​If I do not embrace the crazy, constantly changing, ever evolving chaos that is my life, I know what the results are. They are dark, dismal, completely enveloping and will swallow me into a pit of despair. Sounds dramatic, I know… but that’s because it is. It does not take much for my mood to shift from feeling perfectly positive to feeling perfectly dreadful. It can be really exhausting.
 
During all of the years that I have been doing work on my personal growth, one of the most important things has been to recognize that those moments that start feeling so painful that they will actually end me this time are lying to me. They do not tell me the truth of my experience. The truth is, life is f*cking hard, man. Some of us, especially those who are highly sensitive and empathic, can take on such a heavy emotional load that it feels like too much to bear. And unlike some people, I do think we are given more than we can handle sometimes. In those particular moments, I allow myself to shut down and go into survival mode because that is the best I can do, and that is good enough. I do not feel shame anymore for just getting through the day. I heard someone say recently that if the best you have is 20% of yourself to give today, and you give 20%, you are actually giving 100%. I like that idea, because it stops me from entertaining the inner critic that falsely asserts I am never enough.
 
My therapist recently challenged me to practice what she called “microdosing positivity.” When something good happens to me, she asked that I make it a point to stop and acknowledge how that physically feels in my body. I have spent so many years focusing on what feeling bad is like that feeling good is actually far more unnerving. Like anything else, it takes practice. When the part of me that is my protector shows up to seemingly self-sabotage me, she asked me to try to learn to love and embrace it for what it is trying to do instead of becoming irritated and attempting to shut it down.
 
Recently I had an experience that felt so good, so wholesome, so aligned with my soul and my innermost hopes and desires. Naturally, my immediate reaction when I thought back to it was to activate the protector, who just knew that it could not possibly be as good as it felt. There had to be a catch. There was no way this was going to be meant for me, no way that it would stick around. And because the situation has present limitations that are outside of my control and cannot evolve into the things my heart wants, the protector started working overtime. It began erecting walls of steel to guard my fragile heart. It told me to completely discount the experience because the outcome cannot be what I want it to be. OF COURSE this was too good to be true. OF COURSE it would be nothing but another disappointment. I went from feeling the highest of highs to a full on dopamine crash. I could feel those walls getting higher and closing me in, just like they always do. I could not talk to anybody. I began to withdraw into the illusion of safety that is my insulated cocoon keeping me away from danger.
 
The thing is, that cocoon also keeps me away from experiencing what I really most desire – connection and intimacy. I have watched it happen over and over. I experience what feels like even the slightest hint of rejection, and that little child inside me who was so brutally abandoned and unloved latches on to the protector for dear life. My reaction to anything outside of my own expectations is often majorly disproportionate to the actual situation.
 
It was no different this time. When I communicated with the person who resurrected a part of me that I thought very well might be dead, and it was clear that there was some continued spiritual work and growth for both of us before we could be the versions of ourselves that both each other and the world deserved, it was very difficult for me to hear “not now” and interpret that to mean anything but “not ever.” When it comes to matters of the heart, I am not what I would describe as patient. I become almost like a child excited about a new toy – I want what I want, and I want it NOW. A very mature and spiritual reaction, I know. But that protector just wants to avoid the suffering that has kept some of the most beautiful parts of my soul hidden. I understand why it happens. I have spent a lot of my life hurting, and I want to avoid more suffering.
 
I also know that if I want another outcome for my life, I have to start taking different actions, and that includes in response to my own instinctive defense mechanisms. I took some time to feel sad, disappointed, and release my chokehold on the need for instantaneous results. I decided to try that microdosing of positivity my therapist told me about. I closed my eyes, placed my right hand over my heart, and brought myself back to that moment I would normally try to avoid for fear that it would forever disappear. I pictured the scene where it happened. I noticed all the details around me – the dim lighting in the room, the sheen emanating from the television, the softness of the blanket against my skin, and the warmth of a body so close to mine that I had not experienced in so long. I asked myself, what does this feel like? I recognized the fullness of that aching hole inside that rarely allows, or even recognizes the need for, any company. My stomach flipped and quivered against the butterfly wings circulating around its edges. The weight of anxiety that I wear like a cloak almost all of the time was lifted. And, much to my surprise, I did not feel any fear. I felt seen. I felt safe.
 
I have had many experiences since then that completely removed me from that safe place. Sometimes, I have been so far removed that I forgot the safe place existed for a time. But somewhere, buried though it might be, I know not just that it was still there - I know that it will always be there. No matter what happens or does not happen in the future in relation to this person, there is nothing that can change that moment that gives me full-body goose bumps.
 
