I read your message and locked my phone away. Then I picked it up again, opened it, and read it a second time. Then a third. Then a fourth. Each time, I seemed to find a different emotion waiting for me. First, there was anger. Then sadness. Then disappointment. Eventually, all of those feelings settled into something quieter and heavier. Defeat.

At first, I assumed it was closure. I thought it was your way of saying, I’m sorry, but I can’t be what you need me to be.The strange thing is, I think I had already made peace with that possibility long before your message arrived. I had spent enough nights wrestling with reality to understand that some people come into your life only to leave before they become what you hoped they would. Hearing you finally say it out loud would have hurt, but it would have at least made sense.

A part of me even wanted to thank you for being honest. There was a small part of me that appreciated finally being given the truth instead of another question to carry around. But gratitude felt impossible. I could not bring myself to applaud the smallest act of kindness after enduring so many moments that had felt careless. Honesty should not feel extraordinary. It should not feel like a gift. It should be the bare minimum. So while I appreciated it, I could not celebrate it.

Then the phone rang.

It was you.

And despite everything, I answered without hesitation.

The conversation felt familiar in a way that almost annoyed me. It was so easy to slip back into it, so easy to forget all the reasons I had spent days trying to let you go. My heart immediately softened. It loved wherever the conversation seemed to be heading. It loved the ease of it, the familiarity of your voice, the possibility that maybe things were not as final as I had convinced myself they were. But while my heart was leaning into the conversation, my mind was resisting every step of the way.

I could not ignore what had happened. I could not pretend that you could disappear when it suited you and reappear when you felt ready. I could not keep making room for someone who seemed unsure whether they wanted to stay. There comes a point where understanding someone starts looking a lot like abandoning yourself, and I was dangerously close to that line.

What bothered me most was when you said you knew I could never hate you. The certainty of it irritated me more than I expected. I hated how confident you sounded, as though my forgiveness was guaranteed. As though no matter what happened, no matter how many times I was disappointed, I would always find a way to understand you. It felt unfair that you could be so sure of something that I myself was still trying to figure out.

Why couldn’t I hate you?

I had every reason to.

I could make a list if I wanted to. I could point to every moment that hurt, every unanswered question, every time I felt forgotten. I could revisit the waiting, the confusion, the feeling of being suspended between hope and reality. If I truly wanted to hate you, there was enough material there to build a convincing argument.

But the truth is, I didn’t hate you.

What I hated was myself.

I hated what I had become over you. I hated how much power I had given a situation that should have been so simple. I hated how much of my peace I sacrificed trying to understand someone who seemed unwilling or unable to explain himself. Most of all, I hated the lengths I went to in order to forget you. The distractions. The rationalizations. The bargaining. The desperate attempts to convince myself I did not care when I clearly did.

For days, I walked around believing I meant nothing to you. I told myself that if I mattered, things would be different. If I mattered, you would show up. If I mattered, I would not be left guessing. Every silence became evidence. Every absence became proof. Every disappointment reinforced the story I was beginning to tell myself.

And yet, somewhere beneath all of that, my heart refused to cooperate.

No matter how hard I tried to convince myself otherwise, there was always a small voice whispering that you cared. I dismissed it constantly. I told myself it was delusion. I told myself it was wishful thinking. I told myself it was simply my heart trying to ease its own pain. But it persisted anyway, quietly insisting on seeing something good in you even when I was trying my hardest not to.

So I waited.

I waited for messages. I waited for explanations. I waited for effort. I waited for some sign that the connection I felt had not existed entirely inside my own head. I kept waiting for someone who, from my perspective, simply was not showing up.

And after a while, I started feeling foolish.

I would catch myself checking my phone and immediately feel embarrassed. I would replay conversations and wonder what exactly I was searching for. I would sit with my own disappointment and think, What are you doing? Why are you still doing this?

That may be the hardest thing to forgive. Not what you did, but what your absence convinced me to think about myself. The way I started measuring my worth against your willingness to show up. The way I allowed your inconsistency to become a reflection of my value. The way I slowly began questioning things about myself that had nothing to do with me at all.

And after all of that, after the waiting and the confusion, after all the nights spent trying to make sense of things that made no sense, after all the moments I spent feeling unwanted, unseen, and insignificant, you simply get to say you’re sorry?

You simply get to arrive with an apology after I have already carried the weight of everything that made the apology necessary.

