I Fell Out of Love With Myself

A breakup caused my emotional death

“Leave him before he destroys any more of you,” she says. The words slap me through the phone. I know she’s right. I hear the desperation in her voice. The urgency to save me.

Tracey feels me slipping away.

I feel it too.

I just can’t stop it.

I pace the driveway still listening to her. But my thoughts are elsewhere. The echo of my youngest son still rings in my ear. “You’re not the same, you’re not you anymore,” he says.

How do I tell them I don’t like myself?

That I’ve fallen out of love with myself?

Not just love, out of like, out of everything good.

I can’t. Instead, I pretend to be me. I walk with this overwhelming secret, I am uncomfortable in my own body. It moves ahead of me.

I mourn myself.

Because I know it’s too late.

I’ve suffered an emotional death.

Despite my living masquerade, some people realize I’m a goner. I ignore them because acknowledging I’ve lost my fight makes it real. Yet the permanence brings those who pay their respects.

“We’ll miss her.”

“What a shame.”

“Let’s remember her the way she was.”

Of course, a few aren’t able to attend. The people who believe a divorce of two, no longer makes one worthy. Like the other sock lost to the dryer. But they don’t interest me. It’s not them who has brought about my demise.

I have done that.

I, the misguided girl who believes saying the kind of things even four walls shouldn’t hear, is the price of rescuing my family. The more my husband drinks and upsets us, the more his bad behavior becomes my own.

I stay until I unconsciously surrender myself.

For a man who’s willing to watch the sacrifice.

I wallow in the shallow end of this pool.

I can’t love this less-than person I’ve allowed myself to become. The grotesquely distorted caricature, nothing like the good-intentioned girl who drew her.

For the first time in my life, I am not at peace with my being.

But Tracey, my son, and others are begging me to fight.

I am on the phone again, this time with another old friend. I’m not sure why I share my sensitive contraband with him. Maybe because he lives far away or because I know he’s one of the few people who will always love me. Not in a romantic sense, but in a childhood bond that cements the best version of me.

“I don’t like myself,” I say.

“I never knew a Colleen who wasn’t confident,” he says.

“Well, let me introduce you to her.”

It’s a relief, my insecurity escaping to another.

I can breathe.

This self-loathing is exhausting. The girl who used to be obsessed with others is now immersed strictly in herself. It’s a consuming pastime. One I’d love to relinquish.

The two opposing forces of myself fighting for their survival.

My emotional origin and my emotional death.

He is right, I have always been confident.

It’s not as if I pranced around like a homecoming queen. Well, except for the time I sported my Jennifer Aniston cut. I might have strutted a bit then.

But I was comfortable in my skin, blemishes and all. The good and the bad. The charm and the faults. The successes and the failures. The strengths and the weaknesses.

I was solidly me.

I grew up the youngest of five. My mom didn’t mince words. I was loved. I was special. I was talented. I was captivating. I was wondrous.

I believed her.

I lost that.

I didn’t protect it.

I was reckless with myself.

And for the first time in my life, I felt an agonizing absence of love. The very thing that makes us feel good about ourselves was missing. There is an unmistakable irony to loving someone else until I didn’t love myself.

I irresponsibly walked away from myself.

Like many do because of divorce, illness, injury, loss, or trauma.

I struggled to believe I still existed.

When we lose something, we go looking for it and retrieve it. But emotionally humbling experiences sneak upon us. Before we know it, they threaten to destroy rather than shape us.

Staying with my husband wasn’t bringing out the best of me.

It was losing the rest of me.

There’s a danger in abandoning ourselves. Leave that to others. Let them go. Wish them well. Don’t fight for them. Don’t say things even four walls shouldn’t hear. Don’t let their bad bring out your worst.

Don’t fall out of love with yourself.

Like the sock lost to the dryer…

They won’t be the ones who show up to mourn you.