Because I am not actually delusional (even if it feels like I can be at times), I do not believe that people are perfect. I do my best to no longer place people onto pedestals that will eventually crack and crumble beneath the weight of my expectations. I do believe, however, that moments can be perfect. And regardless of what comes next, no one can take those away from me except for me, if I allow them to self-destruct out of fear they will never return.  
 
I cannot count the number of times I have placed my hand over my bruised but healing heart in the past week, gazed downward or softly closed my eyes and drew that experience back in. Every single time I feel the outward edges of my lips curve up into a faint smile. The world gets lighter, my chest tingles and the flutters dance. That moment was perfect, and it was mine. Nothing can take it away from me. I imagine I will have many more like it in my life, but for now, I am grateful for it to be a reliable anchor in the unpredictable waters around me.
 
When the tides feel rocky and the ground shifts under my feet, I can always come home to my heart. There, I will always be safe.

​I no longer have to own sh*t that is not mine in order to make peace.
 
I have spent the majority of my life walking on eggshells. That is what happens when your primary caretaker is inconsistent – frequently angry, often disapproving, more likely than not unable to meet the simplest of emotional needs. As a child, I did not have the skill of discernment, so I did not know that when someone was unhappy, it was not automatically my fault. I internalized the outward expressions of negativity and frustration, and eventually this developed into the deepest of my core beliefs: that there was something inherently wrong with me. That I was a “bad” person. That I was an expensive inconvenience, and that I alone was the source of misery for those around me, particularly my mother.
 
This was not true. It was not fair for her to unload her own unprocessed emotional trauma onto me in such a way that I felt like I was at fault for her constant negativity. I do not think this was intentional, at least not always. This is what is referred to as intergenerational trauma, which is trauma that is passed from a survivor to their descendants. My mother’s own horrifically painful childhood left unhealed wounds that she projected onto me, which she probably absorbed from her caregivers, and on and on. Nonetheless, this was the reality of my formative years.
 
One of the most prevalent consequences of this experience was that I blamed myself for everything. When I got sober and we were talking about “owning our part” in the resentments we had formed in our lives, that was absolutely no problem for me. I frequently had a much harder time seeing fault in anyone else, and instead I took it all on. The result was that I hated myself from a very young age. I believed that the reason my parents fought and were so mean to each other was because they were unhappy that I was around and they did not want me. This is another very common experience for children who grow up with caregivers who display emotional inconsistency and immaturity – they take on the responsibility for the happiness of others, and believe if they just behave better, then the chaos and turmoil they are experiencing in their lives will stop.
 
For me, this manifested in many ways, but one of the most damaging was that I became a total perfectionist. As an undiagnosed neurodiverse child, school was very difficult for me. Because I learned how to mask my deficiencies and was otherwise able to “keep up” with extraordinary effort, it was not until I was 19 and in college that I was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, which remains highly underdiagnosed in females, particularly of my generation and older. I did not know why my brain did not seem to work like my brilliant sister’s. All I knew was that I felt “slow,” which often led to one of my most dreaded experiences – the look of disappointment on my mother’s face when I did not perform to her expectations. I cannot tell you the amount of stress and anxiety I put myself through to try and avoid seeing that expression.

​Some of my worst childhood memories involved not just my caregivers, but being on the receiving end of the cruelty of other kids who enjoyed finding reasons to poke fun at others. One of my earliest memories (which is not very early since I do not remember a lot of my childhood, which I have since learned is very common for people who experienced trauma at a young age) is when I was participating in an elementary school spelling bee. Up until that time, spelling was my favorite subject. It was one of those innate talents I had, which is consistent with my ongoing love affair with language and written expression. In order to prepare for the championship round and find out who would be going on to the district competition, we were given a packet of words to memorize that were potentially going to be asked.
 
I memorized every word on that list, which was divided up into different categories. I breezed through the early rounds and made it through to the finals. Excitement coursing through my veins, I was asked to spell the word “teal.” I froze. I remembered that this word was listed under the category of “birds,” not colors. I knew how the color teal was spelled, but was that the same as the way the bird was? An overwhelming wave of nausea engulfed me. I wanted to crawl out of my skin. I felt the eyes of my peers in the audience boring holes into my skin as the judges looked on. I knew I could not just keep sitting there, and it did not appear that the differentiation between the bird and the color, if there was any, was not going to make itself evident in that moment.
 
