151: What if he made you think you were crazy?
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I was sure that this was his mental illness and not something wrong with me until I started having those dreams and hearing it in my head. And that was when I started to think like, holy shit, maybe I'm actually going crazy. Welcome to the Permatemp Corporation, a presentation of the audio podcast, This Is Actually Happening. Episode 151.

What if he made you think you were crazy? This Is Actually Happening is sponsored by ADT. ADT knows a lot can happen in a second. One second, you're happily single. And the next second, you catch a glimpse of someone and you don't want to be. Maybe one second, you have a business idea that seems like a pipe dream. And the next, you have an LLC and a dream come true. And when it comes to your home, one second, you feel safe.

And the next, something goes wrong. But with ADT's 24-7 professional monitoring, you still feel safe. Because when every second counts, count on ADT. Visit ADT.com today. I grew up in a really small town in Ontario. I'm the only girl in my family. I have two older brothers and one younger brother.

I was a really outgoing child. I would talk to anybody. I had a big imagination. I was very in my head a lot. I had a bit of anxiety as a kid. I had a bit of, a little bit of OCD when it came to numbers and things not being even. Like if my shoes didn't have an even number, I wouldn't wear them.

And I would measure my shoelaces. I used to measure the sides of my bed to make sure my blanket was even all around the three sides if it was hanging off. I don't really know where that started, and I don't really know how it stopped either. My parents separated for about a year. I was eight years old, and my mom just told me and my little brother to pack and leave.

And we left and we moved to a different town. I believe the reason for the separation was my dad had been having an affair. And then eventually they went to marriage counseling and reconciled their differences and we moved back home. It definitely gave me this sense of like, you work out a relationship through anything, right?

no matter what. You know, my parents were able to overcome this. So, you know, when I fall in love, I know that love can conquer all that sort of thing. Middle school years, like puberty years, I really struggled through life.

That was when a lot of my anxieties really blossomed, I guess. And that's when I think I really started suffering from depression when I was about 12. Locking myself away, fighting with my parents a lot. When I was about 12, I started cutting myself pretty regularly. I started smoking weed as well. Those were definitely hard years. High school got a little better. I found my group.

I was quite a stoner. I smoked a lot of weed. I did a lot of other drugs. I drank a lot. And I was never really asked if something was wrong. It was more of a, what's wrong with you? So I tended to shy away a lot, avoided my family. There was one really major event in high school. My older brother was in a car accident.

They went to a bunch of different houses, saw different friends. They were going to be going out. The last stop was his girlfriend. They picked her up and drove around the corner from her house. It was January and it was slushy. As they, you know, turned out of her subdivision, the car slid on ice, I guess. He lost control of the vehicle and hit a pole and she died right there.

Obviously, the cops were asking them if they had been drinking and he admitted that he had had a drink. He got arrested and he went to jail for two years for causing her death. And one of our friends was in the car and she was injured. His girlfriend was a friend of mine. She was my age. And that just changed everything in our house, in our lives. Everything went downhill after that. My parents became really absent.

I was 16. I was a virgin. I had never had a boyfriend until that point. And after that, it just kind of hit me that I could die at any moment. It made me feel like I had to experience everything. So I kind of stopped saying no to things. That was when I started really seeking male attention.

My parents did ask if I was okay. You know, they asked if I needed counseling because they were getting help. And I said, no, I don't think I need it. But I mean, I was 16. So I don't think I knew any better. So I think kind of boyfriends became that. They, especially that first one, he became that ear for me. It filled that void, I think, of just having someone listen to me.

After we broke up, I became quite promiscuous. When I was in a relationship, I was very committed. I was a spend all day every day together, talk on the phone at night kind of relationship. And then when that relationship dissolved, it was whoever I fancied at that time. It was just one after the other for a while until the next serious committed relationship.

My best friend at the time, he was a friend that I'd had on and off since I was eight. We were, you know, driving around, smoking weed, trying to find more weed. So he said, hey, I have a buddy that sells. I can probably get some from him. And that was the first time I met him. He got in the back of my car. He sold us some weed. We smoked a blunt in a parking lot.

