Becoming Me

Some Intimate Thoughts During the Holiday

I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting during this holiday. I’ve had some time to myself and being around family and friends and seeing how supportive their husbands are has made me realise something about my own marriage that I don’t think I had fully understood before.

I’ve realised how much I lost of myself.

During my marriage, my ex-husband wasn’t supportive of me in the way I needed. I did so much on my own. I carried so much on my own. I was constantly trying to make everything work without having someone beside me saying, “I’ve got you. You can rest. Let me take care of this.”

I knew I had lost a lot of myself during my marriage, but being away this time and seeing other relationships has somehow made the whole thing much clearer to me.

And, honestly, I’ve been sad.

I think what I’m experiencing is grief.

Grief for the person I was.

Grief for the time I lost.

Grief for the dreams I put aside.

Grief for the years I spent trying to please people and making myself smaller.

And perhaps, most painfully, grief for the version of myself that I didn’t even realise I had lost.

I think some of this came from not having enough self-worth or belief in myself at the time. I allowed myself to give and give and give. I was kind. I helped. I supported my husband and his family in so many ways.

I don’t regret being kind.

But sometimes I do wonder whether I gave my kindness to people who didn’t value it.

I gave people access to me that, looking back now, they didn’t deserve.

And that makes me both sad and angry.

I think about all the things I wanted to do with my life. All the things I wanted to achieve. I don’t want to blame my ex-husband for everything, but when I look back, I realise that while I supported him and helped him pursue his dreams, I didn’t experience that same sense of someone walking alongside me and helping me pursue mine.

And somewhere along the way, I stopped thinking about my own dreams.

I lost track of what I wanted.

I didn’t have the space to think about my aspirations or explore what I was capable of.

Growing up, there were things I wanted to do. At one point, I wanted to go into the clinical field and even considered medicine. But I was working hard to look after myself, and I couldn’t afford to step away from work and go into full-time education without someone supporting me.

I never had that.

When I look back now, that makes me sad.

And I wonder whether some of what I’m experiencing is grief for the opportunities I didn’t have.

Not because I wasn’t capable.

I am a smart woman.

I’ve always been a smart woman.

I just didn’t always have the opportunity, support or confidence to explore that part of myself in the way I wanted to.

I don’t know why I’m remembering all these things now.

Perhaps I’m finally in a place where my mind feels safe enough to grieve the parts of my life that I lost.

My daughter said something to me recently that really stayed with me.

She described it as being like a flame.

She said, “Mummy, it’s like the flame is there, but you’re having to add your own fuel to keep it going.”

And I thought: that’s my life.

I didn’t have someone standing outside the flame, adding fuel to it and helping it burn brighter.

I had to keep my own flame going.

And perhaps because I was constantly trying to survive, it didn’t burn as brightly as it could have.

Now, I’m learning to fuel my own flame again but in a different way or using different method.

I don’t know if that’s the perfect metaphor, but it feels right to me.

I’m doing it anyway.

And I believe I’ll get there.

When I look back at my marriage now, sometimes it feels as though I was a completely different person.

I look at that version of myself and ask:

Who was that person?

I was so different from who I am now.

I don’t regret getting married. I wouldn’t say that.

But I do grieve the person I became during that marriage.

And sometimes I ask myself whether I could have done anything differently.

Could I have changed who I became?

Could I have stood up for myself sooner?

Could I have recognised what was happening?

I don’t know.

Looking back from the outside, it is easy to ask yourself questions like:

“Why didn’t I do this?”

“Why didn’t I leave?”

“Why didn’t I speak up?”

“Why did I allow this?”

But I have had to learn to give myself grace.

Because when you’re living through something, you don’t always see it clearly.

There were things that people on the outside may have noticed that I didn’t understand at the time.

I remember someone once making a joke that I was scared of my husband!

At the time, I didn’t think much of it.

Looking back now, I realise that perhaps I was.

There was a level of control in my marriage that I didn’t fully recognise while I was living through it.

It wasn’t always obvious.

It wasn’t necessarily something that other people could see.

But I felt it.

I felt as though I couldn’t be completely myself.

I felt restricted.

I felt frightened.

There were things I stopped doing that I had once been perfectly capable of doing.

For example, I used to drive.

Then, at one point, I became terrified of driving.

I remember having to drive my children to school on the dual carriageway.

That might sound like such a small thing to someone else, but to me it represented something much bigger. It came with trembling and being gripped by fear !

It represented the impact that another person’s control can have on your life.

It can affect parts of you that you don’t even realise have been affected.

It can make you feel incapable when you are capable.

It can make you question yourself.

It can make you lose your confidence.

And sometimes it is so subtle that you struggle to explain it to someone else.

Looking back now, I recognise that what I experienced was a form of coercive control.

And I must give myself grace for that.

I must forgive myself for what happened to me.

Not because I allowed it.

I don’t believe I simply “allowed” it.

It happened to me.

And when I look back, I realise that I didn’t have the clarity or freedom that I have today.

Someone standing on the outside might ask, “Why didn’t you do this?” or “Why didn’t you do that?”

Now, even I sometimes ask myself those questions.

But I must remind myself that I was living it, not observing it from the outside.

I was in it.

I was trying to survive it.

And perhaps I was in a kind of daze, believing that some of what I was experiencing was simply what love looked like.

That has been one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned since my divorce.

Love isn’t something you earn by constantly doing things for someone.

You shouldn’t have to lose yourself to keep someone.

You shouldn’t have to become smaller so that someone else can feel bigger.

You shouldn’t have to surrender your dreams, your confidence, your voice or your freedom to prove that you love someone.

I think somewhere along the way, I had learned that love meant giving everything you had to another person.

Now I understand that healthy love should not require you to disappear.

I can say now that what I experienced was abuse.

And even writing those words feels significant.

Because for a long time, I didn’t call it that.

I think I am still processing the trauma of that marriage.

There are things I don’t want to think about.

There are things I don’t want to revisit.

And perhaps that’s why I haven’t wanted to get married again.

But I’m beginning to understand that healing isn’t about pretending that those years didn’t happen.

It’s about acknowledging that they did.

It’s about acknowledging what they took from me.

And it’s also about recognising what I have rebuilt.

Because in the end, I had to save myself.

There was no one coming to rescue me.

And perhaps that’s one of the hardest things I’ve had to accept.

You must reach a point where you recognise that something is wrong.

You must want something different.

And sometimes, before anyone else can help you, you must decide that you deserve to help yourself.

I am grateful that, along the way, I opened to the right people who helped me see things differently and helped me recognise that what I was experiencing wasn’t okay.

Today, I am still grieving what I lost.

But I’m also beginning to see what I have gained.

I have my voice.

I have my confidence.

I have my dreams again.

I have a better understanding of who I am.

And perhaps most importantly, I’m getting to know myself again.

Maybe this is what becoming me really means.

Not becoming someone new.

But finding the woman who was always there underneath everything.

And this time, giving her the space to live.

I’m still grieving the past, but I’m looking forward to the future with Love, Faith and Hope.