“T-E-A-L…” I paused. I later learned that as I stared at the ground, the judges started to lift up their green cards to indicate that I was correct, but I was so immersed in my own overthinking that I did not see them. I continued, “…E?”
 
The dreaded red cards flipped up in front of me. I recall hearing the faint voice of a judge saying “The correct spelling is T-E-A-L. You may step down and join the audience.”
 
My face and chest flushed an excruciating shade of blotchy red, as it always does when I feel any heightened emotions. I held my breath as I stood and walked down the five steps off of the stage. I could hear the snickering of my peers, and that short walk felt like a mile as I begged the tears stinging my lowered eyes to hold themselves in. I do not remember the rest of the spelling bee, who won, or how long it lasted. All I remember was the shame of failure that engulfed my entire body.
 
When it was over, we were sent out to recess. Kids, even the ones that are supposed to be your friends, can be cruel and I knew that I was going to be teased. Before I could get to the bathroom to hide, one of those “friends,” the ring leader of our group, approached me with a particularly satisfied look on her face. “So you didn’t know how to spell the color ‘teal,’ huh?” She snickered, as did her followers standing close behind.
 
“Well,” I stammered, “on the list we were given to study, ‘teal’ was listed under the category of birds, and I did not think that such a simple word would be on the list if it was not spelled differently than the color…”
 
Now, some of you are not going to be old enough for the upcoming reference, so I will explain. During the 1994 U.S. Figure Skating Championship, there was a scandal when it was discovered that Tonya Harding, an American figure skater, had hired someone to attack her rival Nancy Kerrigan during a training session. The assailant struck Nancy on the knee of her landing leg with a metal baton, in hopes of knocking her out of the competition so that Tonya could secure a spot on the Olympic team. The immediate aftermath of the attack was captured by the media and broadcast for months, with Nancy sobbing on the ground and yelling “Why me? Why me?” over and over. (Spoiler alert – Nancy was unable to complete the U.S. Championships, but she still secured a spot on the Olympic team and went on to win a silver medal, while Tonya finished eighth, later pleading guilty to hindering prosecution related to the attack and being forced to resign from the U.S. Figure Skating Association. Karma, people.)
 
I realize that the point of including this anecdote is not immediately apparent, so here it is. This scandal was going on at the same time of the spelling bee. My friends came up with the clever idea to turn Nancy’s “Why me?” cry into “Why ‘E’?” to taunt me for adding the extra letter onto the word that got me eliminated. They even came up with a hand signal to reinforce their self-satisfied hilarity. They were relentless for months. Eventually I realized that if I stopped allowing them to make me visibly upset, they would let up, so I became skilled at internalizing the shame and laughing alongside them about how dumb I was. When it was no longer causing me obvious pain, they eventually let it go and moved onto the next easy target.
 
I was ten years old when this happened. Nearly 31 years ago, and there is not a single detail that I made up to fill in the blanks in my memory, because there were none. The lessons gleaned from that experience were many – one, that making mistakes was unacceptable and perfection was the only option to avoid embarrassment and shame. Two, that I was, in fact, very dumb and I had better work harder than anyone else to make sure nobody knew. Three, people were not safe, because if this was the acceptable way to treat friends, I certainly did not want to know what happened with people who did not fit in that category.
 
This was not the only experience that assisted in the development of my incredibly warped sense of self, but it was very significant. If only I had studied harder… if only I was not so stupid… if only that forsaken word had not been in the “birds” category… if only, if only, if only. The common theme of those “if only’s” was that at least ninety percent of them could be considered my fault. It was not even that I was unable to grasp the idea that everybody makes mistakes; it was simply that I was not allowed to do so. If I did, everyone would know what a useless disappointment I was.
 
I do not remember what my mother said when I got eliminated from that spelling bee, but I can visualize the look on her face as clear as if it had happened yesterday.
 
Recounting this experience today makes me so incredibly sad for the little girl who was just trying to do something she enjoyed. She did not know that it was okay to not be the best at everything she did, so when she made a mistake, it felt catastrophic. She learned that anything less than perfection was unacceptable. I could describe countless other occasions that further enforced this belief system, but I think you get the point.
 