And then he was gone. And, you know, I kind of laughed. I'm like, who is that weird kid? And he's like, oh, yeah, that's my buddy. He's kind of strange. But, you know, he's he's really good people. You know, he's fine. He was awkward and nerdy looking. But then he was like this drug dealer and like had this gangster persona. Just this interesting but strange person.

human being. And I guess, I mean, I kind of thought that I was a weird human being. So I guess I just thought maybe we had something in common. And then I met him again at a party a few weeks later and I pursued him. Then we started sleeping together and then it was a lot of just sitting and

around in my bedroom smoking weed and having sex and I would go to work and I would go to school you know the fact that he didn't have a job and he wasn't in school or anything was like so well what do you do and well he's like I you know I'm I have a disability so I don't have to really do anything I just get a check every month and

All he ever told me in regards to an actual diagnosis was that they labeled it psychosis. He had tendencies of schizophrenia and like he's manic depressive. And right from the beginning, I witnessed, you know, really high highs and really low lows and flying off the handle for no reason. You know, that's when I should have run, but I didn't.

I can remember meeting his mom for the first time and him, you know, warning me, like, I hate my mom. I hate my mom. So we're going to fight just so you know, and you're going to see it. Don't listen to her. She's crazy and she's a bitch and just don't listen to her. Sure enough, the first time I met her, they got in a fight and she ended up calling the police and him and I took off in my car and got away. And that kind of became a regular occurrence now.

He wasn't raised by his mom. His grandparents had raised him because she wasn't fit. She had suffered from drug and alcohol abuse. She had a history of trying to commit suicide. I know of one incident that he witnessed. In the beginning, he was always, you know, verbally abusive to his mom and to his grandparents, but never to me. Everything was fine, I'd say, for the first six months.

We were both very clingy and obsessive and controlling, and we spent every waking moment together. There was a lot of jealousy on both sides. I was not okay with him speaking to girls at all, and he was not okay with me speaking to guys at all. Very controlling, reading each other's text messages, stuff like that. It was very petty stuff.

Second semester of that school year was starting and I wanted him to finish school and I wanted him to get a job. I was like, if you enroll in my high school and my parents let you live with us, will you finish school and think about getting a job?

I was trying to help him. So he moved in and that's when it got a lot more controlling and I noticed him getting a lot more aggressive. And that was kind of when it started turning on me. The first time he ever hit me was my 19th birthday. My best friends, we all had birthdays within two weeks of each other and we always celebrated together. And this year he said to me, you're not allowed to

I'm not letting you. And I'm like, well, what are you going to do if I go? And he said, I'll kill myself and I'll make sure everyone knows that it was your fault. So I didn't go. My birthday had to be spent with him.

So we bought a bottle of vodka and we were having just a night in watching movies and drinking and smoking weed. And we lived in my parents' basement at the time. So we were kind of on our own down there. I know he was mad at me for something. And, you know, the way I could make it up to him was to have sex. That became commonplace.

He never like physically forced it on me. I was never held down. It was all just like coercion and I'm mad at you for this so you can make it up to me like that. So I would. I mean, it was an easy way to shut him up. But this particular night and this had never happened before and I don't know if he did it on purpose or not. He slipped out and hit me in the wrong spot and it hurt. So I jumped away.

And as soon as we started going again, he did it again, but a lot harder. And I started bleeding and I was crying and it wasn't stopping. And I was scared and I was crying and he got mad at me for crying.

And, you know, he said, it wasn't my fault. Stop acting like I did it on purpose. You're being a baby. And he just lost it, just lost his mind. He started throwing things. He took the

There was about half a 26er left and he chugged it and then threw the bottle at the floor. He busted the hardwood floor. He picked up my bed and my mattress and tossed them over and he threw me to the ground and just started screaming at me and raging at me.

