The Price of Becoming Someone New

People love to talk about healing like it’s some magical transformation.

You start setting boundaries.
You learn to love yourself.
You finally know your worth.

Cue the inspirational music and the Instagram quotes.

What they don’t tell you is that becoming a different person comes with a bill. And eventually, somebody has to pay it.

Usually, it’s you.

For most of my adult life, I was a professional people pleaser. Not because I was naturally kind, but because I was terrified of being abandoned. 

Those aren’t the same thing, even though they can look identical from the outside.

I spent years trying to earn love.

I made excuses for people who hurt me.

I stayed long after I should’ve left.

I believed loyalty meant enduring things that were slowly destroying me.

Looking back, I don’t think I had terrible luck with relationships.

I think I had terrible boundaries.

If someone gave me just enough attention to keep me hopeful, I’d build an entire future around the potential of who they could become instead of paying attention to who they actually were.

That habit cost me years.

Then there was Jason.

Most of you already know that story.

His death broke me in ways I didn’t know were possible. At the time, I thought losing him was one of the worst things that had ever happened to me.

Now I know something that would’ve sounded heartless back then.

His death also gave me a chance to save myself.

Not immediately.

I was still using at first.

I still tried to rescue everyone around me.

I still thought love was measured by how much pain you were willing to survive.

But eventually I got tired.

Tired of chaos.

Tired of fixing.

Tired of believing everyone else’s life was somehow my responsibility.

So I started changing.

Slowly.

I got clean.

I learned boundaries.

I learned that peace isn’t something another person gives you. It’s something you protect.

I stopped asking, “How do I keep this person from leaving?”

I started asking, “Why am I working so hard to keep someone who makes my life harder?”

That one question changed everything.

The universe, apparently not convinced I’d learned my lesson yet, introduced me to Robbie.

At first, Robbie was kind.

Helpful.

Funny.

He showed up during one of the hardest seasons of my life.

Jason had died.

COVID had turned the world upside down.

I’d finally gotten my own little townhouse after months of bouncing from place to place.

Then my mom moved in because she had Stage 4 COPD and needed me.

Life was…a lot.

Robbie started helping.

He’d walk to the liquor store and grocery store. (The morning Jason died, we had been fighting because he came home without my car. I never got it back.)

Help with my mom.

Stay over.

Somewhere along the way, friendship became something more.

For a while, I thought maybe this one would be different.

It wasn’t.

His anxiety became paranoia.

He was getting high. Too high. 

Then came the disappearing.

He’d take my car and vanish for hours, sometimes longer, and every single time it happened I could feel myself slipping back into a life I’d already fought so hard to escape.

I tried everything.

Forced him to go to rehab.

Sober living.

Second chances.

Third chances.

Probably a few chances nobody deserved.

Nothing stuck.

Eventually he was back on the streets.

Even then, I couldn’t completely shut the door.

I’d let him shower.

Sleep somewhere warm.

Get out of the weather.

Every time I hoped maybe this would be the day things changed.

Every time the same cycle came back around.

Paranoia.

Chaos.

Explosions.

One day he showed up again.

This time I put all of his belongings outside.

I told him to take what he wanted because whatever was left in the morning was going in the dumpster.

When he came back again, I spoke to him through my Ring camera instead of opening the door.

He lost it.

And for the first time in my life, I did something that would’ve been unthinkable in the family I grew up in.

I called the police.

Even typing those words still feels strange.

Where I come from, you don’t call the cops.

Ever.

But I had spent too many years sacrificing my own safety trying to save someone else.

I wasn’t doing it again.

That wasn’t cruelty.

That was a boundary.

There’s a difference.

Then came the hardest goodbye of all.

Not a boyfriend.

A friend.

Shawna.

We had been through so much together.

I loved her.

I still do.

But healing has a funny way of changing your address, and not everybody is willing to move with you.

Our conversations stayed centered around the same things they’d always been centered around.

Men.

Drama.

Surviving one crisis just long enough to make room for the next one.

Meanwhile, my entire life had become about protecting the peace I’d fought so hard to build.

Neither one of us was wrong.

We were just headed in different directions.

Sometimes people don’t leave your life because somebody did something awful.

Sometimes they leave because you’ve both become different people.

That’s a quieter kind of heartbreak.

But it’s heartbreak all the same.

People think healing is about adding things to your life.

Sometimes it’s about subtraction.

You lose relationships.

Versions of yourself.

Dreams you thought would happen.

The fantasy that if you just love someone enough, they’ll finally become who you need them to be.

The price of becoming someone new is saying goodbye to the life that kept the old version of you alive.

Would I pay that price again?

Without hesitation.

Because these days my life is quieter.

Healthier.

More peaceful than I ever thought it could be.

I don’t wake up wondering who I’m going to have to rescue today.

I don’t confuse chaos with passion anymore.

And I don’t apologize for protecting the woman I fought like hell to become.

She cost me too much.

I’m not giving her away ever again.