To be liberated is to acknowledge not just what you’ve experienced in life, but the role you’ve played in the experience, and your commitment to showing up differently.
I often don't talk about my friendships, relationships, or family history in casual dialogue. I've explicitly done it in a few of my published books, two fiction novels: A Liberated Son and Ashes in the Wind. And four nonfiction essays, To Heal or Not to Heal, Be Gentle with Yourself, How to Feel Your Way Through Survival Mode, and The Force of Unseen Hands. But I rarely connect my lived experience to the topics I speak about so sharply in my digital content. This is one of the times I will.
Before I do, I want to share something about the speaking itself. Tiptoeing around what's been labeled “sensitive” is its own kind of moralization. I’ve been candid and open about what I'm going to tell you for about six years now. My former partner, I'll describe, knew that before he passed away three years ago, which I found out through a Google search, when his obituary surfaced in the results. Notice that I'm even mentioning that. It sounds like grief stacked on grief stacked on grief, and it is. But because I speak about it so plainly, the anxious charge isn't part of my experience of it. The respect is still in the room. The context just becomes visible and legible. And that’s the whole point. What I want you to be able to do is meet the relationship to a thing, rather than flinching at the thing.
Over a decade ago, I was in a two-and-a-half-year private relationship with a younger white man. I grew up sequestered in a strict Pentecostal home. His background was wide open, and the contrast was part of the charge.
Things I would normally screen at hello didn't show up until after we'd quickly decided to be exclusive. A mental health history of bipolar, ADHD, and PTSD. A physical health history of steroid use, substance use, pills, and full-blown AIDS. These bled into my life in ways I had to recover from and reconcile.
Disclaimer No. 1: I want to be precise about what I'm saying and what I'm not, because this is exactly where most people stop accurately reading the situation.
This is not a judgment of him for having that history. The conditions themselves are not the problem. People live whole, honest lives with bipolar, with ADHD, with PTSD, with HIV. The problem was never the diagnosis or the status. The problem was that his relationship to that history was severely unchecked and unprocessed. He hadn't met any of it. And what's unmet bleeds into whoever gets close.
So the thing I had to reckon with wasn't his conditions. It was the unprocessed relationship to them, his and eventually mine. Being close to someone's unmet history forces you to meet your own.
It forced me to ask why I was drawn to this in the first place. And the honest answer was love bombing. The heightened sense of urgency. The spontaneity. My need to feel something more than monotony, getting activated.
The urgency felt like aliveness. The intensity felt like depth. The spontaneity felt like independence. None of those readings were true, but my system reached for them because they offered relief from a flatness I didn't want to sit in. The relationship didn't create that need. It found it, already there, and pressed exactly on it.
At the same time, both things held at once forced me to come to terms with my sexuality in a way no other connection had been able to. The harm was real. And it was also the crucible for something that finally integrated. I'm not telling you it was worth it, and I'm not telling you it cost me nothing. I'm telling you both were true in the same relationship, and refusing to collapse that into a single clean story is the only honest way I can hold it.
As my relationship to my history began to surface, I knew my time in the relationship was coming to an end. It ended, surprisingly, better than I anticipated. It was never physically abusive. Verbally, and otherwise, it was.
This is why my messages can land with a sharp intensity. It's why I'm meticulous not just about what I say, but also about how it's said and the intent behind it. When harm has reached you through words, through tone, through intent wearing the mask of something reasonable, you learn to track all three with precision because all three were once weapons.
The non-negotiables I hold now exist because they're the things I negotiated in that relationship. And negotiating them cost me. Each one is a scar with a lesson inside it. People sometimes read a firm boundary as rigidity, perfectionism, or an impossible standard. What they're actually looking at is the encoded memory of a specific harm. The firmness is proportional to the cost. That's not a bar set too high. It's a bar set exactly at the level of what it took to learn.
People can honestly disclose that they've partaken in the very things on my list and still withhold the details that context requires. They'll tell you that they did something. Whether they tell you when, and what it cost, and whether they've integrated it, is a different disclosure entirely. The first is honesty. The second is transparency. And whether their truth can actually meet and adapt with mine is vulnerability. People hide in the gap between those three, usually while calling the hiding "protecting myself."
So I'm not reaching for perfection. People assume proportionality means perfection. It doesn't. It's relative perfection. In other words, it’s just right for me and for whoever is aligned with me. It may be entirely wrong for someone adjacent to me, or invisible to me, and that's fine. They're not failing a universal test. They're simply not aligned with me, which is different from being less.
After the relationship, I had to live in the gap. I let myself go through the withdrawals. I let the grief hurt. I moved through it in ways that felt like torture. My ex had every opportunity to join me in that work and chose not to. The consequences that followed reflected not just his choices, but also the mindset, the beliefs, and the disempowering definitions that drove them.
What I learned in that gap is the thing I most want to hand you: nobody is coming to save you, and you need support. Both. The two aren't in conflict. We're capable of saving ourselves, but we need help doing so. The real challenge isn't finding help. It's understanding what kind of help you're accepting.
Help tends to come in two forms.
There's help that accommodates your despair. It feels like codependency. It's constrictive, sometimes manipulative, and it leaves you more drained than uplifted. Picture someone wrapping you in a blanket and then refusing to let you leave the couch. It keeps you comfortable in exactly the place you need to get up from.
Then there's help that reflects your wholeness. It feels calm, clear, and empowering. It isn't necessarily easy, because life rarely is. But it's easeful. Those two words are not the same. Easy is when something asks little of you. Easeful is when, even inside the hardship, you feel at peace.
When the disproportionate demands of the world bully you into constant survival mode, it gets hard to tell whether the support you're reaching for is genuinely lifting you or simply reinforcing the old wound. Sometimes the safety nets you dismiss, and the ones you cling to, are the very things showing you the pattern, and the role you've been playing inside it.
The part that's hard to hear...
It's easy to point the finger. It's easy to build a clean villain and a clean reason. What's hard is acknowledging that you're playing a role in this, while keeping the abuse story on a loop in your mind. The loop is what makes you feel helpless. The helplessness is what makes you reach for external validation. And no one likes to hear that no one is coming.
Disclaimer No. 2: Let me be specific about the responsibility I'm pointing to, because this is where people get hurt by misreading. You are not responsible for what was done to you. Nobody has control over what happens to them. The responsibility I mean is for your emotional response, and for the mental stories those responses give birth to. That's the part that stays yours. The harm wasn't your fault. The loop, afterward, is the thing you get to take your hands off of.
The codependency I negotiated in that relationship ten years ago was a wake-up call to the fear and despair I'd been feeding, consciously and subconsciously. It was also the guiding light toward everything I decided I would no longer negotiate in any connection, ever again.
None of this is about the thing, or the condition, or the diagnosis. It's about the relationship to the thing. De-moralized—which is not the same as being immoral. It's about interrogating the happiness and the safety that wants to be felt at the most basic, innocent level—and noticing, honestly, when the thing, and the story we tell about the thing, isn't actually the gateway toward that happiness and safety we keep hoping it will be.
That's the liberation I'm inviting. Not mine for you to witness. Yours, for you to take.
In the meantime and in between time, please be kind and gentle with yourself, as I do the same.
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