I quickly got dressed and I said, I'm driving you home to your mom's house. I don't want you here. And I was drunk and he was drunk. But I at that point, like my adrenaline was going and I just said, get in the car. We're leaving. And we were driving. I just started screaming, stop yelling at me. And then he just hit me. He just hauled off and punched me in the neck and in the shoulder. And I pulled over the car right there at the side of the road. We were in the middle of a wooded area. And I said, get out.

And he got out and I went home. I went and woke my parents up. I didn't tell them everything. I just told them that we were drinking and we got in a fight and he hit me. And they made me promise that I'd never see him again, go near him, don't answer his phone calls, don't talk to him. And it was, you know, I never want you seeing him again. I promised that I never would. But that only lasted like a couple of weeks.

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I started seeing him again and it was, I'm so sorry, I've never hit a woman before. And, you know, I've seen my mom get beat up by boyfriends and I promised I would never be that and I'm going to change. And, you know, maybe I really need to start working on my mental health and I'll get counseling and all this. The only place we could see each other was at his mom's house.

And I remember, you know, one time him treating me terribly, like just kind of being a scumbag. He kept, he kept calling me a cum bucket. His mom told him to stop and she started yelling at him for speaking to me that way. And then they started fighting and, you know, I can remember him like pushing her down the stairs and he beat her with her phone and

He unplugged the phone from the wall, like the landline, and tore the cord out so she couldn't call the cops. And like kicked her front door down and we ran off. There's only a handful of times that he ever actually hit me. One time he punched me in a club and we got kicked out. He would grab me a lot, you know, restrain me sort of thing. One time he pushed me down a hill.

Other than that, it was just threats of it or like hitting something near me or hitting himself or grabbing a knife and cutting himself in front of me. See, I can do it. I can kill myself and that it'd be my fault. And he, you know, would say, my mom almost did it. I've tried to do it. If I want to succeed, I will. And if you leave me or if you hurt me, I will kill myself. So I just put up with it.

When we would fight and he would go off into a rage, I very much would go off into a rage as well. I would hit him back. I would yell and scream as well. I would go from being mad and angry at him for putting all of his problems on me. And then it would quickly dissolve into like, oh my God, what if he actually kills himself in front of me? And this is all my fault.

And then I would, I would cave. I would always end up caving. I would always end up just giving in and crying and he would cry too. And, you know, I don't really know how it would end up resolving, but it always did end up resolving. And, you know, and then a minute later we would be like, you know, smoking a bong and laughing and everything was fine. And a minute ago we were hitting each other and screaming in each other's faces and,

There was a thing that he used to do where he would pretend we had conversations that I didn't remember having, or I would bring up a conversation we had had and he would say, no, we weren't. We weren't talking about that. And I'm like, yeah, we were like, we've been sitting here for like 10 minutes discussing what movie we're seeing tomorrow. And he would like, are you okay? Like, are you having a blackout or something? Cause we, we've been silent for,

for like a half an hour, I thought you were mad at me. I can remember the first time I really noticed it. We were smoking a blunt in a McDonald's parking lot. And there was a billboard for a Big Mac in front of us. And he said, I could really go for a Big Mac right now. And I was like, well, when we're done smoking this, let's go get a Big Mac. And he's like,

what do you mean when we're done smoking this let's go get a Big Mac and I'm like you just said you could really go for a Big Mac so let's go get one and he got like so serious he looked at me and he said are you hearing things

And I'm like, I heard you say that you wanted a Big Mac. And he's like, I haven't been talking at all. Like we haven't spoken since I lit this. So either you're hearing things or something's wrong. And I got so angry because we had just started smoking. I wasn't stoned.

And I'm like, you said it. I swear to God, you said you wanted a Big Mac. He didn't even get mad at me. He got so concerned. And he was like, it didn't happen. It didn't happen. And it just blew my mind.

So that was when I started really paying attention to everything he said. And I started noticing it happening with everything, with little things. My keys, my car keys, he'd hide them and then convince me that I must have absentmindedly put them somewhere. I would find my keys in random places, like in the freezer or like in a bag that I wasn't using or something.

