Choosing Ourselves First: The Power of Self-Love and Healthy Boundaries

We\don’t leave because we don’t love you, we leave because we finally love ourselves and can no longer bear the reality of being hurt by you.

It took me 18 months to come to that realization.

Maya Angelou said “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

You showed me.

Like those who came before you, you showed me over and over again while you said the necessary “I love yous” that kept me dangling from your string.

The silence was deafening. The messages clearly obligatory.

You showed how unimportant I am when you intentionally left me out of the most important moment of your life and then acted like I was a bad person for being deeply wounded.

These are the moments that break us.

You held your affection over my head as a holiday and birthday treat – one that came only as an afterthought. “Damn, it’s 8:30 p.m. I guess I should leave a message.”

For 18 months you hurt me. In that time, I lost sleep, beat myself up in ways more fierce than you and others can imagine, and doubted my very existence.

All who know me know I am not an easy person. I am, in fact, a very imperfect person – a truth admitted over the decades. I come from a loud and assertive family. We laugh loud, and we argue loud.

We stand on chairs and scream for those we love and the things we believe in.

For 30 years this served so many, including you, as I fought for everything good and right. It is what I did, because fighting is what men and leaders understand. That battle benefited you and others in my universe, providing things both needed and wanted.

This mixed in the cauldron of life with the swirl of personal battles in the background, smoke rising in tendrils. Phone calls while you weren’t home; exhausting arguments; lawyers. Your lack of awareness of these things did not mean they did not exist, just that they were intentionally hidden from you.

Funny how those I protected you from are those you dedicated yourself to, and that the very same fight that benefitted you is what you eventually used as a reason to punish me, without so much as a conversation.

Just….. silence.

Alexandra Kay said “I can’t keep pouring from a cup so empty.”

My cup is empty and yet overflows with the rejection and silence this relationship has become.

And so now, I’m done.

For the first time in 66 years, I choose me, because my mental health and life are every bit as important as yours.

This is me, walking away from the pain inflicted on me by others and finding the happiness I deserve.

This is a deeply personal article with the acknowledgement that there are so many – especially women - who have sunken into the quagmire of guilt and the acceptance of blame. We are the target of the poison arrows of disrespect that have been shot at us for generations because our culture tells us and others that everything is our fault. Fathers, husbands, children, and systems have placed the full weight of perfection and responsibility squarely on our shoulders, all while men are held harmless and revered, even in their unkindness. Women, in the meantime, have spent generations accepting blame while the fires from the wooden piles we are staked to lick at our bruised and battered bodies, both realistically and metaphorically, watching with acid tears as those fires are lit by people who say they love us.

"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent". Eleanor Roosevelt

Stop giving them consent. You deserve better.