After Facebook went down last week, I’ve been exchanging numbers with a lot of you, and I’ve been amazed at how many of you are still reading this blog. I feel that I have a lot to explain. Like I said in my last post, a lot of these things were obvious to my friends, but not to me. I was oblivious to many of the signs of trouble with my relationships. Letting go and moving on has meant looking back with improved clarity, but in doing so, I’ve managed to repeat my own trauma patterns, too. More than one person has reached out to me and said I need to break the cycle.

I was shocked this morning to see my own pattern of slipping into deep waters at the beginning of every October for the past eight years. October 2013, my parents kicked my sibling and me out. October 2014, I came forward here about my parents’ abuse. It’s October 2021, and as if on cue, there’s a new post on this site talking about how I’ve just escaped another bad situation. I’m amazed that so many of you have been so kind and understanding when I reached out. I feel that I’m hanging on by a thread of trust, though. I spent so long justifying my last relationship, and now I’ve taken time away from it, and my whole perspective has changed. Again.

We repeat the same patterns in our lives, and breaking the cycle is never easy. At the height of our fight, a friend even tried to mediate by appealing to this fact with me. I understand that trauma is playing a role, and I am not an innocent hero up against a villain. At the same time, looking back, I realized that there was nothing left between us to fight for. Unfortunately, outgrowing someone means loss on both ends. The blowup was so classic, so textbook, that a lot of people saw it coming. The two of us were too busy spinning into each other, too busy picking up speed. I was too deeply codependent to hear the warnings that I was collapsing into trying to care for others at the expense of myself.

I cannot thank you all enough for hanging in there with me. It means my survival and livelihood. Thank you for your continued support, care, and kindness. I don’t know where I would be without it.

I need to step away from the blog for a while. I will try to post again next month, and keep my Patreon patrons updated. But I need to break this cycle for myself, and part of that is recognizing what my own baggage and trauma did to this relationship and the decisions I made surrounding it. For now, I’m reaching out to people again who I fell out of contact with over the past five years.

I’m also taking precautions not to fall for this kind of thing again. Part of that means I need to stop talking about all of this on my blog immediately when it happens. That’s an old habit I picked up from my dad, if we’re being really honest here. I grew up thinking my life was a spectacle, so I made it more so, and now I am living with the consequences. Thank you all for reading along, and for your patience as I work on other things.