“The Days I Took My Life Back”

I didn’t get relief all at once. I untangled it, thread by thread.

At first, I still jumped at his name. Still flinched when the phone lit up. Still questioned if I was the one who was broken. That’s how it works with covert abuse—you leave long before your nervous system catches up.

But then something shifted.

One morning, I made coffee.
I noticed sunlight coming through the kitchen window and felt it—for the first time in years.
And I realized: he wasn’t in the room anymore, but his voice still was.
Still twisting the truth to serve him.
Still muting me with silence.
Still making me feel crazy for things I knew to be true.

So I did something radical.
I decided to take all of me back.

I stopped defending myself in my head.
I stopped rehearsing what I should have said.
I stopped needing him to understand.

I wrote it down—every lie, every twist of truth, every manipulation—and then I burned the pages.
I walked in the woods and spoke my name out loud like a promise.
I stood barefoot in the soil and let the earth remind me:
You are not what he made you believe. You are what you remember now, but better.

Each day, I called back the parts of me he tried to erase.
My laughter. My love. My intuition. My stillness. My fire, MY LIGHT.

And little by little, I became a woman I recognized.
Not the one he dimmed.
The one I’d buried.

She was never lost. She was just waiting for me to come home. Carlin