And he would be like, you know, I don't touch your car keys. Like, I don't, he didn't drive. He didn't have a license. So he's like, why would I touch your car keys? You must have put them there. But like, I know that I didn't. And conversations, you know, like even fights. Like I'd be, you know, mad at him about something he said. I mean, you know, it could have been anything. And he would deny, deny, deny that it happened. And then he started really like,

You know, maybe you need help. I understand what it's like. I go through it too. Sometimes I have voices in my head. Maybe you need to talk to someone. It didn't help that through all of this, my depression was at an all-time low. Like I was a cutter, like I was a self-mutilator, very closeted and no one ever really saw it. One part of me was so defeated that I almost believed him.

And then another part of me was like, but no, because no one's ever accused you of being crazy before. Why all of a sudden would this person that you know suffers from a mental illness be able to diagnose you? So I was really fighting within myself about what was really going on, what was reality and what wasn't. At this point in my life, and I don't know when it started, like in reference to my timeline with him personally,

But I started having paranormal experiences. The first time it happened, it wasn't a bad day. There was nothing going on. We hadn't fought. There was nothing happening. And I was driving in my car. And I just, out of the corner of my eye, caught like a glimpse of a man sitting in the seat beside me. I hadn't been smoking weed. I hadn't been drinking. I hadn't been doing any other drugs. When I was working, I was sober. So I was coming home from work sober.

It happened in the blink of an eye that I saw this man beside me. My heart started racing and all my hair stood on end. And I just, you know, talked myself out of it. Like, okay, like that's trick of your mind. It's not real. But then I saw it again to where even if I blinked, he was still there. And then it reached out and touched me.

on my arm and the area where I felt the touch went numb, like completely numb. And then that started happening all the time in my car. Sometimes it would be in the seat beside me. Sometimes it would be behind me. Sometimes it would pull my hair. I'd be driving and my hair would just get, my whole head would move. I'd be yanked. It kept happening and I was just afraid of driving.

He kept touching my hands like I felt like I could not grasp the steering wheel. And so I pulled over my car and called my parents and I said, like, I don't know what's going on, but I don't feel comfortable driving. So can you come get me? That happened maybe only two or three times that were really scared me to where I didn't want to get back in my car.

I would just experience like large amounts of anxiety and sometimes kind of I would go into panic attacks feeling like I can't breathe and

not sure if it's really happening. And my heart would race. And I'd suffered from panic attacks ever since my brother's car accident. So I was quite used to them, especially in cars. I dealt with panic attacks in cars for a very, very long time. And so I would just treat it like my usual panic attacks. I'd go outside and sit down with my head between my knees and breathe and drink water and

And then just wait for it to subside and then just continue on with my day like nothing happened. I started having dreams about this man. It was always the same guy. A large man with dark features and dark hair and dark eyes and dark clothing. Always kind of smiling but looked mad at the same time. It was always his voice and it was always him.

This particular dream I remember had been like open-handed hitting me and scratching me. So I woke up with scratches and I had like a handprint on my arm, like I had been slapped. And one of these dreams, he was my dad. The man all of a sudden was behind him and jumped into him and he just lunged at me and started choking me and everything started to go black. And then I woke up.

And I had red marks on my neck. It didn't fully bruise. But for that day, you know, I had like red marks and like scratches. I don't know if maybe I was grabbing my throat in my sleep. In my dreams, he would jump into the people around me and make them hurt me. So often it was my dad.

or my best girlfriend for some reason. She was often in my dreams and he would make her hurt me and I would always wake up right before they kill me and I'd wake up with bruises and scratches and physical marks. It progressed into then I would have dreams where I'd be sitting at a table looking in a mirror and he would be behind me and he would just like step into my body and I'd kill myself.

It started with just the dreams, but then it started happening when I was awake, where I would have like a vision of him jumping into me and throwing the steering wheel and my car just going off the road. And I would just, I would just die and it would all be over. I have never been suicidal. I have never wanted to die. I have always wanted to live. I've always wanted more and wanted better.

