ask jojo: what do i do if my soulmate left me?

ask jojo is a free advice column by joelle schumacher, a person who’s made every mistake. if you enjoy their work or want to support it, you can subscribe here to receive email updates, or submit your own questions here.

dear jojo,

i don’t even know where to start, so i’ll just say it plain and clear: i was sexually abused my entire childhood and so i have never had a healthy relationship with sex or love, which obviously has had a major impact on my relationships. i tended to date people who were very, very bad for me throughout my teens and twenties and i just basically always felt broken whenever i was having sex with someone so i just let them do whatever they wanted and kind of checked out. i was about to give up hope on finding love completely and was actually coming to terms with the idea of being alone, and then i met my soulmate and it felt like god was giving me a second chance. i was in love with him like i have never loved or been loved, and now i feel so stupid and pathetic because even though i thought he felt the same way he broke up with me out of nowhere a few months ago. i don’t know what the fuck happened or what the fuck is happening. i feel stuck, like i can’t even begin to think about moving on, because i’ve never loved anyone else like that and i’m convinced i never will love anyone else like that again. and although i know nothing in life is fair and i am so, so, stupidly privileged and i have no right to hate the world, i fucking hate the world right now. i am in my late twenties now and still i have never been with anyone (with the exception of this guy, for a grand total of three and a half months) and i just don’t see the point of trying anymore. everyone i know is in relationships except me; everyone i know has such an easier time of living. i know there is suffering in the world and i am way better off than most people here, but i just feel so fucking angry at the world and the fact that my life has to hurt this much. i feel pathetic because i can’t just get over it or rationalize what happened, and even though i know i’m not supposed to say mean things to myself i just keeping asking myself “what the fuck is wrong with you??” i also just can’t believe that it’s over and that he isn’t coming back because up until he left he had never expressed anything but love and light for me. he had had a similar childhood to me and so we were able to really, really understand each other and connect and make each other feel safer. and it wasn’t just some trauma bond situation either — i’ve had plenty of those and none of them felt even a fraction as healthy and beautiful as this. i can’t convince myself he isn’t coming back, but i also can’t believe myself when i say comforting things to myself. i also seemingly can’t make any progress in getting over it, and i feel like my friends who are happily settled are just annoyed and tired of hearing about it at this point (and have probably known in their heads for quite some time i would never end up partnered, so are just rolling their eyes waiting for me to get the message). my question is, if i really don’t know why he left me and i feel like i didn’t do anything wrong, what the fuck did i do wrong? what’s the point of even trying to get over it when i’ll never be healthy or normal enough for a relationship anyways? why am i even here on this earth if i was just put here to get abused and lose everyone i love the second i start to feel safe with them?

signed,

stuck

dear stuck,

what if i told you you didn’t do anything wrong?

alternatively, what if i told you this: when i was twelve my older brother hit me in the face for the first time.

this was not the usual inter-sibling spat, nor the kind of light swat that is done more to annoy your sibling than hurt them. we had always fought, as siblings do, me and him and my younger brother like three looney toons characters loudly running through the house. we all played soccer, all skateboarded and climbed trees and swung all the way up on the swings and then jumped off into the air when we were at the absolute highest. we all teased each other mercilessly, all shoved and poked and tripped one another whenever we got the chance. we tackled each other during games of wiffle ball, and intentionally stood up on our bike seats and rims to see who was the bravest (it was not me), and played world cup with the other kids in the neighborhood, an occasion that usually found us kicking and screaming at the end of the last match, me literally laying on my little brother’s legs so he couldn’t get up, him trying to kick me in the stomach so he could, the neighbor kids scared or else equally diabolical and our mother screaming from the house for us to stop screaming. this is just what we did. that’s how we grew up.

the hit i’m describing was not any of that.

it was an intentional, open palm slap that came so quickly i didn’t even realize what was happening until it was over. there was no prelude. there was no warning. he just hit me as hard as he could, called me a whore, and stalked away. that was it. there was nothing bigger or more meaningful happening, no context to explain it or thing i’d done to deserve it, except for the fact that my dad had left-slash-been-kicked-out three or four weeks before and the authoritarian throne, from which he had doled out our punishments, both frequently and gleefully, was sitting empty for the first time. and so with one slap he made his claim for the throne and solidified the violence of the next five or six years.

why did he not leave it empty? why could we not have had my father leave and all became nonviolent in response? i don’t know. i suspect it was beyond any of our capacities to stop it, because we had no other way and our mother was not emotionally there enough to make it stop. and we were angry, too, angry that we suddenly had no dad even if he had been a shitty one, and angry that our mom had disappeared so far into herself that she would not come out for several years. so my brother did the only thing that would give him any sense of power in an ultimately powerless world, and he hit me first.

