I had a moment this week where I realized I haven’t still even begun to unpack the hurt that being with you caused me. I pulled open my notes on my computer to write up a draft letter for my mom’s job tonight and since it hadn’t been opened in a while, the most recent note that came up on my screen was this one that I am going to share below. This was a letter I wrote to you and read to you out loud, sobbing so hard I could barely get the words out, sitting across from you, in a hightop chair at Grottos. You acted like this letter meant something to you, but by the end of it, you told me you refused to change the behavior, and drove away. I will never forget the devastation I felt, and I will never forget the memories that this letter holds.
I am posting this because this letter made me cry again tonight almost exactly a year later. These feelings and moments are still buried inside me, and I need to be more intentional about getting them out.

To you:

I realize that I haven’t felt safe or protected in a very long time. 

It started slowly. 

When I kept finding out that you weren’t honest with me, it built up a lot of insecurities in me. I worried constantly. I found myself stuck in cycles of looking through your phone or just rehearsing horrible scenarios. That made me fearful, which is an unsafe emotion. 

Then when I started to notice a consistent pattern of you being unable to show compassion, it again made me insecure, wondering what was so wrong with me that I was so easily dismissed. It also confused me as I have not had the ability to genuinely not be affected by the person I love in pain. I started to develop anxiety before sharing my emotions with you, because if you lacked a response or dismissed them I could feel inside how much more painful it would be. 

Every time you shamed me or belittled me for my feelings it felt like I was unsafe to share my heart. 

I think when I started really actually feeling unsafe is when I found out you knew I was going to go to a hotel to meet someone. You were the only one who knew, you even told your best friend, but did nothing to even try and speak reason into me. I understand at the time you did not realize this was a manic episode, but it made me feel like I was not protected, even if I needed that protection from myself. That feeling of unsafe then deepened when you told me multiple times you would not prevent that if it happened again. That I should “know better”.

I felt unsafe when I found out you were watching the material you were. As a woman who has felt the fear of abuse and assault by a man and felt so powerless, and as someone who had been open about that fear and trauma with you, it alarmed me that that was what you were looking at for pleasure instead of feeling disgust.

I felt unsafe the night you got drunk and kept hitting me when I was begging you to stop and then cried myself to sleep while you slept, my face swollen.

The times where I have been hesitant to allow you to do something (for example sleeping over) bc you have made me feel like I was wrong for doing so, and you insisted you wanted to, to later have thrown in my face, made me feel like I couldn’t actually ever trust that your good deeds would not be used against me later. 

When you told me you were using me for sex, I felt unsafe. 

When you would use drugs with me all night, and berate me the next day for needing to slow down, or the money you lost, it felt confusing and like I couldn’t trust your choices to be real or not.  I started having the feeling of walking on eggshells. 

Your behavior to me since we’ve gotten back together had switched on and off from incredibly loving and caring to cold and distant. It leaves me feeling like I don’t know what’s coming. 

I started to feel uneasy when we would have a deep conversation about a respect or boundary issue between us and you would repeat the behavior and act like that never happened. It also threw me off and made me feel confused when in conversations you would go back and forth on your opinions so much that I never knew what was real. 

I even told you once it was alarming me that I felt like I did not know which one was the real you. 

You started shouting at me more. 

You started insulting me in ways you never had. 

The entire two months I waited for you I was filled with an insane amount of panic and anxiety because I never knew if you were actually coming back to me. You had told me you could see yourself falling in love with someone you were actively talking to, and that created so much fear of losing you that when you called me ladybug that day in the hospital I started crying to the point of hysteria. 

I have become so desperate for those in between, incredibly loving moments that are getting farther and farther away. And that worries me. It’s like I’m chasing that acceptance and love and willing to endure anything to get to it. 

When I found out you were selling **** I was afraid because of my family and the implications. 

Knowing you can lie to me so easily has caused fear to build up and always wonder if what you say is real. 

When I woke up with your hand inside me was the first time I recognized that I really felt physically unsafe. I couldn’t believe that was happening to me all over again by someone who had listened to the pain I had from that happening to me in my past. 

When you repeatedly broke up with me back to back I felt unsafe because you promised each time you wouldn’t leave me again. 

When you watched me completely crumble and then held me and patted my head after I agreed to your terms and to “just listen to what you said” and you said that you broke me and that’s what made you want to stay. I was afraid. But I could not leave. I needed you and I was so full of shame. 

You continued to escalate and get more aggressive and defensive and unkind to every remark I made no matter how hard I tried. 

Your behavior when you were drunk was unpredictable and when I tried to talk about it I ended up so broken that I was apologizing and you were accepting it. 

When I saw you brag to your friend that you fucked me during a seizure, that made me feel unsafe. 

When you watched me not even challenge my roommate and best friend on leaving because she was sick of me defending you and then you threatened and decided not to live with me and refused to even discuss it, made me feel unsafe for my future and my kids future. 

When I found out you were giving someone I cared for ******, I felt unsafe.

I have felt unsafe with the amount of people that know you deal hard drugs 

I have felt unsafe with the recklessness you show around new people with said drugs and money.

When you told me I did not actually hear what I heard. I felt unsafe. That level of manipulation frightened me. 

When you sat in the car today and finally validated what I was saying, made me feel like you were actually hearing me, for me to come back out and you immediately snap and yell at me that it was my fault, that I was self sabotaging, throw in my face the money you lent me, and say you didn’t mean what you said, just to then return back to the calm, remorseful you. 

That made me feel unsafe.

When you refused to give up drugs and repeatedly lied to me. When you took me on a drug run when I had almost a month of sobriety, when you took me inside of houses with people using when I was trying to stay sober. 

That made me feel unsafe. 

I still feel unsafe, with everyone, and everything around me. But I am starting to trust myself again, and that, in itself is more than I could have hoped for when I wrote this. Slow and steady.