So I knew it wasn't me. And I'd hear his voice telling me to end it, but I knew it wasn't mine. It was like, you know, the way you hear your own thoughts, but it wasn't my voice and it wasn't my thoughts. And it was always telling me to hurt myself before someone else did. Your life is going to be terrible regardless, so just die. It was very tricky. Like, it was very much, I tried to rationalize it as, well, my mind's playing tricks on me.

Or, oh, it's just a bad dream. But there were other people around me that experienced it. I had a friend sleep over and she woke up in the middle of the night and she said that my door just slammed shut out of nowhere and then she could hear footsteps in the hallway and she left my house and never came to my house again. There was one major incident with this and it kind of signaled the beginning of the end of everything.

It was summer and I was with this boyfriend. We were still together at this time. And we were in my car and we were smoking weed. I was in the driver's seat and he was in the passenger seat. And it was a normal day. Nothing was going on. We were just chilling and getting high. And I saw the guy behind me and I just kind of froze there.

I blinked and he went away. And so I thought, okay, like it's, it's gone. I'm okay. And then I just felt this sharp, hot pain in my back. It felt like a razor. Like it was that sort of just really like sharp and quick and hot pain. And I, I screamed like outwardly screamed and

And he starts freaking out and he's like, what's wrong? And I start crying and I'm like, oh my God, my back, like something just stabbed me in my back. And I lifted up my shirt and I had like a long scratch down my back, just to the right of my spine. I was bleeding.

And he was wide eyed like, what what did that like, how are you bleeding? And so he starts like squishing my my car seat together to see if there's something in the seat that was stabbing me. And then he starts screaming. And I'm like, what? And he's like, my shoulder, my shoulder. And he rips off his shirt. And he's got these three long scratches down his shoulder.

We both freaked out. We left my car there. I went back for it like the next day. I just don't know. I don't know if that was a paranormal experience or if, you know, psychologically I was just, you know, being affected by everything going on around me.

Because, I mean, it didn't start when I started dating him. It was, you know, towards the end of the relationship that those experiences started. And it was sort of overlapping with the turmoil that I was experiencing with him. But it didn't seem to co-relate. So, like, it wasn't like these things would happen when we were fighting.

Like if it was happening when we were fighting, I would think that I'm just reacting to him. That maybe I'm experiencing something because of him. But it didn't. I like things to be tangible in front of me. I love proof. It's definitely something I still think about and struggle with. Of whether or not I actually believe in paranormal stuff. And whether or not I believe that those things that I experienced were actually paranormal. Or whether it was paranormal.

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Stop wasting money on things you don't use. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions by going to rocketmoney.com slash wondery. That's rocketmoney.com slash wondery. rocketmoney.com slash wondery. It was after the paranormal stuff started happening that I really started believing him because the things that he were doing were all very tangible. Like,

When he was saying things to me, it was very clear to me that he was fucking with me. I was sure that this was his mental illness and not something wrong with me.

Until I started having those dreams and feeling like I was seeing this guy in my car and feeling like I was hearing his voice. And that was hearing it in my head. And that was when I started to think like, holy shit, maybe I'm actually going crazy. I would talk to my mom about it. And I started asking her if our family had a history of mental illness.

And she said, you know, that maybe I needed to talk to someone. And I know that the woman I went to see was someone that my mom knew her through church. And she said that she dealt with spiritual struggles. So that was who I started seeing. After seeing her a few times, she told me that she didn't think I suffered from any mental illness other than depression.

dealing with some anxiety and depression, which she said was, you know, understandable that I had those issues, but that I wasn't crazy. And that whether I was dealing with something spiritual or whether it was the negative effects of this relationship, that either way I had to cut both off. I don't know what changed. I guess it was maybe that experience. I said, enough's enough. I'm just, I'm fucking done with all of this. I don't want this anymore.

I told him that it was over. I said I couldn't do it anymore. He said he would kill himself. I said, then that's your problem, not mine. I called his grandparents. I told them that I had broken up with him. They didn't know where he was at the time, but shortly after that, they couldn't find him. They went looking for him, and I got a call a few days later that he had tried to kill himself, and he was in the hospital.