I have been in therapy on and off, but mostly on, since I was 19 years old and struggling with a life-threatening eating disorder. I have spent 16 years in recovery from alcoholism and drug addiction. Even still, it was not until rather recently that I even became aware of the origins of the unyielding self-loathing that permeated every decision I would go on to make for decades, like a thread that wove itself through and connected my entire existence. When I was attacked by my first boyfriend in college and reported it to the police, it was my fault that the fraternity where the assault happened got into trouble with the dean. When there were difficulties in any relationships I had – professional, platonic, or romantic – it was my fault because I simply lacked the skills to properly relate to other human beings. It did not occur to me that when the fraternity blamed me for getting the guys in trouble, the fault actually laid squarely in the lap of the man who so brutally snapped my head backwards he gave me whiplash while trying to choke me. I did not understand that if someone treated me with egregious disrespect, that it might actually be about them, and have nothing to do with me. I read countless self-help books. I searched in every place I could think of to discover the fundamental flaw in my makeup that bled all over everyone and everything around me. If I could just figure out what it was, I could fix it. Right?
 
A few years ago, I remember telling my therapist that although my parents had given me everything I needed to succeed in life, I had screwed it all up and I was a failure. For all of the preceding years when working with other therapists and in recovery, when I was asked about my childhood, I described my family as loving and supportive and simply not a source of trauma. I had not been physically abused and my parents were still married. But then, my therapist asked something no one had ever asked me before – what exactly, in my view, had my parents given me that I needed to thrive? My response was that I had grown up in a nice home, that my parents paid for my education, they bought me a car when I was 16, et cetera.
 
What my therapist told me next absolutely blew my mind. She said that those things had nothing to do with developing into a well-adjusted, emotionally mature adult. Children need to be seen, soothed, and feel safe. She asked if my primary caregivers had made me feel those things. I paused and gave it some thought before answering. No. I had not felt any of those things. When she told me that I had not, in fact, been provided with everything I needed, it was like the entire world stopped moving. For another dated reference, do you remember the show “Out of This World” where the main character Evie – who was half-alien and had inherited special powers from her father – could touch the pointer fingers of both hands together and stop time? It felt like that.
 
You would think that something as mind-blowing as this would be a huge relief. In some ways, it was, but it shook the core of my entire foundational belief system. Was it possible that sometimes the bad things that happened in my life were not because I was a bad person, or because I did something wrong to cause them? I mean, that would be great news, but it was incredibly disorienting.
 
I will not get into the myriad of ways that this realization began to alter the course of my life, because they are too numerous to name in a single post. (I’ll save that for the book.) But one very significant piece, and the reason that I told you the story about the Nancy Kerrigan-esque bullying, was that I was no longer responsible for the entirety of every challenging or difficult situation or relationship in my life. This is not to say that I was absolved of my part in all of these conflicts either; quite the contrary, I almost always contribute in some way to the things that happen, whether it is by way of active participation in the inciting event or in my response to it. But I, Lisa O’Leary, was not just a bad person whose darkness infected everyone and everything around me. Sometimes other people, places or things were responsible, too.
 
Why does this matter? Well, there are a lot of reasons, but let me just give a few examples. I am not responsible for my mother’s childhood trauma. Yes, it was horrible, and it explains a lot of why she sees the world in such a cynical way; but it does not give her the right to make me feel like I am the cause of all of her discomfort. I do often play a significant role in the challenges in our relationship because of how I respond to her words and actions. The younger parts of me that try to protect me get easily activated when I feel like I am back in my childhood home, trying to do anything to feel loved and accepted in spite of my many imperfections. But that does not mean that I have to give her a pass when, during a recent and completely unnecessary conflict, she told me she wished she never had me. I do not care how old you are - that is just about the worst thing I can imagine hearing from a parent. I did not turn this into a yelling match, as is my default. (Anger is my go-to for everything to avoid feeling pain.) My response was to thank her for finally verbalizing the way she made me feel my entire life and to take the necessary steps to get myself out of the toxic living situation I was in.
 
One of the things I learned in early sobriety is that I cannot control how people act, react, respond, or do anything. All I can do is focus on keeping my side of the street clean. Today, because I have learned that I am not the detestable person I once believed I was, when conflict arises I have the ability to step back and try and look objectively at the situation. What was my part in this? Did I share some of the responsibility? Or is someone else truly projecting their own issues onto me? If it is the latter, then I no longer have to fall prey to my default settings and take on the blame for what is happening. I can allow it to hurt, and I can be sad. But I do not have to hate myself anymore. And, even if I did contribute to the situation in some way, I still do not have to hate myself because I am a human being who makes mistakes. What counts is that I own them, I make amends when necessary, and I do my best not to repeat them. Perfection is an impossible standard and one that no longer serves me, if it ever did.
 
