DISSOCIATING MY WAY THROUGH IT

“I don’t know how you handled all of that without completely falling apart.”

Respectfully, what was my other option?

Was I supposed to stop paying my bills? Stop getting out of bed? Let everything fall apart because I was falling apart?

I didn’t handle it well.

I survived it quietly.

There is a difference.

You saw what I chose to let you see. You saw the smile I painted on before going out in public. You saw me make jokes, answer messages, and insist that I would figure it out.

You didn’t see the distress underneath it. 

You didn’t see the hours I spent trying to get out of bed. The loss of appetite. The sleepless nights.

You didn’t see how close I was to breaking. You didn’t see the moments when I let myself feel the full weight of everything life had thrown at me and realized I could not afford to stay there for long.

Because I did not have time to fall apart.

I couldn’t handle it, but I did survive it.

Mostly on my own, because I do not believe I had another choice.

I don’t have a partner to come home to when life becomes unbearable. My parents cannot bankroll me while I put my life on pause to recover. My friends are accustomed to me being the positive one, the strong one, the person who can always find a way forward. When it becomes my turn to have a hard time, many of them do not seem to know what to do with me.

So when someone tells me to “lean on my support system,” I have to resist the urge to laugh.

What support system?

I love my parents, but their first response is often to question whether I did something wrong. I have a few friends who check in occasionally, but there are not many people I can confidently fall apart in front of. Few people have earned enough of my trust to hold the mess without making me defend it, minimize it, or clean it up quickly enough to make them comfortable.

Maybe there are people I could reach out to now, but the problem is that too many people taught me what happens when I do.

I reached for friends in the past and found no one reaching back. I trusted people with the most vulnerable parts of me only to be left alone when I needed them. Eventually, I stopped asking.

Not because I never need anyone.

Because needing people began to feel more dangerous than pushing through without them.

Why would I ask for help when asking only creates another opportunity to be disappointed? Why would I admit that I am drowning when experience has taught me that people are much more comfortable admiring my strength from the shore?

If you have people who recognize when you are struggling and show up without waiting for you to find the courage to ask, I am genuinely happy for you.

I also envy you.

I have had to carry myself through breakups, betrayals, toxic jobs, grief, financial uncertainty, and days when simply remaining functional required everything I had.

After enough of those experiences, self-reliance stops feeling empowering.

It becomes a survival response.

But being repeatedly let down did not only teach me how to survive without people, it also taught me to overextend myself for them.

I know what it feels like to reach for someone and find no one there. I know what it feels like to wonder whether your pain is inconvenient, whether you are asking for too much, or whether anyone would notice if you stopped pretending to be okay.

I never want someone I love to feel that way because of me.

So I check in. I remember the small details. I make myself available. I offer support before anyone has to ask for it. I become the person I once needed, again and again, hoping that no one in my life will ever have to question whether they matter to me.

I give people the care I spent years wishing someone would give to me.

Sometimes, I give far beyond what I have the capacity to give.

Not because anyone asked me to, and not because my care is transactional. But because I know how deeply someone’s absence can wound you, and I never want to become another absence someone has to recover from.

The painful part is that giving people what I needed has never guaranteed they would recognize when I needed it too.

I have spent years showing people exactly how I want to be loved, only to discover that many of them were comfortable receiving that kind of care without ever learning how to return it.

So I became both things at once:

The person who never asks for anything and the person who gives everything.

The person everyone can lean on and the person who no longer believes it is safe to lean back.

I have been playing the role of my own hero for so long that I am not sure I would know how to let someone else help me. Even if they offered, part of me would remain braced for the moment they changed their mind.

I would be waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Waiting to learn that I had asked for too much.

Waiting to be left alone…again.

Some of the kindest people I have encountered have been strangers.

Some of the people who have hurt me most held the titles of “best friend” and “boyfriend.”

I am still unlearning what those titles taught me.

And I am still learning that loving people well should not require me to give them everything I once needed while convincing myself that I need nothing in return.

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Lately, I can feel myself repressing feelings, memories, and entire experiences.

It is a strange thing to recognize your own body trying to protect you in real time. To feel it gathering the memories you are not ready to process, placing them somewhere beyond your immediate reach, and allowing numbness to take their place.

This is not the first time I have survived this way.

I have felt it after friendship endings that dismantled my understanding of people I trusted.

I have felt it after being cheated on in nearly every relationship I have been in, each betrayal reminding me how little control I have over what someone may choose to do with the love and trust I give them.

I have felt it after working in environments that slowly eroded my confidence.

I have felt it after experiences I needed to move past before I had the time, safety, or support to fully understand what they had done to me.

Every time, some part of me decided that processing the pain was less urgent than surviving it.

So I kept moving.

I picked myself up alone. I found another job. I made new friends. I built another routine. I became functional enough that even I started to mistake my ability to continue for evidence that I had healed.

But moving forward and processing what happened are not the same thing.

