I came from a broken home and somehow grew up only to build another one with my own bare hands. That’s the part nobody understands. I wasn’t trying to destroy love — I was trying to finally feel safe inside of it. When I was six months pregnant, terrified and emotionally alone, I came to you softly and told you I felt like we were becoming roommates instead of lovers. I wasn’t attacking you. I was begging for connection. Instead of pulling me closer, you looked at me and said, “If I’m so bad, why are you with me? Go be with your ex.” That should’ve been the moment I left. But I stayed because I loved you more than I loved myself. Two days after giving birth to our son, my stomach freshly cut open from a C-section, I woke you up crying and asked if you could help me put my underwear and socks on because I physically couldn’t bend. You got angry and told me to do it myself. I remember crying and walking to the other room where my mother was holding our newborn son, begging her to help me because the man I loved wouldn’t. That pain never left me. So when our second baby came, I stopped asking you for help completely. I swallowed pain pill after pain pill just to survive recovery because I’d rather suffer in silence than feel like a burden again. That’s how unwanted you made me feel during the most vulnerable moments of my life. And somehow I’m the “crazy” one. You labeled me manipulative, narcissistic, toxic, insane. But people don’t wake up broken overnight. I wasn’t “crazy” when you met me, right? None of your exes were “crazy” when you met them either. Funny how every woman only becomes crazy after loving you. Maybe it’s not insanity. Maybe it’s what emotional inconsistency, abandonment, and manipulation does to someone over time. You wore the mask of a calm, understanding man in the beginning. Someone safe. But around six months in, the mask slipped. Every feeling I had became an attack against you. Every tear became manipulation. Every reaction became proof I was unstable instead of proof I was emotionally drowning. Meanwhile your mother was texting you, “She’s nuts. The kids are going to pay the price. I wish you could Baker Act her.” What kind of shit is that? As if postpartum psychosis wasn’t real just because she never experienced it herself. Instead, you let outside voices poison our home while I fought for my sanity. Now our children are growing up apart, missing the family I fought so hard to keep together because nobody wanted to look deeper than my reactions. I know I’m not innocent. Trauma made me hard to love at times. But I’m done carrying the entire blame for a relationship that broke both of us. You are the villain in my story. Not because you screamed the loudest… but because you watched me drown while convincing everyone I was doing it to myself.
