by ~ Kim Saeed
I knew something wasn’t right with him, with us…but I thought I could fix it. I kept telling myself he needed to be shown what true love is. According to his stories, he’d been betrayed by all of his past partners. He just needed someone that would be true to him; to show him what real love really meant.
Love. With all of its patience and forgiveness. All of its compromise and sacrifice.
All of its self-denial.
In the name of love, I tolerated things I always swore I’d never tolerate. Things that are so disgusting to me now, I feel nauseated just thinking of them.
I reached a point where I believed that whatever he did to me I deserved because of things I’d done in my past. After all, I’d told him almost everything about me. “See”, he’d say, “God is doing that to you because of ________ (insert unforgivable sin).”
Then it became, “I have to break you so you will get my point. I can only get the best out of you when you feel worthless so you can prove that you’re not.”
By the time I began to catch on to this trickery, it was almost too late to leave because of the depth of enmeshment I shared with him.
Looking back now, I wonder if I stayed because my soul knew I had brutal lessons that needed to be mastered.
Perhaps my soul intuitively understood that I had to be ambushed with these teachings over and over until I finally woke up and realized that I’d be forever in purgatory until I did something about it…about staying…about learning…about seeing that what was happening to me was really all of my worst fears and insecurities manifested before me in human form.
Every day I felt abandoned, betrayed, not good enough.
There were treacheries big and small.
There were one-time shockers that caused my world to spin as I experienced states of disbelief so traumatizing, I could do nothing more than lie down and wait for the vertigo to pass.
There were small betrayals that happened time after time, chipping away at the very core of my identity…deconstructing everything I thought I knew about relationships, goodness, and common decency.
About love.
Was this really my life? What had I done to deserve this? Was I being punished for all of my past sins and ones I’d yet to commit?
That’s what I believed for eight years.
Maybe I deserved his wrath because I couldn’t make him happy. No matter what I did to cultivate happiness inside him. No matter the amount of devotion, submission, or following his command. There must be something innately wrong with me, I began to believe, and I just don’t see it.
There’s something wrong with me. Me. What is it about me? What can I do differently? I’ll keep trying until I get it right.
I didn’t see the truth until I’d broken open completely. Until I’d been so utterly destroyed it felt my soul had died. But it wasn’t my soul that had died. My soul was being reborn.
It was my old self that died, my negative beliefs, my old thoughts… to make way for new ones. True ones.
Now I know it had to happen that way.
I had to be broken to get the point. I had to feel utterly worthless to get the best out of myself…to discover that I’m not worthless.
That’s the only real thing he ever said to me.
