Healing and moving on are probably two of the most vague, daunting phrases I’ve been told lately. Ironically, it seems those are also the two most advised courses of action for me to take in the last few months. While I am well aware that the healing journey looks different for everyone, I am of the belief that you cannot fully heal without fully acknowledging. And without fully healing, you cannot fully move on. However, this is tricky for me, having felt silenced and shackled to the weight of the events of the past year for so long. I have felt a responsibility to protect the individuals behind the defamation and mistreatment that I endured. But as Taylor Swift once said, “If guys don’t want me to write songs about them, then they shouldn’t do bad things.” So now I sit at my kitchen table on my mother’s birthday to write this tribute for the person I used to be. 

This morning while eating bagels in the car, my mother asked me if I was “truly done” with my ex boyfriend. If anyone else in my life had asked me this, the answer would be a clear “yes absolutely”, but I hesitated before answering her question. The reason wasn’t because I was still in love with him or wanted him back, but quite the opposite. I believe you can be over the person but not over what they did to you. My ex-boyfriend and I dated for scarcely six months. Yet for the six months following that, my life was consumed by indecision, toxicity, and anxiety on both his side and my own. Realistically, six months is just a blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things. I think back to one of my best friends and her boyfriend, who began dating after my disastrous break up. Already, they’ve surpassed the time my ex and I spent in a relationship. In fact, we’ve been broken up for longer than we were together. But yet the feeling of him still lingers, although it has been less and less prominent nowadays. He was my first real “adult” relationship although very little of it actually was due to the false sense of maturity both him and I seemed to have had. But, everyone that has ever known me knows his name too. This relationship was the patriarch of my youth and childhood coming to a conclusion. His words, good and bad, have profoundly built the pillars of who I am as an adult today. 

If you were to ask me to look back on it now, I would tell you that I am certain he never loved me like I loved him. Taking off the rose colored glasses in any relationship is one of the hardest things to do, especially when you are with someone who had such a tight grip on your very being. The chaos and trauma become familiar and the lines between love and hate become blurry. You have to rewire your brain to reexamine and reframe situations of animosity and apathy that you mistook for love.  I met him when we were 16 and I had just moved to a different state. He seemed so much more mature than everyone else our age, and he was. That was until everyone else caught up and grew past him, while he continues to replay the same high school fantasies out into adulthood. You would never be able to see past his lies unless you watched his eyes while he spoke. Through his calculated dialect, he knew exactly what words to say to hook you and reel you in. His mind was so devoid of color, he wouldn’t even notice if he drained the color out of you as well. When he spoke, he painted these delusions of grandeur and prosperity. These ideas that he wanted to bring to life with his very hands. He could spin straw into gold. And the best part is, while he was special to everyone else, you alone were special to him. And that’s how it started. 

One of my closest friends is a firm believer that to become the person you want to be, you have to lose the person you once were. I would have to say that I went through that twice this year. Before him, I was someone who was independent, calculated, careless, and free to my own ambitions. I knew who I was and who I wanted to be, or at least as much as a seventeen year old can know. In our whirlwind of a relationship, our lives quickly merged and suddenly my life was no longer for me, but for him. The very little time we spent apart would cause arguments and my everyday life consisted of his friends, his family, his church, and working 40 hour weeks for his family business. All of the people in his life merely tolerated me by association to him. My mistake was my naivety, thinking they saw value in me too.  The exhaustion of being overworked and the voices of those around him tearing me down while simultaneously lifting him up began to give way to me losing myself. I am eighteen now and admittedly the sixteen and seventeen year olds I work with think they know everything. But I would never treat them the way adults in his life treated me when I was that age. Their words were cruel and designed to tear me down by analyzing my flaws in excruciating detail.  My successes were diminished by his, even if I had put in twice the effort and yielded double the outcome. I would never be as good as him and as far as they were concerned, I would never deserve him. Each day started to feel like I was reaching and pulling him closer and closer like a life raft, somehow convinced that the only goodness and happiness in my life was him. My carefree attitude became cautious and guarded. Bitterness seeped into all of my relationships and I unknowingly pushed away anything leftover of my life to make room for his. 

My demise wasn’t entirely his fault. When dating someone with addictions, you are often searching for some kind of control over a situation in which you have none. You are the first to make sacrifices, the first to make compromises, and the first to try and make it work. You believe you can carry his problems. You would do anything for him to get better, give him the sun or carry the weight of the whole world.  You unknowingly end up giving so much of yourself to the one person who ultimately never ends up choosing you. The scale becomes unbalanced and you become restless, having no part of yourself that isn’t contaminated by him. Your behavior begins to become over corrective as you search for control and look for the person that you once knew at the beginning. If you show someone that you will love them through anything, they will put you through everything because they know they can. Arguments worsen and words begin to be pointed at your deepest hurts. You will be told you are his happiness and reason for being. Then in the same breath, accusations will follow that you are the reason for his actions and he will never be able to make you happy. Someone that hates themself will hate you too for loving them. Your attempts at kindness and affection will be met with cold resentment. This was my reality and as the months flew by my mind became blurry and muffled with confusions and contradictions. 

Who I am now is not who I was when I was with him. I don’t know if I ever really was that person or if it was merely a desperate attempt to fit into a box he and I created. I don’t need to know the reasons why he didn’t choose me, nor do I need him in my life to make it feel worth living. He will always be a part of my soul. He was my best friend, my equal, and the biggest contradiction in my life. Never have I loved something so deeply that has ruined me so completely. For a while, it felt like I was living in a haunted house. Every road led back to him, no matter how far I ran. What he did left a scar that needed to be healed and I kept picking at it by choosing him again and again. The words he said and the way he treated me ruined everything I thought I knew about relationships and everything I thought I knew about him. His words felt sacred, and I took them like an oath. He made me think I deserved to be loved this way. His way.  And although I felt all of these things, I realized I didn’t need to. There is happiness in leaving it all behind. When you focus on the good, the good gets better. He will always be part of my past but I choose to not carry him into my present. He will not define me, simply because I don’t need him to. The best version of me isn’t the person who tried to make her life purpose being as small, silent, accommodating, and convenient as possible. I am still learning how to rebuild, but this time I am so much stronger. The most growth happens in seasons with the most change. And two people really can change each other. 

Presently, when I think about love, I don’t think about any person that I’ve dated. My definition of love is waking up and choosing to love fully, regardless of that person's flaws. It is putting their needs before yours, lifting them up and treating their successes as your own. To bare your soul equally to one another. To cherish and value one's company and walk as equals through life. I see love in my parents every day. I see it in my best friend and her boyfriend as he cared for her when she was sick. I see it in my brother and his girlfriend when he rides the subway to work with her so she doesn’t have to go alone. I see it in my brother and his wife, and the beautiful family they’ve created. Lastly, I see it in my friends as they helped me put the pieces of myself back together countless times and selflessly put my needs above their own. Moving on was the last thing that I wanted to do because I was terrified of what I might lose. But who I became in the process is worth so much more to me than who I used to be. You will never find someone who meets all of your needs. That person simply does not exist. Instead, you must be able to meet your needs on your own. Be your own true love. Be your own light. Be the truest version of yourself that you can be. You can write your own story.

-Jessie Raigoza