Letter 010

I Miss the Person I Was Before I Met You.

Not *I miss you.*

I miss me.

Or at least, sometimes I miss the version of me who existed before I knew you.

The version who didn't analyze the silence after a text.

Who didn't know how quickly affection could turn into punishment.

Who didn't walk into rooms already wondering what kind of mood someone else was in.

Who didn't rehearse ordinary conversations before having them.

Who didn't know that a perfectly normal evening could become something else without warning.

She trusted herself more than I did afterward.

That's one of the things I miss most about her.

She didn't need three other people to confirm that something wasn't okay before she allowed herself to believe it wasn't okay.

She didn't collect evidence for her own feelings.

She didn't explain someone's behavior to herself until she'd explained away what it was doing to her.

She didn't automatically assume that if somebody she loved was hurting her, there must be something she could change about herself to make it stop.

I learned that later.

I learned how to become easier.

Quieter when quiet was required.

Apologetic when I wasn't sure what I'd done.

Hyperaware of changes most people probably wouldn't notice.

A different tone.

A shorter answer.

A door closing harder than usual.

The particular kind of silence that meant something was coming.

I became very good at noticing things.

For a long time, I thought that made me perceptive.

Maybe some of it did.

But some of it was fear wearing the clothes of intuition.

I wasn't reading the room.

I was checking whether I was safe in it.

And eventually I did that everywhere.

With people who had never hurt me.

In relationships that hadn't given me a reason to be afraid.

Sometimes alone.

That's the strange thing about what another person can teach your body.

They can leave the room and somehow the lesson stays.

So when it was finally over, I thought getting away would make me myself again.

I imagined there was an old version of me waiting somewhere.

Like I'd left her behind before all of this happened and healing meant finding my way back to her.

I wanted her confidence.

Her softness.

Her ability to believe someone without simultaneously preparing for the possibility that they were lying.

I wanted to stop questioning my own memory.

I wanted ordinary things to feel ordinary again.

I wanted to meet someone without wondering what they might eventually become.

I wanted to love without also preparing to survive it.

Mostly, I wanted to feel like me.

And that took much longer than I expected.

Because there were things I got back after you.

My home.

My body.

My standards.

My voice.

My ability to leave.

But getting something back doesn't always mean you immediately know how to use it again.

Having a voice and trusting yourself enough to use it are different things.

Having a boundary and believing you're allowed to enforce it are different things.

Being physically safe and feeling safe are different things.

Being free and knowing what to do with your freedom are different things.

I had to learn those differences.

Slowly.

Sometimes badly.

There were times I was angry with myself for not healing faster.

Times I thought you were still taking things from me even though you weren't there anymore.

I hated that.

I didn't want you to have another year.

Another relationship.

Another night I spent overthinking something harmless.

Another person paying for damage they didn't cause.

I wanted to be finished.

But healing apparently did not care about my preferred timeline.

So I started smaller.

I started believing myself.

I started noticing when I was explaining away behavior that hurt me.

I started saying no without writing an essay afterward explaining why I was allowed to say it.

I started letting people be disappointed in me.

That one was hard.

I started understanding that someone being angry with me didn't automatically mean I had done something wrong.

I stopped treating every conflict like an emergency.

I learned that I could leave a conversation and come back to it.

I learned that love wasn't supposed to require constant surveillance.

I learned that peace can feel boring when chaos has trained your nervous system to expect a plot twist.

And somewhere in all of that, something unexpected happened.

I stopped trying so hard to find her.

The woman I was before you.

Because the truth is, I can't be her again.

She didn't know what I know now.

She didn't know what she would survive.

She didn't know how many times she would mistake being wanted for being safe.

She didn't know how easily love could become an excuse for tolerating things that should never have required tolerance.

She didn't know that one day she would stop asking,

How do I make them stay?

and start asking,

Why am I trying so hard to keep someone who keeps hurting me?

I miss her sometimes.

Her softness.

Her certainty.

The way she could trust without first looking for evidence that she shouldn't.

But I don't want her life back.

I want mine.

This one.

The one I built after I learned I could.

The one where my standards aren't an apology.

Where my home belongs to me.

Where my body belongs to me.

Where somebody else's anger doesn't automatically become my emergency.

Where leaving is something I know I'm capable of doing.

Where I don't have to abandon myself just because somebody else threatens to.

Maybe becoming myself again was never the point.

Maybe there isn't a pristine version of us waiting on the other side of what happened.

Maybe we don't go backward.

Maybe we take what survived, grieve what didn't, and build from there.

There are things about the woman I was before you that I will always miss.

But there are things about the woman I became after you that she hadn't learned yet.

She knew how to love.

I know how to love without leaving myself behind.

And I think she would have wanted that for me.

So no.

I don't need to become her again.

I don't need to undo every way knowing you changed me in order to prove that I healed.

You were part of my life.

You affected me.

Some of those effects took years to understand.

But you don't get to decide what I become because of them.

That part belongs to me.

I didn't have to become the person I was before you.

I had to become someone you had never met.