i have been in enough therapy and taken enough philosophy classes and known enough complicated people to know, logically, at least, that he is not an evil person. he was a fourteen year old child whose father had just walked out and whose mother was having a nervous breakdown. he was a child and he grew up getting hit, and our father grew up getting hit, and probably our father’s father grew up getting hit as well. but my father hit my brother, and my brother hit me, and my father hit my other brother, and my older brother hit my younger brother, and my younger brother hit him back; and our uncle hit our cousins, and our father’s father hit our father, and my father hit me. and my older brother hit my mom’s boyfriends, and he hit any of the kids his age that tried to flirt with me, and he hit his friends when they upset him. and he didn’t hit my mom but he did corner her, him and my younger brother, occasionally united but usually alone, both of them yelling and screaming so loudly that she would curl into the fetal position on the floor and cry.

that cry is the worst sound i have ever heard.

it was a weak, barely audible one, pitiful, circular, horrifying to hear, the kind of rolling sob that you can tell is hitting every note on the scale even as she’s trying not to let anyone hear it. they did this to us whenever they were mad, which was often, and one time before we went to school they had already escalated it past the point of cruelty. that morning is what i remember when i think of my sophomore year of high school: my mother, curled into the smallest shape possible, as if shrinking herself would protect her, as if maybe if she were small enough they would stop; curled up as if they were not just yelling and hurling insults but kicking her as well, which at the end of the day they may as well have. my mother, obeying them; my mother, refusing to let me call the cops; my mother, in the shape of a comma. curled into the smallest space possible. and her refrain, like a prayer, just whimpering the words i can’t do this, i can’t do this, over and over and over again.

i don’t know what the point of telling you this is, except that this is what i thought of when i sat down to reply to your letter. i’ve been reading tiny beautiful things by cheryl strayed, as is the duty of aspiring advice columnists everywhere, and she is unashamed and unflinching with her pain. she is generous, almost extravagantly so, a ptsd santa claus who comes in with their arms overflowing. she is generous with her suffering, but she is also generous with her kindness, generous with her words. i am trying to be generous these days as well.

the summer i turned twenty i met a boy bussing tables at a shitty breakfast spot. we were, although i didn’t know it yet, astonishingly alike: we both rolled our eyes when the waitresses got frantic, unbothered and unimpressed that they had been doing it thirty years and still couldn’t master the sunday rush. we looked at our vans and sulked whenever someone said something critical to us. we skimped on side work, and made fun of the same customers, and made the exact same face whenever the extremely catholic sister of our manager came in and tried to talk to us about jesus.

we had started hanging out, outside of work, and then suddenly we were inseparable, the kind of best friends that solidifies seemingly overnight and is characterized by a mutual sense of fierceness and protection and not a small amount of dazzlement. if i had been twelve, the intensity would have been no different; it was the kind of enmeshment that doesn’t happen much when you’re an adult, the sort of reckless, wandering, sleeping in the same bed without touching sort of thing that when i look back at was nothing short of miraculous. i needed a friend desperately, and although i won’t put words in his mouth i think he probably did too. i loved him, or i was in love with him maybe, but whichever one it was it didn’t matter because he kept me safe. if i was crying about something i would call him; if i couldn’t sit with myself and stay home the whole long dark lonely night he would pick me up and out we would go for a drive, the beach or the bluffs or some neon twenty-four hour breakfast spot. i was the one he called when he got news, the first one he called when he totaled his car. his parents, who he lived with on and off, were always happy to see me, and they made me feel like they loved me, even though i was always hanging out there in the middle of the night and eating all their eggo waffles. he was the safest person i knew, and subsequently i told him everything, without having to think about what i was saying the way i did with everyone else, and so we went from only hanging out on the clock to talking or listening to music or just sitting comfortably in silence for hours and hours several times a week.

but then he got a girlfriend. but then i still slept over. and i still saw him all the time. and his parents still made me feel like they liked me whenever i was around. do you see where this is going?

i went from being his best friend to being in love with him, and then i told him that i liked him, which was the strongest iteration of affection that i could manage to say out loud to anyone, so deep was my fear of needing anyone; and he told me he liked me too, but then he kept dating his girlfriend. and then i cut him out, because i was nauseous every time i thought about it and i was too lovesick to look him in the eye anymore and also, probably, the most of anything, i wanted him. i wanted him badly, more badly than i could remember ever really wanting a person, which was weird for me because usually the second i had even an inkling of a crush on someone i went and hooked up with them right away so that i wouldn’t like them anymore. but i hadn’t touched him, had thought about it but instead heard this still, small voice inside my head that whispered wait every time i almost did it; and then he got a girlfriend and i knew if we kept spending all our time together it was only a matter of time until i did something bad. and even though i had kissed plenty of girl’s boyfriends in high school, and i had created more than my fair share of heartbreak over the years, i didn’t want to be that kind of person anymore. i didn’t want to ruin his relationship, because he wanted to be in it and who was i to decide that he shouldn’t be? and i really didn’t want to be the kind of person, even tangentially, who made his girlfriend’s life harder or — god forbid — ruined her sense of trust completely, even if i also really didn’t like that she was his girlfriend. i couldn’t do it. i also kept running into the problem of reality whenever we hung out, a reality that kept unfolding, autonomously almost, so that even as i sat in the same room as it i could do nothing to change it. before him i had always got the guy i wanted. kept them, no, but that was a different skillset entirely and not one i had ever really tried to develop.

