Learning to Live Without Him
A friend of mine who recently went through a difficult break up and is currently in the process of healing from it asked to share her story and the lessons she’s learning through the healing process. I happily obliged as I think there’s a lot we can learn from her experiences. However, in spite of my pleas that she append her name, she refused and opted to share anonymously instead. The story will come in a 2 part series which I’ll share every week for the next 2 weeks. I hope you enjoy & learn from her experiences.
NOTE : To maintain the integrity of the story, I am sharing as is and have only edited for typos.
THE BREAK
It wasn’t the first time it was happening. His usual break up with me. Initially they were just threats but there was something different about this one. As usual he made it about me. Said I was not appreciative of his efforts. I was making him think a lot. I was always being paranoid. I didn’t make him happy anymore. He wasn’t free dating me. He didn’t love me anymore. I’m not sure if I hadn’t read well or if I just had a hard time accepting all he said, still I begged. Asked him if there was nothing else to hold on to. His reply: "nothing at all". Still I begged because that was all I knew to do. We later settled for taking a break after I had pushed so hard. I was travelling for a period of about two weeks and we agreed to meet after I came back.
It happened at about 11pm. We stopped texting at about 1am. I dropped my phone and closed my eyes to sleep. I should have felt some sort of victory that I got a break instead of a break up, but all I felt was pain. I’m not even sure where it came from but it pierced my heart so deep I could physically feel it my chest. I thought I was about to die or go crazy. I started to cry, I started to wonder, I had so many questions to ask; 'how?' Being the most prevalent of all. Could this be about another woman? How can he even like somebody else (so all my love couldn’t fill up his heart? You mean to say there’s still space?)? How did I even wrong him, if I did? How can he live with causing me all these pain? How did we go from being so happy to this? How did I become this “not enough”? How did he become this person that he has become? How did this happen? How did that happen? How does he not remember everything? How didn’t he even fight for me? And above all, how did I get here?
My self esteem was at its lowest, my dignity the same, I was so low. He had drained me of all the value I had for myself. I had taken so much that I didn’t even know how to stop. I had given it all to one boy in trust, believing that he would protect it. I had forgotten what it was like to feel for anyone else, to love anyone else, to let anyone else make me happy. He owned it all. He owned me mind, body and soul. Even I hadn’t realised at what point he gained such control over me.
I lay crying. Scared. I still don’t know what I was scared of, but fear is what best describes the way I felt. I didn’t know what to do with all that pain and fear so I picked up my phone and started to text my friends. (I have to add here that my friends are so annoying. I have told them severally to leave their phones on ring out when they go to bed but they wouldn’t listen) I knew they wouldn’t see my text till they woke up, still I texted them.
Morning wasn’t forth coming, the pain wasn’t going away and the fear just kept increasing.
PRAYER
I knelt down. fully aware that I had been fornicating, drinking alcohol, doing things that might be considered unclean but not neglecting the fact that He doesn’t care about my sins. That He loves me regardless. I knew very well that even if no-one on earth could help me out of this, that He could.
So with all the tears welling up in my eyes, pouring down my cheeks. With my swollen and red eyeballs, my body shaking, my heart pounding, my knees shivering and not being able to hold balance, I only looked up and said "I can’t do this without you. I am scared. I need strength". I couldn’t say a long prayer, I didn’t even have the words to even if I wanted to, but I was confident that I had invited God into the situation.
I cried all night. I didn’t wait for dawn. At about 5am I got up and started to prepare. I hadn’t planned anything for the day still I knew that staying at home was a bad idea. even as I prepared I cried. I could not control it. At some point I felt like I was running out of breath and I would stop and catch my breathe again. My heart kept pounding like it was about to jump out, my body kept shaking. My phone rang. It was one of the friends I had texted the night before. As I answered the phone she replied with "are you crying?" Even I could tell that I was drained, my voice sounded like weakness, like pain. I started crying even more. Then she asked me a question. She said "do you know who you are?"
REALIZING MY VALUE
In that moment, I felt different. I felt something that had left me for so long come back to me. She said "you didn’t loose him, he lost you" and I knew it was true. My confidence came back and I asked myself a simple question "after the pain you went through last night. A pain caused by someone you have loved so deeply for so long, given so much to, given so much for, is that where you really want to be?" And my honest answer was NO. I started to see myself for what I really am. A queen. A beautiful, smart, strong woman who knows exactly what she was and wasn’t willing to accept less. I know a lot of people say this in the books but trust me when I say I actually started seeing myself differently.
The pain was still there in my heart. On somedays I felt like screaming, breaking things, just anything to transfer all that anger onto. If I remembered him, I raged. Somedays I still felt like I was going to die or go crazy but one thing was now certain, I was not going back. I was not going to call him to beg. And the difference was that for the first time since I met him I was choosing myself and even with all that pain it still felt good.
Xx.
