Rock Bottom Was Only The Lobby

Tag: #HealthyRelationships

  • The Price of Becoming Someone New

    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.

  • Get Out of the Lobby: Why I Finally Stopped Letting Other People Rent Space in My Head

    Get Out of the Lobby: Why I Finally Stopped Letting Other People Rent Space in My Head

    Okay, let’s address the elephant in the room. I know my recent posts have been a deep dive into the “horror show”, especially that recent look into the generational trauma and the absolute, inherited madness that was running through my family tree way before I was ever born. I know I’ve been wading through some dark, inherited sludge lately.

    But I want to be crystal clear: this isn’t a tragedy. I’m not writing this to keep us stuck in the basement of our own histories. I’m writing this because the end of this story? It’s actually a really, really happy ending. I want you to stick around because, while I’ve had to walk through fire to get here, I’ve finally reached the part of the movie where the protagonist actually wins.

    You know that specific, arrogant little moment where you think, “Yes, finally! I have arrived! I have cracked the code of the universe! I am an enlightened being!”? And then, five minutes later, you find yourself staring at a wall wondering why you bought that weird blue cheese at the grocery store?

    Yeah. That’s my life. I live for those “aha” moments. But I’ve realized that right when I think I have it all figured out, the universe leans in and reminds me that I absolutely do not. And for the first time ever? I’m okay with that. I’ve learned a lot, and the tuition for this education was exorbitant. I paid the price. I’m talking full-market-value for my wisdom.

    The “Dumpster Fire” Era

    From 2015 to 2023, my life was essentially a low-budget horror film that had been doused in gasoline. After my husband Keith died, I found myself trapped in an abusive relationship, spiraling into a haze of drugs, just waiting for the curtain to close. And then, the universe pushed me further than I thought possible: I watched that partner take his own life right in front of me.

    That was the peak of the chaos. I felt like I was just waiting to die because everything else in my world had gone to absolute shit.

    The “Aha” Moment (That Didn’t Fix Everything)

    I didn’t always know what boundaries were. In fact, before I met Keith and his mother, Barbara, I thought a “boundary” was just a suggestion you ignored to keep people happy.

    I’ll never forget the day I got my first real taste of the truth. We were sitting there filling out disability paperwork for me, this huge, heavy, life-changing stuff, and my mom called. She demanded I stop everything to run her errands. I got off the phone and told Barbara and Keith I had to leave to do it. They just looked at me like I had three heads. “What the fuck are you talking about? We’re doing this for you right now, and this is important.”

    I was defensive. “But it’s my mother! I can’t tell her no!”

    I was wrong, and they were right. No was an option. But here is the raw truth: knowing that and doing that are two very different things. I didn’t become a boundary ninja overnight. Far from it. I stayed in that abusive relationship way too long. I let myself get taken advantage of; I was robbed; I had so much taken from me while I was still trying to figure out how to stand up for myself. I was out there in the trenches, just trying to survive without a roadmap. It wasn’t until after that final tragedy that the real, permanent shift finally took hold.

    The Rescue Mission & The Retraining

    Around the end of 2020, I started my real-life rescue mission. I saved my mother from my sister, who, let’s be real, is a certified nightmare. I did it because I needed a purpose, and I was ready to be a daughter again.

    But bringing Mom into my life required the ultimate boundary test. It took some serious retraining. I told her, “I will take care of you until the day you die, and I’m happy to do it. But it’s going to be with respect, love, and strict boundaries.”

    And do you know what? She listened. We healed 40 years of hurt and pain. I saw my mom, who had been depressed for as long as I could remember, actually become happy. It was my first real crack at holding a boundary, and I realized: boundaries aren’t there to push people away; they’re there to create a safe enough space for love to actually grow.

    The Great Pivot

    Then 2023 hit like a wrecking ball. I lost my dad, then my mom. I began noticing more and more how some of my friendships were one-sided. Then they imploded and I cut off contact. It wasn’t just friends I had to cut off anymore, I had to perform surgery on my own family tree. I cut off the toxic members, stopped letting them have a seat at my table, and stood in the wreckage of my old life, completely alone.

    But this time, instead of avoiding pain I did something revolutionary: I leaned in.

    The “Don’t Touch My Shit” Era

    Once I stopped letting the wrong people have a seat at my table, I became a person I didn’t even recognize.

    I was single for a while, and let me tell you: it was fucking fantastic. I discovered the absolute, intoxicating joy of sovereignty. I could do whatever I wanted. No one touched my shit, no one moved my shit, no one took my shit. I was in heaven.

    I realized everything I’d ever begged a partner, friend, or family member to give me, validation, help, fulfillment, I could just give to myself. The moment I stopped getting angry that they weren’t providing it and just started providing it for myself, the whole world opened up.

    The Real Payoff

    And here is the beautiful part of the plot twist: When you finally do the work, set the boundaries, and cultivate that self-love, dating hits different.

    I’ve spent a lifetime in weird, dysfunctional dynamics where one or both of us was fundamentally broken. But this is the first time I’ve ever been in a healthy exchange with another healthy adult. There is so much power in the “I don’t need you; I choose you” energy. I don’t need someone to save me, to complete me, or to fix me. I am already whole. Choosing to be with someone from that place of strength? It’s amazing. It is a completely different world.

    Ascending the Hotel

    I look at myself now, and I see that little girl who got her dreams crushed all those years ago. I scoop her up. I tell her, “It’s okay. I got you. I’ve always had you, and I always will.”

    I have my own back. I pick myself up off the floor, and I climb another level of this hotel.

    If you’re feeling lost, know this: you are not stuck in the lobby. The lobby is for waiting. The lobby is for people who think they need a receptionist to tell them where to go.

    I’m writing this because I don’t want you to have to wander in the dark as long as I did. I had to learn this in the trenches, the hard way. But I’m here to tell you that there is a way up. Find the stairs. I’m currently on the top floor, and honestly? The view is spectacular.