i have never been good at sitting with my uncomfortable feelings, stuck. i have never been good at not getting what i want.

we had kept in touch a fair amount over the years, grabbing dinner and sometimes sharing music and just generally keeping the door, if not open, exactly, then unlocked and with the light on inside. we spoke intensely when we did, both of us trading stories back and forth for hours or sometimes days and then just as quickly returning to radio silence. we were friends, or some approximation of it, even if we weren’t close, would never be as close again as we had been that first summer, and even though we didn’t always talk there was what seemed like a mutual understanding that we would remain friends forever, even if we didn’t talk or one of his girlfriends (there were a lot of them) forbade it, which i later learned they all had.

i don’t know what we thought we were doing, stuck. i don’t know why we had to go and tempt fate like that. but i called him one day, some five or six years later, and from there i lost all sense of control. he was single, a rare occurrence, and i was unclaimed, as always, and some part of me woke up. and then suddenly we were facetiming every night and suddenly we were joking about me and him and then suddenly he was looking up flights. and then suddenly he was at my house. and then suddenly i was in love with him.

it was and wasn’t like the first time. was, in the sense that after only five or so minutes with him i was comfortable again, and in the feeling i got looking at him lying next to me, as if i’d taken everything i felt when i was twenty and had locked it up purely for the sake that i didn’t want to feel it because feeling it meant i had to acknowledge my loss — that feeling, out of the box and stretching its arms and then suddenly seeing who was there and flinging itself at him — as if to say, oh, YOU, i’m so happy you’re here. i had forgotten how much i liked him, how much i loved him, because some younger part of me had refused to remember. and now i was here, on the other side of it, lying in bed and looking into his eyes with both my twenty-five-year old and twenty-year-old selves’ hearts brimming with joy. and wasn’t, in the sense that i was different, older and wiser and this time fully aware of just how rare this was. i had never had a best friend like him, not since we were kids, and anyone i had dated or fallen for were always not the kind of people i wanted in my life for any other reason (which is usually a good sign that you shouldn’t be dating those people).

it was different because we were different. he was different, more serious now, or at least more solemn, and he looked me in the eyes when i was straddling him and he swore with surprising frequency that this was it. it hadn’t worked with anyone else, couldn’t have worked with anyone else, he told me, because some part of him had always been waiting for this.

i was like a cat, stuck, purring and purring and purring and absolutely smug in my happiness. i had gotten what i wanted after all, and the reason it hadn’t worked the first time, we both exclaimed in earnest, was because we couldn’t have made it work back then — we had to grow, had to make other mistakes, had to come together down the road because we hadn’t been ready and the universe or fate or some wiser self inside of us had known if we did it then we’d fuck it up and we were supposed to do it properly. i was in love, the kind of love i had always secretly longed for but would have never been able to admit how much i wanted it. and because we had suffered, and because we had grown up, and because the universe had brought us back together somehow, i was convinced that it was mine to keep.

he said it first, on the fourth day he was here. we were talking about his ex, the one he had started dating when he and i had been best friends, and i was teasing him about the fact she’d hated that we talked and he had sworn up and down it was never going to be like that. “yeah,” he said, his arms around me in a bowling alley, “i should call her up and be like hey dude! remember joelle? turns out i was in love with them this entire time!”

it just worked, miraculously. he was the first person i had ever felt completely safe with, and because we had waited so long we were so, so careful with each other. we were slow and we were gentle and we were sweet. i have never been connected with someone like that, have never received a gift so clearly chosen by the universe and placed directly in my arms, and i was awestruck the entire time, unable to believe he was here and he was mine and i got to be his.

i felt like the luckiest bitch this side of the mississippi. i spent most of his visit just staring at him, seven years of longing distilled into one week. and all the things that made it impossible for me to trust anyone else made it possible for me to trust him. we both knew what it was like to leave your body even while you’re in it, both knew what it was like to be wracked with guilt or to not ever be present in the moment at all, to not be capable of it; both lived life with a distinctly barbed wire between the things our bodies was doing — talking, laughing, kissing, fucking — and the things we actually felt. and what had been a liability with everybody else became a gift with him. i brought him back when he went missing. he touched my face when i was getting ready to flee.

i don’t think i had ever been one hundred percent present with someone before that week, stuck. it was literally the best and truest thing i’d ever felt. he brought me into the present when i started to leave, and he helped me find my body, helped me climb into it like an old robe you haven’t worn in forever, like something you’d forgotten how much you loved to wear and would now keep close and hold tight so you wouldn’t lose it again. i’ll never forget the night i asked him to be rough with me, some stupid roleplay or brat shit, and he stopped me and told me no. “i don’t think it’s good for you,” he told me slowly. “you don’t ever feel good afterward.”