I think that is what hurt the most. Not the apology itself, because I genuinely believe you meant it. Not even the fact that you were sorry. What hurt was realizing that while you were apologizing for a wound, I had already lived through it. I had already spent days bleeding from it. I had already questioned myself because of it.

By the time the apology arrived, the damage had already done its work.

There are some pains in life you convince yourself you have outgrown. Certain heartbreaks, certain humiliations, certain emotional collapses you swear will never find their way back to you once you become older, wiser, more self-aware. You tell yourself that experience alone should have made you immune to this kind of unraveling. That at this age, after everything you have already survived, you would know better. You would choose better. You would protect yourself better.

And yet somehow, here I am.

I never imagined I would have to sit with feelings like this again, let alone write about them. It feels almost absurd to admit it out loud, because a part of me genuinely believed this chapter of my life had closed years ago. Not like this. Not with this intensity. Not with this familiar ache that quietly settles into your chest and turns even ordinary moments heavy. It simply was not supposed to happen again.

But it did.

There are moments where it feels as though my entire world has tilted slightly off its axis. Not in the catastrophic, life-destroying way it once did years ago, perhaps because time has made me stronger, or maybe because experience has taught me how to survive pain without completely falling apart. But even then, there is something deeply humiliating about discovering that you can still be wounded this way. That you can still care this deeply. That despite all your caution, all your self-awareness, all the walls you carefully built over the years, another person can still reach into the softest parts of you and leave you questioning everything.

What makes it worse is that none of it feels entirely irrational. I wish I could dismiss it as insecurity or overthinking, something imagined and exaggerated by fear. But there are facts. Fragments of truth I cannot unsee, details I cannot comfortably explain away no matter how desperately I try to. And so I find myself suspended between denial and acceptance, between wanting to protect my peace and wanting to hold onto the version of reality that hurts less.

It is an exhausting place to exist in.

Still, I am trying very hard not to punish myself for being human. Because despite everything, despite how embarrassing vulnerability can feel when things do not unfold the way you hoped, there is nothing inherently shameful about caring deeply. There is nothing pathetic about wanting something wholeheartedly and pursuing it with sincerity. We live in a world that often glorifies emotional detachment as strength, as though loving carefully is somehow wiser than loving honestly. But I do not believe that anymore.

To feel deeply is not weakness. To try, despite the risk of disappointment, is not foolishness. To place your heart into something and hope for tenderness in return is one of the most human things a person can do.

And perhaps that is what I am trying to remind myself now: that even if this leaves bruises, even if it unsettles me, even if it forces me to confront parts of myself I thought I had long mastered, it still does not make me weak for having cared.

You want to know pain?

I will tell you about pain.

For a long time I was getting more and more frustrated every day, living in a constant state of uncertainty. Waiting for the floor to fall through at any minute. It felt like walking on a tightrope when my balance was already awful.

I was fighting for my life.

But I knew I loved him. I knew I loved him enough to put myself through it. And somewhere in the back of my mind I believed that if I could survive the mess we were in, we would eventually reach a happier place together. A calmer place. A place where everything would finally make sense.

I thought that would be our forever.

So I pushed myself to be strong. I told myself to be patient. Even when I knew I was betraying myself in the process, I believed it would be worth it. I believed he would eventually love me enough to make up for everything I had endured.

I was so certain about my love.

The only thing I was never certain about was whether he would choose me.

Until the very last minute, I did not know.

He prolonged the uncertainty. He delayed decisions. He let the tension stretch day after day while I carried emotions that were heavier than anything I had ever carried before.

Eventually, like any human being pushed to the edge, I imploded.

And the worst part was that I imploded alone.

I was isolated even in my collapse. I was not loved in that moment. I received very little compassion. When I think about it now, it still hurts. I remember feeling like I was being buried underground, like sand was being thrown over me while I was still breathing beneath it.

I felt lower than low.

I felt more alone than I had ever felt in my life.

For two days after that moment, I sank deeper into myself. I tried to stay afloat, but it felt inevitable that I would drown.

And in that darkness, instead of being lifted up, I was given even more pain.

You know the phrase about kicking someone when they are already down? Even that does not fully describe the hell I experienced.

Eventually I stopped fighting.

I needed escape. I needed relief. I needed anything other than the unbearable feeling sitting in my chest.

Anything but that.

So at 3:40 in the morning, on the 25th of November 2024, I did something I had sworn I would never do again. Something I had not done in over a decade. Something I had always been too afraid to repeat.