From what they told me, he had slit his wrists and then just walked off into... It was snowing. He had just, like, walked off into the night, and they found him. Like, someone saw him, like, bleeding in a snowbank. His grandparents had told me that it really wasn't that bad, and this was a cry for attention, and they said, now more than ever, you need to just not answer. Just go off. Disappear. Go live your life. Once I broke up with him...

And cut him out of my life and started seeing her. Like again, it all happened in the same week. Nothing ever happened again. I never heard a voice. I never had a dream. I never had any feelings of maybe I'm crazy. I never questioned myself ever again.

I don't really know if it was cutting him out that was the big change or if it was me just deciding that I was going to take care of myself and focus on myself and my mental health. I think it was going to counseling that really...

helped me sort of see things clearly because I was just feeling so foggy. I had my friends I could talk to, but as far as the boyfriend went, they didn't like him, obviously. And I couldn't open up completely to anybody. So it was really hard to

trying to navigate what I was going through alone, just kind of dealing with all of this stuff beneath the surface that nobody really saw the whole picture. Nobody really was seeing everything I was seeing and feeling everything I was feeling. So when I had this unbiased person who is sitting there just to listen to me sort out the mess of my mind and her reassuring me

of what she was seeing and telling me that she was seeing the person that I thought I was, that really gave me the strength to see my way through it. And that amplified that part of me that wasn't totally lost yet. I went off to college, like I went to school and like I was doing really well in school and got myself back.

I moved out on my own. Like I was just, I was doing really well. And then I got into another relationship sort of towards the end of my schooling, the end of my second year. That was when I started dating my ex-boyfriend's best friend. And then again, it was, I got back into a relationship and

Lost myself again and just went like full force into this relationship, became inseparable. The same problems that I'd had in every other one, jealousy, controlling, fighting, just, you know, a really immature, really petty relationship. And then eventually, you know, the yelling turns to physical fights. That relationship lasted about two years.

I went into another spiral. I started doing a lot of drugs. I lost my job. I got fired. I took my last paycheck and I bought as much coke as I could with it. And then I flipped it. And then I started doing that. I just started flipping coke here and there to continue to supply my partying habits and my drinking and smoking. I was single and just doing a lot of drugs.

I felt really scummy at that point. It was another one of those, like, what am I doing with my life? How am I back here? I need to change. I wasn't going to make any really positive changes in my life if I was still in the same town seeing all the same people. I was fresh out of school and I just started handing out as many resumes as I could to as many job opportunities outside of my town as I could.

Until I found one that was far enough away that I could be a bit of a recluse and just started really taking care of myself. I got to a point where I kind of wanted to start dating again. And I just had decided I was going to have a completely different approach to dating, a completely different outlook. I was going to be critical and I wasn't going to just date anybody. And I was going to wait and I was going to date until I fell in love.

I had a friend from college. She had said like, I'm going partying in Toronto for my birthday. Do you want to come? So I said, okay. And I just met her in Toronto for a weekend. And she had a friend and she was like, we're going to party at his house. You can crash there if you want. The night I met him, I canceled all my other dates. I just completely fell in love with him.

For the first time, I was with someone who like didn't want to check my phone and didn't think that that was okay in a relationship and didn't think that it was reasonable to demand that your partner not have friends of the opposite sex, whereas that's what was normal for me. He took me on dates and really took his time to get to know me.

And he just did not treat me with the same sort of disrespect that I had always experienced previously. I had a lot of walls. It took time for him to kind of break all of that down and really like get to understand why I was the way that I was.

He's the first person I think I've ever told my entire story to. The bad things that have happened to me and all the bad things that I've done because I wasn't always innocent. I did bad things too. I wasn't a good person in that time to myself or to other people. We met a couple of months before he was meant to move to Australia. So we agreed to date casually, but that we already knew our breakup date and that would be it.

So we kind of talked about maybe just like continuing to have contact after he left. We were in the midst of talking about that when I got pregnant. I had been told at 20 that I would never have kids because I had really bad endometriosis and cysts. And I ended up having surgery right before I met my husband. And then within two months of meeting him, I got pregnant.