I think there are entire chapters of my life that I have never fully grieved because feeling everything would have required me to stop, and stopping has rarely felt like an option.

So my body learned to protect me in the only way it knew how.

It softened the memories.

It quieted the anger.

It disconnected me from the parts that hurt too much to carry while I was trying to rebuild.

And now it is happening again.

Just over a month ago, my life was turned completely upside down. 

A six-year friendship ended after she became unable to balance her new relationship with the friendship that had carried her through her divorce. Because I had also been living with her, I suddenly had to move back home.

I did everything I could to keep the personal fallout separate from my work. I continued doing my job well and treating the business with more care than our friendship was being given.

But I was fired anyway.

Rather than admit that the decision was personal, the quality of my work was suddenly called into question. Years of loyalty, the life I had put on pause to support her, and the work I had poured into her business were rewritten the moment they became inconvenient.

In what felt like an instant, I lost a friendship, my home, my job, and the life I thought I was building.

So, take it from me: never put all your eggs in one basket. Especially when that basket belongs to someone else.

At first, I felt everything.

The anger. The betrayal. The heartbreak. The shock of watching nearly every part of my life change at once.

And strangely, all that pain gave me momentum.

It gave me something to say. It gave me the drive to create The Reclamation. Every painful realization became another sentence. Every memory became something I needed to write down before anyone could convince me it had not happened the way I remembered it.

I was hurt, but I was driven.

I liked having somewhere to put my anger. I liked turning everything that was meant to break me into something that belonged to me. For once, the pain was producing something other than more pain.

But almost as quickly as that motivation arrived, it disappeared.

The anger became harder to access. The memories started losing their edges. Experiences that had consumed my thoughts only weeks earlier began to feel distant, as though they had happened to someone else.

I know they happened.

I know how deeply they hurt me.

But today, I mostly feel numb.

It is as though my body gathered all those emotions, placed them in a box somewhere deep inside me, and promised I could come back for them later.

One day, my therapist and I will open that box.

For now, my body is doing what it has always done when life demands that I survive before I have the chance to heal.

It is helping me forget just enough to keep going.

So I will keep going.

Not only for the person I am becoming, but for every younger version of me who believed love had to be earned through self-abandonment.

The girl who sacrificed herself to preserve friendships.

The girl who finally stood up for herself, only to be treated exactly as she always feared she would be.

The girl whose confidence was dismantled by people she once called her best friends.

The girl who kept trying harder whenever someone made her feel unworthy.

The truth is, I still handle pain the way I always have.

I disappear. I stop answering messages. I retreat into myself and let numbness protect me from everything I cannot afford to feel at once.

When life becomes unbearable, I become unreachable.

The difference is what happens when I resurface.

The old version of me would have treated someone else’s inability to value her as evidence that she needed to become more valuable. She would have returned ready to become more available, more agreeable, and more useful. She would have tried even harder to prove her worth to whoever remained.

Not this time.

This time, I am learning that the way someone chooses to treat me does not have to become the way I view myself.

This time, I am not rebuilding for the people who were absent while I was breaking.

There may not be many people waiting on the other side of this. As painful as that is to admit, it has also made something clear:

I am the one who was here.

I am the one who carried me through the hard days. I am the one who got out of bed, kept moving, and found a way forward when everything in me wanted to stop. I am the one who stayed when everyone else’s presence felt uncertain.

So the energy I once spent proving my worth to other people will now be spent protecting the person who survived without them: Me.

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No longer will I allow a job to determine whether I believe I am capable.

No longer will I let friends repeatedly disrespect me just because losing them feels worse than losing myself.

No longer will I build my life around being useful, agreeable, or easy to keep.

No longer will I return from my darkest moments ready to give everyone else the love, patience, and loyalty I needed but did not receive.

I will give those things to myself.

We only get one life, and the relationship I have with myself is the only one I am guaranteed to carry through all of it.

It is time I prioritize that relationship with the same devotion I have always given to everyone else.

So yes, I handled it.

But not because it didn’t break me.

Not because I was stronger than the circumstances.

Not because I knew what I was doing.

I handled it because life kept moving, and I had no choice but to move with it.

For most of my life, surviving meant carrying myself through the pain just so I could return to being everything everyone else needed me to be.

This time, I am returning to myself.

I am reclaiming the energy I spent proving I was worth keeping.

The care I gave so freely while convincing myself I did not need any in return.

The time I lost trying to understand why people I loved could treat me as though loving me were so difficult.

The parts of myself I abandoned to preserve relationships that were never preserving me.

Maybe my reclamation is not learning how to handle more.

Maybe it is deciding that survival can no longer be the only thing my life is built around.

Maybe it is taking everything I have spent years pouring into other people and using it to build a life that finally belongs to me.

Not when I have processed every painful memory.

Not when trusting people feels easy again.

Not when I feel completely healed.

Now.

I have spent enough of my life living for other people.

This is the part where I reclaim it for myself.