I am not responsible for making sure that everyone around me is happy. I simply do not have that kind of power. I am responsible for my own actions, behaviors, and being open to communicating with the people I care about and allowing them space to share, even if – especially if - my intent does not align with how they feel. If I fail to meet someone’s expectations, particularly if they have not been communicated to me to begin with, that does not mean I did something wrong. I also do not have to hold anyone else’s toxicity in order to make peace or force relationships that are not meant to endure. I get to choose what I receive in my energy and allow in my life.
 
Today, I am pretty proud of my side of the street. Tomorrow, I might not be. But I am grateful that no one dictates what it looks like other than me.

This is not how I pictured it.
 
Ten years ago today, Patrick suffered the first of many seizures that led to his diagnosis with glioblastoma, which would ultimately end his life just ten months later. I have written about the experience of being his care partner extensively. I have worked in grief counseling to process the trauma. I have been ceaseless in my pursuit of uncovering and discovering who I am underneath all the layers of meaningless noise that the world spends so much energy and money to convince us are important.
 
I spent years of my life hardened to the world and everyone in it. I was angry, because anger lives in many parts of my younger self that I used to survive as I grew up and began experiencing the challenges that have come my way. That anger, I now know, is not out to make me miserable – while that might at times be the result, its presence is in fact trying to protect me from the pain of being a deeply sensitive and feeling person in an often cold and unforgiving world. That pain is what I was trying to avoid when I suffered with a severe eating disorder as a teenager. That pain drove me to years of alcohol and drug abuse that nearly cost me everything. Even just the fear of that pain has stolen countless moments of beauty, of connection, and of hope. It has often rendered me frozen in time, unable to move forward, paralyzed in a fraught nervous system that weakens my resolve and leaves me incapacitated. And many, many times it has almost convinced me that life would never get better and the world did not need me anymore; that my suffering would not end unless I took permanent action to assure it would.
 
But in spite of myself, no how matter how dark and lonely it has been, a shred of light always remained just visible enough to keep me here.
 
If I am being honest – and, who am I kidding, I am not really capable of being anything else at this point – some of the most intense anger I have felt over the years has been at that tiny glimmer that refuses to dim, telling me that life will not always be so bleak. I cannot speak to the tragedies that anyone else who might read this has been through, nor will I try to. But I can tell you that ten years – a quarter of my life – have been spent in more physical distress and spiritual crisis than I would anticipate one could survive. Countless doctors, diagnoses and treatments, which have often left me with more questions than answers, drove me into financial and emotional bankruptcy. A career that once defined me had to be torn from my clutches, leaving my hands bloodied and marred from the death grip I used to try to maintain some semblance of control. That career was something I once clung to in order to convince the world, but mainly myself, that I was worth something. Without it, I had no idea how to interact with people around me who asked questions about my life. I constantly felt the need to justify my existence, because we are conditioned from the time we are very small to believe that our value comes from productivity, from money, from whatever you “have to show for yourself.”
 
I am not exaggerating when I say that since that fateful night ten years ago, my life has consisted of one chaotic event after the next. It has been lonely. I have felt isolated. Misunderstood. Disconnected. I am not recounting any of this to garner sympathy; instead, it is simply an accurate assessment of what this decade has been like. So, maybe it makes a little more sense now why I have regularly felt vitriol towards that tiny sliver of hope that has not allowed me to finally throw my hands up, to relent, and to say “Thanks, world, but I have had enough.” It was never about wanting to die. It was always about wanting the pain to stop.
 
I knew at a visceral level that someday I would begin to feel a shift. It started, as it always does, deep within my soul. I stopped trying to impress people, period. Now, do not think that this came simply out of virtue; quite the opposite, it came about because I lost all of the things that we typically use to assess value like money, property, relationships, or even health. It was not until I no longer had those things that I realized how little any of that matters to me. On that drive to the emergency room racing behind the ambulance that carried my love to an unknown future, was I thinking about what kind of car I was driving? Of course not. I just needed it to get me to his side. When we were talking to the care team after Patrick’s surgery and heard for the first time confirmation that what we were dealing with was the deadliest type of brain cancer there is, did my career as a lawyer come up in the conversation? No, because it made absolutely no difference in the trajectory of what was to come. No amount of money, education, or anything else of extrinsic value could give us the only thing we really wanted – more time.
 
Very few people outside of my carefully cultivated and intentionally small inner circle have any clue what it has been life to live daily in my chronically ill body. I have been told both implicitly and explicitly that I need to just “get over it” [insert your choice of “it” here] and go back to work, to stop being a drain on society, to quit playing victim and stop living in the past. Hearing these things used to really hurt. I felt so much guilt and shame over the fact that I could not do the things I had studied and trained to do, and that I had been indoctrinated to believe were all that mattered.
 
