This guest blogger is one of my favourites. She has her own blog “Diary of a She-Wolf.” She doesn’t write as regularly as I do – which probably is wise because the writers block is still rearing it’s ugly head for me, I know you’re all keen on the story I have to tell, but below in someone else words & experience, is what I have felt too in the past. It’s almost like she took the words in my head & put them on paper. She is a real writer, not just me who writes a diary & posts 3 times a week, she has a great literary talent that I wish I had!
Enjoy
Guest Blog: Toxic Love & The Road to Recovery
After TOTGA, I haven’t been ok. At all.
He broke me in a way that I’m not accustomed to.
I’ve been beaten. Raped. Emotionally attacked. Mentally destroyed. Financially fucked over…. and now, finally- my spirit has been crushed.
Over the years of stories I’ve shared with you, this is the love that has damaged me the most.
The absence of it crashed down on me, seemingly breaking every bone in my body; piercing my skin, tearing flesh and leaving me battered and broken. My mind was a storm of emotion that was so intense I couldn’t distinguish one feeling from another. I felt like my heart had been dragged from my chest and the wound left open; a cavernous, Black, whooshing hole that nothing could escape from.
Worst of all- I could feel the light inside me dying.
When it all ended, and I moved away, the candle in the coal mine that kept me going- the flicker of light and hope inside me was not my hope that I could save myself again…. It was the hope that HE would save me: from the scores of men lurking in my future that will do me harm somehow. Just like always, he would save me from the monsters from without, and within.
The moment I realised he wasn’t coming for me, that light was almost snuffed- by my own hand, no less. In hindsight, it seems so strange to me that after everything I have faced to date, that this one heartbreak (half a lifetime in the making) would be the thing that finished me.
I stood at the edge of the cliff and was ready to jump. More ready than I’ve ever been in my life. I took the deep breath in to steady myself and… my phone pinged. Some notification or other. That ping saved my life.
In that split second I realised – with more clarity than I’ve felt in a long time – that somewhere deep within me, I still had a spark of life that still held on. It was faint, but with some care and kindling, it could become a flame once more.
Admitting this is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It’s a moment in my life that I’m not proud of. I was weak. Broken. Hurt. Dead inside. Seemingly irreparable.
My lesson from this love is that to be free of the hurt it causes you- you have to pull it out by the roots. Pack up the photos and mementos. Set fire to the house where love once lived. Pack it away until it doesn’t hurt you any more. It becomes just another piece of the mosaic of your life- the sum and total of everything you have been up until this point. A part of the background. Just another story.
He will always be a part of me, but it’s up to me to work every day to make him a part that I don’t need in order to feel whole. I get to decide what part he plays in my narrative.
He is rewriting our story now. Each chapter being amended to include the one that’s easier to love. That’s less complicated. That’s better than me. Seeing each edit has been an accumulative injury- like a wound that keeps opening just as you think you’re finally healing.
It still makes me wince. If it didn’t hurt, I wouldn’t be human. I’m more in control of how that hurt affects me now. I won’t let it put my fire out. It’s never easy to see someone you thought you’d grow old and grey with writing you out of their narrative, but life has a way of doing that.
I’m finally ready to close this chapter. I have loose ends to tie up, but once they are done, I can finally begin to write a new story.
For the first time in a long time. I feel hopeful. Optimistic. Unshackled from the past… and maybe- just, maybe- I might finally be free.
Here is the link to her blog! https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/90834386/posts/2582191091
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I've Been Dating For You 