I won't dress this up.There is nothing poetic about slowly losing yourself.
Staying hurt in ways that didn't leave bruises. It hurt in the quiet, repetitive erosion of who I was. In the way I learned to carry grief and groceries with the same hands. In how my needs learned to whisper because shouting had never saved me before.
Every day I told myself just one more.One more night. One more promise. One more explanation that almost sounded like hope if you didn't listen too hard.
And for a long time, that was enough.
But endurance is not love, and survival is not living.
I watched myself become smaller. Not on purpose, not all at once. I became careful. Strategic. I learned the weight of his moods and adjusted myself accordingly. I learned when to speak and when silence was safer. I learned how to keep the peace even when the cost was my own voice.
The devil doesn't ask you to betray yourself.He just teaches you it's easier.
What broke me wasn't a single moment. It was the accumulation. The missed birthdays in the same room. The apologies I made for things I hadn't done. The way affection turned transactional—earned by compliance, revoked by honesty.
And then there was her.
I saw it in the way my daughter watched me.Not the way children watch heroes—but the way they study maps. She was learning where danger lived. Learning how to navigate adults who loved imperfectly. Learning lessons I never wanted to teach.
I caught her apologizing for crying.
That was the moment the floor gave way.
Because I knew exactly where she learned that.
I went into the bathroom and locked the door and slid down against the tub like I had years before, except this time I didn't ask what I did wrong. I asked a different question—the one I had avoided because it carried responsibility.
What if staying is the thing that hurts us both?
That question cracked something open. Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just enough for air to get in.
For the first time, I let myself imagine a future that didn't require me to disappear to make it work. I imagined my daughter growing up watching a woman who chose herself without cruelty, who left not because she was weak—but because she was finally strong enough to stop begging to be seen.
It didn't make the fear go away.It didn't erase the love.
But it gave me something steadier than hope.
It gave me resolve.
I began doing small, quiet things that belonged only to me. I told the truth in places where I used to soften it. I stopped explaining myself to people committed to misunderstanding me. I paid attention to what my body had been trying to say for years through exhaustion and ache.
I wasn't healed.I wasn't brave every day.
But I was awake.
And waking up is dangerous for the devil.
Because once you see yourself clearly—once you remember that love should not cost you your dignity—you can't unlearn it. You can't unknow the weight you've been carrying. You can't keep calling a cage a home just because you decorated it.
I didn't leave all at once.But I stopped disappearing.
And that—quiet, trembling, real—that was the beginning.
Not of freedom yet.But of choosing life over endurance.
And that choice saved me.
Even before it saved her.