whatever someone needed, that’s who I was.

I didn’t notice how deeply I still hated myself.

At twenty-three I was planning a wedding with the boy who had been my best friend for years.

We had a future mapped out neatly.

Then one night happened.

A night that divided my life into before and after.

I survived it. But survival sometimes comes with a cost.

Parts of me never came back from that night.

That night didn’t just change my life—it changed the way I understood safety, love, and myself. It led me down a road that was never truly built for me. I told myself a story to make sense of what I had lost, what I feared, and what I believed I could no longer have.

I wasn’t born believing I couldn’t be safe with a man.

But fear has a way of rewriting truth.

And for a long time, I believed that story.

My relationship ended. My life shifted.

And when love appeared again, it came in a form that felt safe.

She loved me gently.

For five and a half years we built something real together.

She showed me something I had never fully understood before—love that stayed.

Love that forgave. Love that didn’t disappear every time I made a mistake.

For the first time, I felt safe enough to tell someone everything.

My monsters. My fears. My dreams.

But somewhere along the way, I realized something familiar had happened.

I had disappeared again.

I had become everything she needed and forgotten who I was.

So I started finding myself again.

I made my own friends. Chased my own interests. Accepted a job with a company I had always dreamed about.

For the first time, our future looked wide and bright.

Until the day I came home and she told me she was leaving.

Just like that.

The air was gone.

It took me eleven years to unlearn what that heartbreak taught me.

I dated. I loved—carefully.

But I never let anyone get close enough to destroy me.

Somewhere along the way I started accepting things I knew weren’t right.

Part of me was desperate for love—the way a person is desperate for oxygen.

Another part of me was simply tired.

And somewhere beneath all of that, something quieter began to surface.

A truth I had buried.

A truth I had been too afraid to question.

Recently, I’ve started to understand that the story I told myself after that night wasn’t the whole truth.

That fear is not identity.

That survival is not the same as knowing who you are.

And that maybe—just maybe—I am allowed to feel safe in ways I once believed I never could again.

I am learning that I can let myself be loved by a man.

Not because I have to rewrite my past.

But because I no longer have to live inside the fear it created.

Learning something and believing it are two very different things.

I know the words.

I know I am worthy of love.

I know that being disappointed in someone doesn’t mean abandoning them.

I know that rejection isn’t always about me.

But believing those truths is still something I practice.

Every day.

I remind myself:

I am good enough.
Smart enough.
Funny enough.
Beautiful enough.

Enough.

Sometimes I forget.

Sometimes the old voices try to return.

But healing is still happening.

Slowly.

Quietly.

I am learning that being myself with everyone is the only thing I need to be. Because pretending to be someone else for the sake of love is the most exhausting thing a heart can do.

And I’ve spent enough of my life being afraid to be myself.

JMS