But that night the pain was greater than fear.

And I bled.

I watched myself bleed. I watched the pain sink into my body and, for a moment, I allowed myself to become numb.

I did not think it through. I was not in a place where thinking was possible. I just needed to escape the awful way he had made me feel. His abusive words were still ringing in my ears. I was still in disbelief that after all the love I had given him, this was how I was being repaid.

And then suddenly it was too late.

Blood stained the pages that should have been filled with ink. A strange, dark aesthetic formed in front of me. My pain had created its own visual memory.

A tragic snapshot of the moment.

But the thing is, it did not stop.

I thought it would stop. It did not.

That was when panic set in.

What do I do now? Who do I call?

And the truth was that I had no one.

I certainly could not call the person whose words had pushed me so far into that darkness.

So, terrified, I pulled myself together and went to the emergency room alone.

I had to. I did not have a choice.

Calling a cab and walking into that hospital was one of the most humiliating moments of my life. I felt helpless. I felt ashamed.

Why did I do this? How did I let myself fall so far down?

Had I not promised myself years ago that I would never return to that place?

Had I not promised my younger self that we would do better?

Oh God. I am so sorry.

I walked into the ER and showed them my wounds.

I was not prepared for the look in their eyes. The pity. The sadness. The concern. I was trying so hard to appear strong despite the obvious state I was in.

They treated me quickly and with care.

They asked about my mental health history. I told them the truth. That I was already on SSRIs. That I had both a psychologist and a psychiatrist. That I was trying to do the right things to stay well.

For the first time in a long time, doctors did not disappoint me. For the first time it felt like someone understood that pain can exist even when you are trying your best.

But it did not change the reality.

I needed eight stitches.

Eight stitches for one moment of collapse.

I left the hospital around six in the morning. They were hesitant to send me home alone, but they did.

He knew what had happened.

But he could not come.

Instead he was angry.

He eventually came to see me that evening, around seven o’clock. The compassion felt half hearted. And in that moment I realized something devastating.

Even my life felt like it carried very little value.

What made everything worse was what followed. Somehow rumors began spreading. I was taunted for what I had done. I was accused of doing it for attention, as if pain like that could ever be a performance.

Nothing could have been further from the truth.

But who would know?

Who would ever truly know what I felt that night? What it took for a person who had fought so hard to stay strong to finally collapse?

The truth is that no one can love you enough to save you from yourself if you are the one choosing to drink poison.

And that realization was its own kind of pain.

Living through that moment. Hiding my scars for months. Trying to love myself again after feeling betrayed by my own hands.

Time has a strange way of softening memories. One day I will forget exactly how it felt to be sitting on that floor.

But the body remembers.

The body remembers everything.

It remembers the pain. It remembers the moment you broke. And it remembers the moment you chose to survive.

And strangely, when I look back now, I do not only see weakness.

I see strength.

Because if I had not stopped where I did that night, I might have done something even worse.

And the fact that I stopped there tells me something important.

Even in the darkest moment of my life, some part of me still chose to live.

[From the Diaries]

The way this year started, I should’ve known not to hope for anything more.

It started with this feeling: a tight knot in my chest, nerves pulling at each other, my body showing all the signs of discomfort. A never-ending anticipation of things going from wrong to worse. A constant cycle of terrible and utterly disheartening surprises.

That was the start of this year.

It’s September now. My heart is in a bigger mess than it used to be. The pain is the same, but I’m sabotaging myself more. Maybe I just got tired of being good.

When I felt this way at the end of last year, that’s when life nearly collapsed. I had someone with me who would love and comfort me. But for reasons I will never understand, none of that seemed comforting.

I’m a fully grown adult who has managed every crisis I’ve ever come across on my own, and believe me, there have been quite a few. But this time, for some reason, it felt heavier. Like I could no longer pick myself up off the floor. This time it felt like me against the world.

And in all my adult years, I did something I had never done before. I called my little brother for help. I asked him to come because I wasn’t feeling well. I hoped that if I talked to him, I would feel a little better.

I think it helped. But it didn’t take away the sorrow.

This year was always meant to be shitty. It’s my fault for believing it would be different.

I will tell you this though: being knocked down when you’ve been nothing but good hurts your soul. But when you start to feel like maybe you did something to deserve it, it attacks your mind instead of your soul.

Both are personal hells.

And I don’t know which one I would choose if I had the option. Probably the one that rids me of any guilt, because these days guilt has become my poison.