Prologue
Who have I become?
That was the question waiting for me the morning after. Not the guilt, though there was plenty of that. Not the shame, though it was there too, sitting heavy on my chest before I was fully awake. Just that question, quiet and unavoidable, the kind that doesn’t let you look away.
The night before, I had hurt someone I loved. Not with intention. Not with memory. My body had gone somewhere without me, back to a place I hadn’t chosen, back to a six-year-old girl on a staircase in a house where the adults were unavailable and the storm was loud and someone had to hold it together. My nervous system didn’t see my girlfriend. It saw something older and more terrifying. And it responded the only way it knew how.
I didn’t remember any of it. That was the part that broke me open.
I lay there that morning sobbing in a way I hadn’t let myself sob in years. Not because of what I had done, though that was part of it. Because I thought I had lost the only person who had ever made me feel truly loved by a partner. And that thought, not the blood, not the gap in memory, not the horror of what my body had done without my permission, that was the thing that finally cracked me open wide enough to let something in.
Who have I become?
The answer, it turned out, was not simple. I had become the product of everything that had ever happened to me, every storm I had weathered alone, every person who had chosen someone else, every violation my body had survived and my mind had tried to forget, every substance I had used to quiet the noise, every relationship I had entered already bleeding. I had become, without knowing it, addicted to the very patterns that were destroying me.
I didn’t need someone to tell me what was wrong with me. I needed to understand why.
This is that story.