Life goes by

  I Will Not Beg for Love Lately I’ve learned something uncomfortable about support. It feels warm when you’re doing what everyone expects of you. It feels loud when you aren’t. When I first told my story, people rallied behind me. Survivors stand together. Don’t isolate. We protect our own. And I believed that. I still do. But the moment I said I might take a different legal route — the moment I said I wanted a structured separation instead of an immediate divorce — the tone shifted. Online backlash. Family backlash. Accusations. Assumptions. I’m being told I’m reckless. That I’m endangering my son. That interacting with my husband at all means I don’t care about what happened. That I’m choosing wrong. What people don’t see are the nights I spend writing and rewriting my goals. The journal entries I’ve torn apart trying to make sure I’m not being naive. The legal structure I’m intentionally building — primary residency, supervised visitation, court-ordered cust...

  When I first left my husband, I believed I had to live my entire life online. I thought I needed to defend myself. Tell my story. Protect other people. And yet… I still loved him. Even when he went to jail, I loved him. I cried myself to sleep at night. I would lay in bed asking, “Why do I love someone who hurt me this badly?” The truth is, leaving someone doesn’t shut off love like a switch. Somewhere along the way, anger became louder than grief. I let other voices influence how I processed everything — voices that fed the rage, the pettiness, the constant revisiting of what happened. I didn’t even notice it happening at first. I started creating content that reflected that anger instead of my own healing. A few times, I tried to step back. I said I was done talking about it publicly. I wanted to go back to who I was before everything exploded online. But I kept getting pulled back in — by people who hated him, by people who wanted revenge, by people who believed ...