I’m sitting here, breathing heavy as I type this, tears threatening to spill over yet again. Today, I lost it. Completely, utterly lost it in my driveway, screaming at my soon-to-be-ex while the neighbors pretended not to watch. And you know what? I don’t even feel ashamed – I feel validated in my rage, yet simultaneously terrified of who I’ve become.
Let me paint you a picture of who I used to be: the woman who friends described as “impossibly calm,” the one who could diffuse tension with a gentle word and a soft smile. The woman who handled disagreements with grace, who could walk away from an argument with dignity intact. The one who got called in when customers were upset to defuse the situation.
That woman feels like a stranger now. Today, he took our 9-year-old autistic son grocery shopping and decided, without any discussion or agreement, to drop the divorce bomb on him. Our sweet, sensitive boy who needs preparation and careful handling of big changes. The same boy I had specifically asked to tell together, when the time was right, when we had a plan.
The rage that erupted from me was primal. Raw. Volcanic. And it got me thinking – when did I become this person? This woman who screams in driveways, who feels her heart racing at the smallest provocations, who sometimes doesn’t recognize herself in the mirror?
With my exes, arguments were… normal. They had a beginning, middle, and end. There were door slams, yes. Tears, absolutely. But then came the resolution – the sincere apologies, the meaningful conversations, sometimes even that tender makeup sex that made everything feel okay again.
But with him? There is no resolution. There never has been. Instead, there’s me, crying silently into my pillow at night, praying he won’t hear and mock my tears. There’s the morning after, where he whistles and jokes with the kids like nothing happened, while I’m still bleeding internally from wounds he refuses to acknowledge.
Eighteen years of this. Eighteen years of being gaslit, of having my reality questioned, of being made to feel crazy for having normal emotional responses. And somewhere along the line, I started to change. The calm waters of my personality began to churn and roil. I became someone who could snap at her children over small things (though I always apologize, my heart breaking a little more each time). Someone who lives in a constant state of fight-or-flight always braced for the next emotional impact.
My children don’t know the mother I used to be – the one who laughed easily and loved freely. Instead, they know this version: wound tight, quick to anger, constantly on edge. And that realization? It breaks me.
Because this version of me? The one screaming in driveways? She’s not who I am. She’s who I became to survive him. And soon, very soon, she won’t need to exist anymore.
Just look at what happened the other day – the absurd cheesecake incident. There I was, simply declining dessert because of gluten sensitivity, and it turned into yet another exhausting battle of him trying to prove me wrong about something as basic as whether cheesecake has a crust. The irony? He ended up proving himself wrong, then got angry when I laughed about it. All of this played out in front of our children, like some twisted performance where he had to demonstrate his intellectual superiority, only to fail and then sulk about it.
It’s these daily moments of madness that wear you down. The constant need to defend even the most obvious truths, to gather evidence for things as simple as the ingredients in a dessert. Eighteen years of this has turned me into someone who lives in a constant state of defensive readiness, always prepared to prove the sky is blue if he decides to argue it’s green.
We are not crazy. We are wounded. And wounds, with proper care and distance from what keeps hurting them, can heal. I’m ready to heal. I’m ready to remember who I was before all this – the woman who didn’t need to prove that cheesecake has a crust, the woman who didn’t scream in driveways, the woman who knew peace.
She’s still in here somewhere. And I’m going to find her again.
To anyone reading this who recognizes themselves in these words – who looks in the mirror and doesn’t recognize the angry, defensive person staring back – I want you to know something: You’re not crazy. This isn’t your natural state. This is your mind and body’s response to ongoing trauma, to living in an environment where peace is never truly possible. It took a few years in therapy for me to realize this. That I was not the narcissist, that I was not crazy.
The woman I used to be still exists. She’s in there, buried under layers of protective armor I had to build to survive. And I’m going to find her again, even if I have to dig through all this rage and pain to do it.
We are not crazy. We are wounded. And wounds, with proper care and distance from what keeps hurting them, can and will heal.