I’m in my mid 30s and starting over. Not in a fresh start, clean slate kind of way. I left my marriage. I’m walking away from a house I can’t afford. I’m moving into transitional housing with my kids, no car, no job, no savings, and no clear plan.
This isn’t a glow up. It’s a slow unraveling that’s been happening for years.
There were so many weeks. So many months. So much emotional torment. I was walking on eggshells in my own home, constantly adjusting myself, trying to avoid landmines that weren’t always visible. I learned about grey rocking not from curiosity but from necessity. I read How to Stop Walking on Eggshells like it was a manual for how to survive a relationship. I found a medication prescriber. I started therapy. Then I started going twice a week, just to function. Just to keep from completely disappearing inside of what my life had become.
I stayed after the financial cutoff, even when it made things unbearable. I tried to respect it as a decision. I convinced myself it wasn’t meant to be cruel. I told myself it would pass, that it didn’t mean what it felt like. But it kept getting worse. And still I stayed.
At one point I had a restraining order. I cancelled it. Not because things were fine, because they weren’t, but because I thought maybe it would be the wake up call he needed. Maybe if I showed him grace, if I gave him one more chance, he’d stop. Maybe things could go back to okay. That was the version of him I still wanted to believe existed.
He never came back. The man I married at 24, passionate, excited, hardworking, full of big dreams, disappeared somewhere along the way. And in his place was someone paranoid, controlling, absent. I don’t know when it changed. I just know I kept waiting for the version I loved to return.
He stopped being a partner. He kept making reckless choices, and I kept cleaning them up until I couldn’t anymore.
And still, I don’t fully hate him. I catch myself rewriting things in my head. Maybe he was scared. Maybe he meant well. I don’t do it to protect him. I do it to survive the truth, that someone I trusted with my whole life could stand by and let me drown.
Starting over like this means packing up your life while he naps. Calling shelters. Filling out forms that ask if you’re fleeing abuse and not knowing how to answer. Sitting across from him in court and trying not to come undone. Showing up to appointments with kids who deserve better and pretending you’re not breaking in front of them.
People call me strong. I don’t feel strong. I feel tired. I feel like I held on too long to someone who let go of me a long time ago. I’m not healing. I’m not rebuilding. Not yet. I’m just done.
I still care about pieces of him. I still don’t know how we got here. And I’m still trying to untangle everything I tried so hard to hold together.
I’m doing this for myself and for my kids, but in a way, I’m doing it for him too. I want to be free, and I want him to be free to figure out who he really is when he’s not hurting people. As much as he’s broken me, I still want him to succeed. I want him to get better. I want him to be someone our kids can look up to without fear or confusion. And I want the same for me. I want to succeed. I want to heal. I want our kids to have two strong, stable, independent parents who don’t live in conflict or chaos. It’s just clear now, painfully and permanently clear, that him and I cannot be together. Whatever partnership I hoped for, whatever safety or kindness I needed from him, just isn’t something we were ever going to have.
I do hope we co parent well. I have low expectations, but I do have hope. Because whatever happens next, even if it’s hard, even if it’s messy, it has to be better than the reality we were all surviving inside of for so long.
This isn’t a beginning. It’s the long overdue end of something that broke me in slow motion.