it was true; i wasn’t good at any of that sexy stuff, wasn’t good at anything that wasn’t just me and him, right there, barely speaking, so silent and still and alive that i felt like i was in a dream. that didn’t mean i didn’t know how to do the other stuff — i did. i had perfected the role of performing for the male gaze, becoming nothing more than an empty naked body that made all the appropriate noises and arched at all the appropriate moments and never once asked for what they wanted or said stop. and always, no matter who i was with or how i tried not to, i could not stop myself from doing this, could not be present or vocal enough to have it unfold any other way. and always at the end i felt dazed, and hollow, to the point where i couldn’t even answer simple questions.

but he wouldn’t let me, not with him. he flat out told me no. and that’s what love is: to risk someone being mad, or upset, and refusing to give them the knife with which to cut themselves.

do you know what it’s like, stuck, to go almost twenty-six years without someone ever loving you enough to stop you?

and then i lost him.

i never got an explanation, stuck. i never received closure, or an apology for what had happened, nothing that even acknowledged that it had happened. the texts got less frequent, the bits of conversation more worrying, and while i sat in the same room he had just sat in with me he was losing it; and then he was gone and i was in love and i didn’t believe he was gone. this happened in the month of march, stuck, and it was over by april. but i didn’t even start to mourn until august, because until then i did not believe it was over. it wasn’t even that i didn’t believe it was over; it was that i knew, or thought i knew, in this sort of certainty that i had never felt for anything before, that there was more. and i am not the kind of person who deals in certainty, stuck. i dwell in ambiguity. i’ll pick a fight over the color of the sky just because we might be wrong about it. i’m flighty, and impossible to pin down, and always in some mood or another. i am not an easy person to build a life with. i am not the kind of person who just knows. but i did. i knew, the same way i knew my eyes were blue or that the crow tattoo on my arm was there, that we would be together. i struggle to write this because it’s hard to convey just how deeply i believed it. it wasn’t even a belief, from where i sat. it was something i knew, in the core of my being, in every atom of my fickle, flighty body. and then it turned out, in the sort of o. henrian twist that is much more fun to write than live, that i was wrong.

but these are just stories.

there are so many layers to grief, stuck. so many different tangled threads you have to gently try to pull apart. of course you feel stuck. you’ve only even begun to unthread the things you’re grieving. of course you’re not over it yet. of course you don’t know what you’re doing. nobody does.

what i can tell you is that you cannot live as if you are waiting for it to be done. i can’t tell you whether or not you’ll eventually reconcile or not; nobody can. but you can’t bet on it, even if you think or hope or pray it will happen. you cannot place your life on this thing that may or may not happen, and not because it won’t; but because you are here, now, and you have to live here, now. and if you put all your hope and love onto a hypothetical future that you may or may not get, you will let your whole life pass you by before you realize you are living. you have to live as if it isn’t important.

because it isn’t important, in a way, whether or not he comes back. i know you want him to; i know your heart is aching. i speak the language of the lovesick very well. i write love poems, for god’s sake. i get it. but you cannot make this relationship the axis around which your future turns.

there is no such thing as getting over it, stuck. you can only get through it. it will take time, and you aren’t guaranteed the ending that you think you want, but you are guaranteed an ending. maybe this grief will be with you in some form forever, maybe you’ll never meet anyone who can take his place. i’m not going to lie to you and tell you you will. i’m not going to tell you that there is someone even better around the corner, or that there is someone for everyone, or that he’ll see the error of his ways and look longingly back on the time you spent together. i don’t know him. you don’t know him, not anymore at least, not entirely. and don’t get me wrong, he might come back! he might drive the whole way to your door to confess his love for you, and you’ll hear a knock on a random wednesday several months from now, and you’ll think, that’s weird, i’m not expecting anyone right now, and to the door you will go. and you will pause in front of the door because suddenly you are given some strange deep knowing about what is about to unfold. and then you will touch the handle, and you will feel a jolt of electricity that goes through your every layer. maybe! it’s not technically impossible for these things to happen. i once drove six hours to sacramento to ask for a second chance with an ex boyfriend of mine, because i am a romantic and i believe in love everlasting and also i was manic at the time. (“second” is also a bit of a misnomer; a more accurate number would be in the range of eight or nine.) but you cannot bet on it and you cannot live with your life on pause in the meantime. i will not let you.

i know you are wracked by grief. i know you cannot see or even fathom where to find a hint of land. there are no seagulls overhead. there is no boat, or people, or anything anywhere that indicates that this is not it. but you cannot wait for someone who may never come back.

i’m not telling you to get over it. in fact, i would recommend leaning into it even harder. because i think something that a lot of us do, especially those of us who grew up in emotionally unsafe households, is think our way through our feelings instead of actually feeling them. you can know you’re in grief and read the entire grief manual and dutifully acknowledge your thoughts every time they come up, but that’s not the same as actually feeling it. most of what you are identifying as your feelings are not even emotions: they are your thoughts. you are in grief, so your brain says “grief,” but since you cannot actually feel anything in your body you only have your mind to fight with. and so you spend every day in the ring with these thoughts, and you feel horrible because it is horrible, and also because humans are not supposed to fight with themselves all day, and also you have not actually grieved the way you need to grieve. the pain you feel is the pain of being locked in mortal combat with yourself. but you’re not actually grieving if you’re just intellectualizing what you’re feeling, and the entire time you’re in your head your emotions are clawing at the gate to be let in.

