Today marks one week.
Seven days ago, I handed Stephen his things without knowing whether I would make it this far.
I have.
And the most surprising thing is that I haven’t spent this week battling an overwhelming desire to go back.
There has been sadness. There have been memories. There have been moments when I have missed him deeply.
And over the last few days, there has been pain.
Real, debilitating emotional pain that has made even the simplest parts of everyday life feel exhausting.
It hasn’t disappeared.
I still wake up with that familiar heaviness. I still have moments when I feel detached from everything around me, as though I’m going through the motions of living without being entirely present.
But somewhere amongst all that misery, I’ve started thinking about things I hadn’t given much thought to before.
Or perhaps I had thought about them, but never for very long.
For years, whenever Stephen did something that hurt me, one of my first instincts was to try to understand him.
Why did he do it?
What was happening inside him?
Was he frightened? Struggling? Acting from something in his past?
If I could understand the reason, perhaps the thing itself would hurt less. Or perhaps understanding it meant there was something we could do differently next time.
There was always another question.
Another explanation to consider.
Another possibility that might help me make sense of his behaviour.
I had spent years trying to understand Stephen.
And now, for the first time in a very long time, I was beginning to wonder about myself.
What had all of this done to me?
It was a question I hadn’t asked nearly enough.
What had happened to my confidence in my own judgement?
When had I become so accustomed to questioning whether I was entitled to feel hurt?
How many things had I accepted because I could understand where they might have come from?
And when had keeping our relationship together become more important than listening to myself?
I began thinking about the person I had been before Stephen.
I had been independent, capable and reasonably confident in my ability to make good decisions.
I had my own interests, my own routines, my own friendships and a life that I enjoyed.
Of course, I had my insecurities. I had my faults. I hadn’t been perfectly happy every day of my life.
But I had been happy.
I knew what it felt like to enjoy my life without needing anything particularly extraordinary to happen.
And somewhere over the course of those five and a half years, that happiness had gradually disappeared.
I couldn’t pinpoint exactly when.
There hadn’t been one catastrophic moment when I stopped being myself.
It had happened so slowly that I hadn’t really noticed.
A little more anxiety here.
A little less confidence there.
Another disappointment to recover from.
Another compromise to make.
Another conversation that left me doubting what I thought I knew.
Another part of my life quietly pushed aside because something involving Stephen needed my attention.
None of these things had seemed particularly significant on their own.
There had always been a reason for them. Something happening in Stephen’s life, something difficult we were trying to overcome, some problem that needed our attention.
And because I believed we were working towards a better future together, I had accepted so much of it as part of the journey.
But now I was beginning to wonder where that journey had taken me.
And how I had managed to travel so far from the life I once knew without fully appreciating it.
It wasn’t only my emotional life that had changed.
I began thinking about the decisions I had made because I believed Stephen and I were building a future together.
My work, for one.
I had left a job I had held for sixteen years. I had taken on another that had been incredibly demanding, and I had made decisions about my working life with the assumption that Stephen and I would be together for the rest of our lives.
I found myself thinking that if I had known how things were going to turn out, perhaps I would have made very different choices.
Perhaps I would have stayed in that difficult job a little longer.
Perhaps I would have moved closer to work, saved more money and concentrated on building greater financial security for myself.
Perhaps I would have made decisions based entirely on what was best for me, rather than what I believed would be best for our future.
I couldn’t know, of course.
And it wasn’t that Stephen had made every decision for me.
He hadn’t.
I had made them willingly, believing in the life we were going to share.
But that was precisely what troubled me.
I had made choices for a future involving two people, and now I was the only one left to live with their consequences.
I began wondering what else I might have done differently.
How much time had I spent worrying about things that never should have been my responsibility?
How many evenings had been spoiled by arguments, anxiety or disappointment?
How many opportunities had I overlooked because my attention was somewhere else?
And how much of my own happiness had I been willing to put on hold while I waited for Stephen to become happier, healthier or more settled?
I didn’t have answers.
I wasn’t even sure how to begin finding them.
But I was beginning to see that the consequences of our relationship extended far beyond the sadness of losing him.
They were woven into the life I was now left with.
There were things that already felt easier without Stephen.
I wasn’t constantly wondering what he was doing, who he was talking to or whether something else was about to happen that would turn my world upside down.
I didn’t have to interpret his moods or search for explanations.
I didn’t have to keep trying to make sense of things that didn’t make sense.
There was some relief in that.
But relief wasn’t happiness.
And hope wasn’t the same as feeling better.