He still went to Australia for a couple of months. And then he came back and we just decided that we were going to give this a shot. We were going to have a baby. So let's see if, you know, what we felt was there in the beginning was really there. And for the first time, I actually trusted my gut in a relationship. And my gut said to go all in. And I did. And, you know, ended up being like the absolute best thing that ever happened to me.

That just changed everything for me. That changed my entire life. I have not done drugs since right after my daughter was born. I had postpartum depression and I had started cutting myself again. And I said, no, I don't want to be that mom that hides in her closet and cuts herself again.

So I went to my doctor and I said that I think thought I was struggling with depression. I got on medication and I did counseling and my whole world changed. I can't be someone's mom and help her, you know, through her struggles in life if I can't even ask for help when I need it. So then asking for help became huge for me.

It's been six solid years of me taking care of myself and being on medication and seeking help when I need it. And like just really being honest. And now, I mean, now I'm honest with like my family and my friends about everything. Now my family knows everything.

I've learned to just be really honest about what I'm struggling through and really honest about how I'm feeling and how things affect me because nobody benefits from, you know, keeping it to myself. And I mean, my relationship with my parents is amazing. My relationship with my siblings is a lot better. My family is a very strong unit now.

The major impact that that whole period had on me now is I feel like my eyes are very open to other people and other people's struggles and, you know, all the things that are happening behind closed doors that you don't see and all the things that are happening, you know, below the surface of someone's personality that you don't notice and

The more I learned about myself and why I let it go on and why I didn't run, the easier it became to forgive him. He did apologize to me. You know, I can't believe what I did to you. You know, are you okay? And I would just brush it off. Like, I didn't want to talk about it with him. I would just, yeah, yeah, I'm fine. Your problems are your problems. My problems are my problems. Just, you know, we're friends now. Just leave it at that.

And I would say to him, like, I hope you don't ever treat a girl like that again. And he told me, he's like, I have never hit a girl since then. I think we were both broken at that time. I really realized how vulnerable I was when I met him and how easy it was to take advantage of me. Even my husband, like, you know, kind of wonders how, like, I don't hate this person.

And he actually this this year, he contacted me just to say hi and see how my life is and just, you know, wanted to check in. And he actually had asked if we could get together him and his girlfriend and me and my husband. He said, you know, he kind of wanted to see how I'm doing. And I said, no. And he was like, oh, are you with another jealous guy? And I said, no, I didn't even ask him if he was interested in that. I'm not interested in seeing you.

And he said, why? And I said, because you're part of my past. And who I was when I knew you is not who I really am anymore. And I'm just not willing to open up that part of my life. Because he was like, well, you know, we were friends. Like, I thought you forgave me. And I said, I do. I hold no hard feelings against you. But I don't want to be friends with you. And I don't want you in my life.

That aspect of me to forgive and to try to help people, it was almost a crutch, this wanting to fix him, wanting to help him and fix him when I wasn't fixed. I was very broken and I think that's the root of it all. Now I'm not broken and I'm not lost and...

I'm a strong person. So my forgiveness now and my ability to forgive people and understand them is a strength because I'm taking care of myself. And I know that I'm of sound mind. Whereas when I'm not taking care of myself and I'm not thinking highly of myself, that forgiveness ends up being a problem and ends up hurting me instead of being a strength.

It changed the way I look at relationships a lot because that was where I realized that nobody else's happiness is my responsibility. As I get older, it just really becomes more and more ingrained in me how important it is for me to take care of me. There's some days where my kids really want my attention and I know that

I'm not in that place. And so it's like, I need to do something for me first so that I can give you my full attention. I always thought that was kind of a selfish way of thinking, but it's not selfish. It's not selfish to take care of yourself first. It's not selfish to need a day off or to need a day to yourself and to take it. You need it and you'll be a better person because of it.

I'm never going to let myself go that far away from who I am again. I know that I'll never ignore myself that drastically ever again. I now have two daughters and I'm raising them to really care about their mental health and navigate life and their emotions and to value yourself and to not be with people who don't value you. ♪

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