here’s another story for you. when i realized i was wrong — when i realized that the thing i thought i knew i did not know at all — i don’t think i felt anything for four or five months. i couldn’t feel it, couldn’t even begin to work my way through it,and so i just floated. i had booked a one way ticket to spain for that august, and because it was paid for and i didn’t think it could get any worse than it already was, i went. i would not recommend being alone on the opposite side of the world from everyone you love when you have just had your heart eviscerated. i would probably recommend finding a therapist, or two, and then spending every waking minute that you can with people who are good for you and gentle with your feelings. i would suggest staying home, and wearing clothes that are not only physically comfortable but also make you feel inexplicably safe, and then i would suggest watching pride and prejudice (2006) and sobbing every last bit of hurt out of you. and that is how you will begin to rebuild the sense of safety and trust that you have lost, when you’re in the stage that you still can’t see straight or think clearly: you need to make yourself safe, and you need to only let people in who will keep you safe too. your priority is taking care of yourself right now. when you have spent the majority of your life feeling not safe, and then you briefly do feel safe, and then you lose this sense of safety, it is not a good idea to go insert yourself into unsafe situations. stay home. cry it out. don’t worry about what’s going on in the outside world.

what i did, however, was fly to spain and get drunk and wander from bordeaux to budapest without ever experiencing my body in real time. i kissed other boys, and i kissed other girls, because that’s what you’re supposed to do, right?, and i smoked too many cigarettes and i sulked my way through mostof western civilization, and then i just sort of chucked my heart into a meat grinder because it was already broken and at my core i am unfortunately a masochist.

in other words i put myself into a lot of very, very bad situations, and instead of understanding that i was not “getting over it” because i was both avoiding it and using it as the rope to hang myself with, i just kept judging myself for not being done mourning already. and since i could not access my real emotions, i could also not access the real crux of the situation: i did not love myself enough to protect myself, which was funny because if you’d asked me before the breakup if i did i would have thought i’d already learned to do so. and so after six months of feeling like nothing was real, and wandering from place to place without taking in anything i was seeing, i came home, and suddenly everything was very, very real.

i tell you this because grief is many-tiered and many-faced, and when you let your grief be felt you are going to feel like you are dying. but you are not dying, and in fact for you to keep living you need to feel this. and so you will cry, for all the million reasons a person can cry, and eventually you will feel as if you are beginning to be okay again.

and so after nine or ten months of not feeling it i cried. i cried for the future. i cried for the past. i cried for myself, and my younger self, and my even younger self, and my self from that march who was just so, so hopeful. i cried because i didn’t understand what had happened, and i cried because what had happened was actually perfectly simple, it just again didn’t align with the reality i wanted to be living in. i cried because it had taken me twenty five years to fall in love with someone and for every day of those first twenty five years i had wanted it, longed for it with a fierceness that to this day takes my breath away. i cried because i only got a week of it, or ten days if we’re being exact, and everybody else got more. i cried because i had stood in front of a picasso for the first time and some small part of me had just wanted to be dead already. i cried because i could not hate him, and i thought if i could hate him just a little then i could get over it easier, and i cried because even though i could not muster even an ounce of hatred for him, i apparently had an entire reservoir of hatred for myself. i cried because my cat who never liked anyone had liked him, and he had liked my cat, and now i couldn’t trust my cat. i cried because i was hurting, and i wanted to not hurt, and because i had been wrong. i cried because i had hope, still, after all of this, and no matter what i did i could not kill the hope completely. i cried because, in november, i had some let german guy fuck me, over and over and over again, despite the fact i didn’t want to, despite the fact i had said no, because i didn’t know what else to do and i was so exhausted and full of despair that it felt easier to just let him do it than to make him stop. i cried because i didn’t push him off, and i cried because i was somewhere i’d never been and i hadn’t slept and the idea of somehow packing my things and lugging my broken backpack to the outside world and navigating berlin in the middle of the night and finding a new place to stay in a city i had never been to and where i didn’t speak a word of the language had felt impossible. i cried because my backpack was broken, and i cried because last march he had told me, so casually and matter-of-factly that i had never thought twice about it before, that he would take my car to the mechanic to figure out what was going on with the wheel the next time he was here. i cried because i had trusted him, and i cried because i had trusted myself to trust him, and i cried because i didn’t know who i was or what i was going to do if i couldn’t trust myself.

because that is the thing about trauma, and especially childhood trauma, especially especially the repeated and warped and exponential kind. you are too young, when you are a child, to understand that the things happening to you have nothing to do with you, or that it’s not supposed to happen.

