Let Go of that Toxic Relationship - Lesson’s Learned from Heartbreak - Part 1

“Don’t light yourself on fire trying to brighten someone else’s existence”

~ Charlotte Eriksson

The above quote made sense to me many years later, after the summer I turned seventeen, but it could have been written for that first night on the bluff above South Bay. Music drifted up from the midsummer dance. Lights twinkled like a second sky and there he was, five years older, charming in a way that felt like certainty. I had been raised to admire certainty. I naively mistook it for safety.

I fell as only the young can, completely, dramatically, with all the innocence of someone who doesn’t yet know how easily love can be confused with swagger. He made big promises in his charismatic man’s voice. I believed him because I wanted to. I also believed him because I hadn’t learned that, in your early twenties, you’re often still auditioning for roles your family handed you long ago.

Before I could test our romance against ordinary life, I left on a year trip abroad with my best friend to Europe. My world opened like a breath of fresh air. We relished riding bikes along French countryside roads, drinking huge beer steins at the Octoberfest in Munich, living in a seaside cave in Matala, on Crete, to eventually landing in the alps of Switzerland where the snow fell light as feathers. We found work in Leysin, in buildings once used as sanatoriums for the ill, now turned into clubs, camps and schools. I served breakfasts and packed lunches for students coming from other countries to enjoy a week away in the alps.

The hallways were long and echoing. At night I would hear taps turn themselves on at exactly the hour when sleep falters, then the faint sound of papers being shuffled, footsteps down corridors that should have been empty. People told stories about the place, about tuberculosis patients who had once been rolled into the sun on balconies, about rooms that turned freezing in seconds or spat wallpaper from the walls like skin that refused to heal. I felt watched, sometimes, standing alone in the foyer of Les Frênes, the way I later felt scrutinized in my own life, as if something old and ungrieved were waiting for me to notice it.

Independence fit me. I skied by day, laughed by night, and I learned the contentment of paying my own way. When spring finally came and thinned the snow on the mountains, I flew home just in time for my eighteenth birthday, unsure about the boy who had written me letters was still my future.

Back home, old patterns waited. I felt small again, being back in my parents’ house, so it was easy for him to feel large. He invited me to move into a place he shared with a friend. I said yes. I told myself it was freedom. We played house. He prided himself on paying for dinners and rent, and I let him. I told myself it was generosity, but something else was happening, I didn’t notice how often I deferred or even how sensitive I was allowed to be. He praised my sensitivity as a gift but treated it like a problem to manage. I didn’t recognize that I was becoming dependent. I didn’t see how often I apologized for needs that weren’t crimes.

Two years in, he announced he wanted to travel, without me. A “boys’ trip,” he said. Marriage and children, once discussed as near, became “maybe in my forties.” His words promised devotion, but his actions pointed to the exit. 

I wish I could say I left. Instead, I clung. I told myself progressiveness meant endurance. He told me he loved me and would be back, and we’d live happily ever after. He told me so often that my body began to argue with him. Panic arrived like a weather system. I woke in the night and forgot how to breathe. My panic wasn’t random. It was my body bracing for loss, long before loss arrived. It pulled me out of the present and into a future I couldn’t control. I could “feel” the truth, his words and his actions didn’t match. I just didn’t know how to believe and trust my own senses yet.

He moved his furniture and things into my parents’ basement and left on his trip as I sobbed saying goodbye to him through the glass at the airport. His boxes were stacked back at my parents like a shrine to a future I kept alive by tending it. He mailed back film for me to develop, things for me to store, letters signed with “be happy.” I performed the role of the good partner. It kept me close to what was already leaving. Six months later his real letter arrived. He wanted to end it. Of course he did. Of course I told myself he didn’t mean it.

Denial is a strange kindness we offer ourselves when we’re not ready to clean the wounds of truth. I shrank to ninety-three pounds of ache before I could admit what my breath had been saying all along.  I finally moved out of the basement where our old life sat. I started interior design school. I learned to feed myself again, literally and otherwise. When he returned years later with a new girlfriend, he told me my old backpack, that I had lent him, had been stolen, the one covered in patches from the places that I loved the most. The symbolism wasn’t lost on either of us. He had carried parts of me I should never have given away.

We met once more. He brought me a new backpack as if to replace what was gone. There was no explanation that could undo those years. But I finally spoke. I told him what the gaslighting had cost me, how the avoidance had bruised me from the inside, how long it takes to unknot a life you’ve wrapped around someone else’s permission. It wasn’t the closure I’d imagined. It was better. It was mine.

Letting go didn’t make me smaller. It made room. The lesson was simple and hard. I am not responsible for the choices of others, only for how faithfully I choose myself. If someone won’t treat you with love and respect, their leaving is a gift disguised as loss. You will hurt. Then you will heal. You will grow new language for your sensitivity and discover it was a compass all along.

Empathic Power is the path I wish I’d had sooner, a way to feel deeply without abandoning myself.

❤ Becca