I was still sad.
Still emotionally exhausted.
Still struggling with that awful physical anguish that seemed to accompany every separation.
And the absence of Stephen hadn’t magically restored the person I had been before him.
In fact, I was beginning to realise just how far away from her I had travelled.
I tried to remember what it had felt like to be genuinely carefree.
To wake up in the morning looking forward to the day.
To laugh without something troubling me in the background.
To feel excited about the future without wondering whether it might all come crashing down.
To be content with my own life rather than measuring my happiness against the state of a relationship.
I knew I had once felt those things.
But I couldn’t quite remember what they felt like.
And that frightened me.
Because what if the old me wasn’t simply waiting somewhere to be rediscovered?
What if those years had changed me permanently?
What if I had become someone who would always be anxious, suspicious or afraid of being hurt?
What if I never trusted another man?
What if I never trusted myself?
What if I had spent so long being unhappy that I had forgotten how to be anything else?
I didn’t know what to think.
Part of me could recognise that I was beginning to feel better in some ways. I was sleeping more peacefully than I had when the relationship was at its most difficult. I had moments of calm, moments when I could enjoy something ordinary without Stephen occupying my thoughts.
But another part of me felt utterly miserable.
How could both things be happening at once?
How could the absence of someone make my life easier and yet leave me feeling so desperately unhappy?
How could I know that leaving was the right decision and still feel as though something essential was missing?
And how could I have been so capable of recognising Stephen’s difficulties while apparently failing to recognise what was happening to me?
That was perhaps the question I found hardest to answer.
I hadn’t been unaware of the problems in our relationship.
Quite the opposite.
I had challenged Stephen, questioned his behaviour and spent countless hours trying to understand what was going wrong.
I had recognised things that weren’t right.
I had known when I was being hurt.
And yet, somehow, I had continued to accept a life in which being hurt had become almost ordinary.
I struggled to understand that.
I didn’t think I had been foolish.
I knew how much I had loved him. I knew how much I had believed in him. I knew how often there had seemed to be genuine reasons to hope that things might improve.
But I was beginning to wonder whether, somewhere along the way, understanding Stephen had become more important than understanding myself.
And what had happened to me while I was so busy doing it?
I wanted to believe that somewhere underneath the sadness, the anxiety, the disappointments and the compromises, the woman I used to be was still there.
But I hadn’t seen much evidence of her yet.
I missed her.
I missed the woman who had enjoyed her life before Stephen became the centre of it.
I missed her confidence, her enthusiasm and her ability to find pleasure in ordinary things.
And I wondered whether she would recognise the woman I had become.
Perhaps that was the most unsettling part of all.
I had spent so long worrying about losing Stephen that I hadn’t fully appreciated how much of myself I might already have lost.
Now Stephen was gone.
And I was left wondering whether the damage could be undone.
I didn’t expect to be happy after just seven days.
I knew that would take time.
But I wanted some reassurance that happiness was still possible.
That I hadn’t sacrificed the best parts of myself in a relationship that had ultimately come to nothing.
That the years ahead wouldn’t simply be spent recovering from the years behind me.
I didn’t want my future to be defined by Stephen any more than my recent past had been.
I wanted to feel like myself again.
But I wasn’t even entirely sure what that meant anymore.
Would I ever be as trusting as I had been?
Would I ever feel as carefree?
Would I ever enter another relationship without carrying all of this into it?
And did I even want to be exactly the woman I had been before?
Perhaps there were things about myself I needed to understand too.
Perhaps some of the reasons I had stayed for so long had been there long before Stephen came into my life.
I had begun exploring some of those questions in therapy, but understanding where a pattern came from was very different from knowing how to change it.
And right now, I didn’t feel particularly capable of changing anything.
I was simply trying to get through each day.
Perhaps that was enough for the time being.
Perhaps these recovery posts would eventually help me make sense of it all.
Not a countdown until I stopped loving Stephen.
Not proof that every day away from him was better than the one before.
But a record of what I discovered about myself when I was no longer standing quite so close to everything that had happened.
One week wasn’t much distance.
It certainly wasn’t enough to heal five and a half years of hurt.
And although I had managed seven days without going back, I knew that didn’t mean the difficult part was over.
For now, I had done something I hadn’t been sure I could do.
I had stayed away.
But I hadn’t found happiness.
I hadn’t found myself.
And somewhere beneath the small sense of achievement I felt at reaching the end of that first week was a question I couldn’t yet answer.
Had I simply lost Stephen, or had I lost the person I used to be as well?