when i was five or six — possibly kindergarten, but definitely before the end of first grade — a member of my family began molesting me. and then the man who was molesting me told me that if i told anyone at school about what was happening i would cause him and his wife to get a divorce and then they would both go to hell because divorce was a sin. and so my molester asked me if i wanted to be the reason him and his wife both went to hell forever and i shook my head very hard that i did not want to. so i did not speak up, and i did not let anyone on the outside know, because if i did i would rip apart my family and it was my job to be a good girl and make sure nothing bad happened to anyone else. so i carried that weight, and i didn’t tell anyone, and i didn’t even fully face it until i was twenty-five and in a psychiatric hospital and my therapist told me it never should have happened, and you should have been removed from your family the minute it did, and then i cried and cried and cried with the wild abandon of a hurting five-year-old because never, in my whole time on this earth, had anyone directly told me that i deserved what i had always secretly hoped i did.

i hated myself, stuck. i hated myself so fucking much for so many years that i did not even realize it was self hatred until i was twenty-three or twenty-four. i hated myself and so i did things that gave me more reasons to hate myself and which confirmed my already existing hatred, because we are simple creatures and at the end of the day we like to stay where we are comfortable.

when i tell you that the fact that i can love myself today is nothing short of a miracle, i am not exaggerating. and that is why it hurt so badly to lose what i lost — not just because i felt totally protected for the first time in my life, not just because i knew i might never feel that safe again, but because i had spent my entire adult life learning to be nicer to myself and actively reversing all the self loathing that i had defaulted to on autopilot, and then i went and got my heart ran through and i couldn’t trust myself to love anyone anymore. i had done everything i was supposed to do. i was on the right meds. i was doing inner child work. i was finally happy with myself and my body and the direction my life was going. and i still got my shit rocked.

the trust was the hardest thing to lose, because it was the thing i had worked the hardest to gain in the first place. it had taken me years to trust that i could be given the reigns to my own life and not run it off a cliff, because every day growing up i had heard that i was not special and i was not as smart as i thought i was and one day i would learn exactly how fucked i was, and i had done everything that anyone has ever suggested to anyone because i knew i had to trust myself or i would fucking die. i had learned to do yoga, and had committed to being celibate, and had tried to commit to someone, or something, or just the idea that i wouldn’t kill myself one day. i did somatic therapy. i did trauma therapy. i did cbt and group cbt and drug counseling and rehab, and when it got too bad i called the ambulance on myself and said “hello, i need someone to come pick me up because i just tried to kill myself and i do not want to die.” i had learned to read tarot and how to read tea leaves and how to stand on my head. i don’t want to say that none of it mattered, because of course it did, but i couldn’t actually trust myself until i had proven myself a trustworthy person. just going to yoga and journaling and going on long hikes didn’t do anything. i had to become a person i could trust, and that meant becoming a person who did not hurt and betray me. and that took almost everything i had.

and then, of course, because i’ve already spoiled the ending, i did learn to trust myself. i stopped having sex with anyone because i was only hooking up with people as a form of self harm, and i took my meds every single day, and i was celibate, from twenty-two to twenty three, then from twenty five to nearly twenty six, and now again since i’ve been home. and then i lost the thing i thought was mine and the entire foundation of my life crumbled.

when you lose someone you have trusted, and your life depends on whether or not you can trust yourself, it feels like you’ve broken your own trust. i didn’t understand how if i knew, deeper and more real than i’d ever known anything else, that this was right and this was good and this was mine — finally, exhilaratingly, securely mine — i didn’t know how, in the future, i could trust myself to know what was real and what was not because i had been so fundamentally wrong about something so simple as love. and this was not a small thing to be wrong about — this knocked me out of orbit completely. i had no idea how to go back to my day-to-day life because i no longer had a day-to-day life: there was me, and there was my grief, and a giant hole where my future had folded, and echoing constantly in my head and in my body was just the question why, why, why, why, why.

and the grief just kept coming. i was so full of rage that i would start sobbing in my car through a clenched jaw because i could not understand what the fuck i had done to deserve this. i didn’t blame him, or even feel angry toward him; i felt infuriatingly, mind-explodingly angry at the universe for giving me something i had wanted my whole life and then taking it away. and it had happened, of course, because when the world turns it eyes on you you had best believe it’s going to see all of you — it had happened just when i thought it wouldn’t. i was supposed to be happy. i had finally, finally reached the the part of my life that was going to be characterized by love and healing instead of suffering. it was supposed to be my year! it was supposed to be my turn to be relax and lay in the sun! i was healthy! i was in therapy! i was practicing celibacy and doing inner child work and focusing on myself! and then the thing i did not want to happen happened and i felt like i was being punished by god.

and i am sorry that i cannot tell you why this is happening to you, but the truth is i don’t know why. i don’t know why, stuck. i just don’t. and i know now, in my own odyssey through self loathing, that it’s not important why it happened. what’s important is that i can trust myself, and live with myself, and that is what is important for you, too. and that is why you have to begin again.

i don’t mean begin again as in going on dates or trying to find someone to fill the void. i think that would (probably) be much more harmful than helpful. what i mean is you have to begin living again. you are not doing yourself any favors living in this limbo land you have constructed, between actually feeling your grief and just obsessing over what might have been or what might be. your grief is located in your body, in the same place all your other grief is stored, and just thinking about the fact it exists or the fact that it’s so big isn’t going to do anything to move it out of you. there is no analyzing your thoughts to inner peace, because this isn’t about your mind. this is about your body.

