When You Don’t Know What To Do With It.

I don't even know how to start this.

I'm sitting here going over all of it again  the texts, the back and forth, the way I kept trying to find the right words like if I just arranged them correctly something would finally click for him. It never clicks. It hasn't clicked in three years. I don't know why I keep expecting it to.

He sent that message and my first thought was: I don't know what to do with this.

Not anger. Not relief. Just this foggy, sinking feeling like I'm trying to read a map in a language I almost recognize but not quite.

He talked about emotional safety. He talked about abandonment. He used every word I have ever used to describe what's been happening to me and he just... flipped it. Turned it around. Now he's the one who's felt unsupported. Now he's the one who's been carrying it alone. And somewhere in there he mentioned a hotel night  as if that's the moment everything changed, as if there was a moment, as if I can even figure out what night he's talking about.

I stood in church. I looked him in the eye. I swore on my kids, my grandkids, my parents, the dogs. I swore. He still said he felt secrecy.

At some point what do you do with that. Seriously, what do you do.

Monday I left barefoot. I just need to sit with that for a second.

I didn't think about shoes. I didn't think about my keys or my purse. I just needed the noise to stop. Not the noise in the room  the noise inside my chest, the one that starts when I realize we are going around again and there is no exit from the loop. He followed me outside. Tried to get me to come back in.

And then a few days later I'm on the couch waiting for DoorDash, my phone next to me because I'm literally watching the delivery driver make turns, and he says: why all the secrecy with your phone?

I said I'm not doing this again.

He said: yeah, I'm still waiting for an answer.

I said: I gave you the answer. You won't be happy until I give you the answer you've already decided is true.

And then he said why are you getting so defensive.

I wanted to scream. I didn't scream. I said I'm not defensive, I'm angry. There's a difference. But explaining the difference felt like another argument I'd already lost before it started.

I talked to ChatGPT a lot today. I know that sounds strange. But there's something about having something explain the pattern back to me in plain language  not telling me what to feel, just saying: here is what is happening, here is why it's confusing, here's what the no-win looks like from the outside  it helped me feel less insane.

The thing it said that hit me was this: when trust is already gone, your answer doesn't matter. Because the answer was never really the point. He already has a conclusion. The questions are just pressure to confirm it.

• if I explain calmly, it's dismissed

• if I get upset, it's defensiveness

• if I protect my privacy, it's secrecy

• if I withdraw, it's abandonment

There's no version of me that passes. There's no door out of it except the one I keep walking through barefoot at 10pm.

I wrote something in one of my messages today that surprised me. I wasn't planning it. It just came out.

Maybe I have changed. But not for the reasons you're accusing me of. It's for survival.

I think that might be the truest thing I've said in a long time.

Because I have changed. I'm quieter than I used to be. I don't share as much. I don't light up the way I probably used to. I keep my phone close not because I'm hiding something but because somewhere along the way my phone became the only space that was just mine  my notes, my drafts, my feelings, the book I wrote out of all of this. He doesn't get to have that too.

And now the thing that kept me sane  having a private inner world  has become the evidence against me.

He called it running. He always calls it running.

You always run. Go. Run. Run.

I want to be clear with myself, even if I can't make him understand it:

I am not running from him. I am walking away from something that makes me feel like I am losing my mind. Those are not the same thing. Leaving a burning building is not the same as abandoning a home.

I've left before. I'll probably have to make a decision again soon. Not because I don't love him. I don't even want to get into whether I love him right now. That's not the question.

The question is: how many more Sunday conversations where he takes accountability and promises to do better, and then Monday it starts again, can I survive before there's nothing left of me that recognizes herself.

He sent a softer message at the end. Said he wasn't trying to corner me. Said he cared about me. Said he doesn't want to lose what we have.

I believed him.

I also don't believe anything is going to change.

Both of those things are true right now and I'm just going to let them sit here together without trying to resolve them tonight.

I'm tired. I'm so tired.

Not the kind of tired that sleep fixes.

What I know tonight:

I did not become this person out of nowhere. The guardedness, the privacy, the exhaustion, the distance  it all has a history. It grew in soil that he planted.

I am not crazy. I am not cheating. I am not a villain in my own story.

I am someone who has been watched so closely, for so long, that she started disappearing just to have somewhere to exist that wasn't under a microscope.

That's not a character flaw.

That's what happens to people.

And I think  slowly, quietly  I'm starting to believe myself again.

That's something.

Maybe that's enough for tonight.