It took a lot of work in therapy, in my recovery, in lessons learned from betrayals and loss of relationships to unlearn those things that I once thought were my core values. Instead, those “values” were a product of mass marketing to create a society of thoughtless robots that play by the rules so the people in power at the top can stay there, and the rest of us can believe that we are somehow lacking. My automatic response when something goes wrong – or, perhaps better stated, does not go the way I expect – was to believe that it was my fault. I have spent much of my life far too uncomfortable with the proposition that sometimes there simply is no explanation for why things happen the way they do. While it felt awful to believe that there was something so fundamentally wrong with me that could be blamed for the misfortunes I experienced, that was easier to accept than being unable to find answers via reason or logic.
 
As I let go of those beliefs that were holding me hostage, I also began to let go of my need to prove myself to anyone. I began to feel the freedom that comes with not caring what people think about me. I stopped thinking I was unworthy of love because I did not have the fancy resumé I used to wear proudly across my chest. I realized that if people judged me because my physical and mental health challenges became disabling, that was their problem, not mine. Not everyone has to like me. If someone thinks that I am of lesser value because I am a “childless cat lady,” that speaks so much louder about them than it does about me.
 
The deeply meaningful work I have done on myself has led me to a place where I no longer hate the person looking back at me in the mirror. I sincerely, with every fiber of my being, love her. That is not to say that all of the parts of me that live inside get along all the time. Far from it. I often describe myself as living in a constant state of existential crisis. But as that love for myself began to grow, so, too, did that tiny fraction of hope that kept me alive during the darkest times. I still would consider it an exaggeration to say that my hope is brighter than my skepticism, but it continues to expand.
 
Over the last few months, those internal shifts have started to manifest into external change. After what felt like losing total agency over my life when I had to stop working and move home with family, I was finally able to buy a car again. Wow. Is it a brand new BMW like I had some years ago? No. Do I care? Absolutely not. I am thrilled that I have something that can take me where I want to go. I was able to move back into an apartment and live on my own. Does it come with luxurious features and a mortgage so I can call myself a homeowner? No. But it is mine. It is my beautiful space that I have cultivated to be a sanctuary, a place for continued growth and healing. Everyone who has visited describes it as warm, welcoming, and homey. It is full of bright colors, candles, and pictures of the people I love. My doormat says “I hope you like Taylor Swift and cats.” I have never been more excited about something used to wipe my feet; something that used to mean nothing to me, apart from its aesthetic. Now it reminds me that this life I am rebuilding is no longer based on fear or appearances. It is about celebrating all of me – the good, the bad, and the ugly – and the immense gratitude I have for the opportunities that are coming my way.
 
Without getting into the specifics, because I still get to keep some things just for me, last month something happened that removed the crushing weight of almost a quarter of a million dollars in student loan debt that has driven every single decision I have made in my adult life – every sh*tty job I took, every place I moved, and the impact all of that had on my health. I am still having a hard time integrating this information into my brain and body, because it does not seem real. It was something that I firmly believed was impossible to get rid of, that I would live with until the day I died. And, it would not have been possible to receive this relief if all of the terrible things that have happened over the past decade had not occurred. Oh, the irony.
 
A long dormant part of myself was recently reawakened in an unexpected, and in some ways unwelcome, way. I realized that my heart still had the capacity to love – deeply and completely. Even though it could not work out the way I hoped, it showed me how much I have changed. I do not have to be afraid of becoming the jealous, insecure, fearful woman I was in past relationships – because I am no longer her. I saw that I can meet challenges and conflict head on, and that not every disagreement has to be a fight. I made choices that reflect the woman I am today, who respects other people more than I need to have my own wants fulfilled. I was reminded that feelings will not kill you, even when it seems like they will. Even amidst the vacuous space I am currently in trying to sort through it all, I know I have been through worse and I will get through this, too. I have gratitude for being broken hearted because I know my heart still works. That gratitude is only that tiny sliver right now, and I am mostly still in the throes of grief. But it is there. With time, it will grow. And when the right partner comes along, I am so thrilled that he will get to be with the woman who lived through all of that pain, and who can show up fully without feeling like she just needs that last puzzle piece to be complete. I am that puzzle piece.
 
This is not what I thought my life would look like ten years after that catastrophic night when I looked into Patrick’s eyes and saw our hopes disappear. But I would never trade what it feels like for anything.