your grief lives in your body because that is where all your trauma lives. and so of course you are gutted by this. of course the fact you could feel safe at all with anyone in that way was nothing short of a miracle. i’m sure it felt redemptive. i’m sure it was everything you’ve ever dreamed of and more. and i know you do not want to be in your body, because when you were in it and you were with him and you felt safe it turned out you were not. and so why would you want to go back into your body when going there has caused you nothing but pain? but i am telling you you need to. you need to return to your body. because regardless of anything else that has happened in your life you have spent too much of it stuck inside your head and terrified of all the things that make life worth living. and you have also spent too much of your life fighting for your right to exist and for some sort of truce between your body and your brain and your past to just throw in the towel and retreat like a hermit crab back inside your shell to remain forevermore. i will not allow you to give up the work you have done toward claiming your body back from the people who exploited it. i know you feel like you can’t trust yourself, and that your body and intuition and heart and clit have all betrayed you. i know you are terrified. i know you are heartbroken. and i know you want, more than anything, more than you even want to breathe some days, that this will turn out okay. but i will not allow you lock the doors and pull down the blinds and go back to living detached from everything that is real and hiding safely behind your thoughts. i will not. because i love you, and i know you are scared, and i will not give you the knife with which to hurt yourself.

you belong here, in the physical, in the pain and the sorrow and the song and the light and the joy and the ecstasy and the longing and the aches and the stretching and the laughter and the rage and the waves. that is where you have to live your life, because that is what childhood sexual abuse tries to rob you of. and you are not going to live your life willingly throwing away all the things that your childhood abusers tried to block you from having in the first place.

and because we are being honest, and because you have come to me for something like the truth, i will tell you one more truth about your situation: if you had actually been ready for a relationship, a healthy one, a worthwhile one, then losing this would not have almost killed you.

this is your job on earth: to understand yourself and to do your best to build patterns that support your truth instead of pit you against it. i know losing your lover feels like a betrayal. i know it feels like your fault. but the real betrayal would be if you abandoned yourself now. you have a body, whether you like it or not, which right now i know is not. but you do exist there. you do have one. you are still in your pinky toe and your belly button and your left earlobe, even if you refuse to allow yourself to feel yourself there. i need you to go there, stuck. i need you to go into your grief, to go into your body, to go into the map you keep of yourself. i need you to get on the yoga mat and come back to yourself, because that is the only thing that will dislodge the grief stuck in your windpipe and making it feel impossible to breathe. even if you don’t actually do any yoga. just fucking sit there. roll your mat out and put your ass into criss cross applesauce and breathe. do anything that puts you back in yourself, because you need to rebuild the sense of trust between yourself and the world, and that starts with relearning to trust yourself. i know it’s hard. i know you are hurting and your grief is big and you don’t know what to even do. but you are bigger. you are the home your grief has come to visit, and if it managed to come inside it must be smaller than the house. you are the home of your grief and you are the home of your joy, and your dignity, and your soft small kindergarten self. you are doing this for her. you are doing this for yourself. there is no other choice. you’ve made it this far without letting life turn you hard. you have remained open and gentle and capable of love and loving, and i need you to believe me that it is a huge achievement and an even huger privilege to have carried hope and possibility and lightness for so long.

love may not always win, but it does persist. love is you. you are the embodiment of love and to expect it from others is, at best, a shot in the dark. i wish i could tell you you would get what you wanted, that there is no conceivable universe in which you could not be reunited with your lover. but i won’t tell you that. i will not do you, or myself, or any of the other formerly abused children reading this the disservice of lying to you now. go find an instagram witch who says that they can teach you to make any man want you. go on youtube and let some grifter teach you to manifest the man of your dreams if that’s what you want to be told. but you know you don’t want an empty promise, and you know you need something solid. that something is you. you are here, even if you are changed or worse or better for it.

and however you feel now i promise you this: on the other side of your grief, you will find the love that led you there. that is what it is to heal: to go full circle through hatred and rage and shame and come back home to loving. that is where i exist now, some of the time at least, when i manage to let myself rest and i can sit still and be here with my roadkill little heart. but then of course i embark on the same journey again, round and round and round again, because grief is not linear and healing is not linear and time is not linear. there is no finish line because there is no finish. you loved someone, deeper and more honestly than you’ve ever loved anyone else, and you will always carry a part of that with you. do not let anyone tell you that that is not a massive reward. do not let anyone tell you that is not a gift.

but you’re the one who has to live with you, babe. you’re the one who has to build that trust and prove to yourself you can keep yourself safe. and that doesn’t mean that you have to keep yourself safe from the outside world, although of course that is part of it as well. i mean you have to keep yourself safe from your worst impulses, from the voices in your head that were planted there early on and have never really let fully go, the critics and the cynics and the straight up cruel. you have to be gentle with yourself, and give yourself time, and fight against the impulse to self destruct, whether through sex or self harm or drinking or numbness. because it is not you versus your ex or you versus the universe or you versus the world. it is you versus yourself, the same it’s always been, and the only way to win is to take out the versus from that sentence and make it just you and yourself. there is no winning. there is no satisfying conclusion to the quest for self annihilation, whether the self you’re set on destroying is the one that dared to trust or the one that self destructs. you have to gather all your selves and keep them in your heart, and you have to go in to your body and greet them there. that is the only way. that has always been the only way. and if your friends don’t get it — if they want you to move on or forget about it or squash out the love you had for him — you don’t have to talk to them about it anymore. they are not comfortable being confronted by your grief, and that’s okay. it’s your grief. stop bringing it up around them and go deeper into your body where it lives. find the people who are safe to talk to, who will let you rage and shine and burn at the pace you feel you need to; find the people who make you feel like you are not required to explain yourself to anyone, just like you are not required to “get over it” or indulge in some revisionist history and say you hate him. it’s okay that you don’t hate him. just remember also to not hate yourself.

love is not a zero sum game. you did not lose anything. i know it feels like you did, and i guess that in this timeline you did. but let me tell you something else, one more story from my own experience:

i lost the thing i thought i wouldn’t lose, and then i went blind with grief. i did not want to feel it. i did not allow myself to feel it. and the people in my life who were only in my life to take from me also did not want me to feel it. because if i felt it, if i focused on myself and my aching hurting heart, then i would not be very useful to them. if you are the type of person who would start your own unpaid advice column, it is probably because you are more supportive than you know; and if you are more supportive than you know, and you are also traumatized, and you spent most of your life feeling like you had to earn your space on this planet and your right to exist, then you will probably also let people walk all over you, in a manner of speaking.

but the beauty of this breakup, even though i’m sure to everyone else it looked like willful delusion, was that i did not believe he was bad. i knew him. he was my friend for seven years, and my best friend for part of that. and then i looked into his soul, and he looked into mine, and i will never be the same because of that. and i believed, despite any evidence to the contrary, that he was good. because i had trusted him, and i had loved him, and i have spent my entire adult life trying to build trust with myself. he has to be good, because if he was not good i would not have loved him the way i did. that is my truth, whatever anyone else says. and when i affirm my truth out loud, when i write that sentence out and know it will be read by god knows who and interpreted in who knows what manner and i still commit to writing it, that is how i love and trust myself again.

and the people in my life who did not actually want me to be happy were furious. i am a very useful friend to have around, because i am funny and i am nice and i will listen to all your problems and then not even really tell you any of mine. and i am fun to go adventure with, and i am charming, and i am beautiful, but i am not threatening because i never have good luck in love. i can’t even keep a boyfriend for a full month, let alone steal yours. besides, i’ve been celibate for the majority of the last six years. i’m basically broken in the sex department. so of course if i loved someone it would be horrible. it would upset the balance. i’m already funny and smart and creative and win poetry awards and can cook anything under the sun — who the fuck am i to also have a happy relationship? and so my friends who were not my friends told me i should hate him, and they told me i was delusional for thinking it was anything but some pathetic sad story, and they tried to nearly fold my seven-years-in-the-making broken heart into a package wrapped by a simple one or two sentence explanation that would then enable me to put the package away and never examine what lay within it and also return my full time attention to being their friend and taking care of them and letting them take from me.

but here’s the thing about really knowing yourself: i knew what i felt. and i knew what i had felt. and i would not allow anyone to tell me otherwise. and i believe in his goodness, too, so much so that when certain people tried to suggest he was not good, i turned my attention to these people and i peeled back the layers of exchange and i realized they were not what i wanted in a friend. i trusted that i was right, and i did not allow anyone to tell me otherwise, and whatever else that says about me i am free again.

loving him made me love myself. and when i go back to my body — when i return to that space that is mine and only mine — i feel that love. i’ve had to rebuild my trust, and accept things i didn’t want to accept, and i have hurt myself a lot in the process because i did not know how to integrate the hugeness of what i was feeling and what i know to be true into a body that does not deal well with contradiction. but when i finally returned to my body — when i allowed myself to feel that grief — i realized that i did not want to hurt myself any longer, emotionally or otherwise, which is what being in your body will always do, if you can outlast the initial bursts of pain. and so i set boundaries, and i banished from my heart and from my life all the guys i’d met in europe who had been anything but perfectly kind and perfectly gentle to me, and i deleted the dating apps off my phone because i knew i had no business dating anyone and i was only going on them for distraction; and i primal screamed in the car and i wrapped my arms around myself while i cried and i told my story out loud to the moon because i didn’t have anyone else to talk to. and i felt rage and grief and sorrow and also the exquisite stunning beauty of having loved someone like that. and no one can take that from me, just like no one can take them from you. and then do you know what i did? i unrolled my goddamn yoga mat for the first time in a month and i sat down and i breathed, into my belly and back out again, transformed.

you will love people that you will lose. but that love will still save you in the end.

i wish you way more than luck.

jojo

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