I can’t always remember the words, but I can always remember the feeling. I wake up with the same dread every morning, angry and annoyed that you were there again in my dreams. But you weren’t shining that side of you that loved me more than anything in the world. Instead you were the man who was too damaged to express himself in a way that I could understand.

You always covered yourself in alcohol and treated me as if I was your slave, your other half who would always cheat on you, that would leave you or treat you badly. You were so damaged from the life before I met you or maybe handed down from your ancestral past, that you could not see what you actually had in front of you. You chose to push the closest to you, the ones who loved you unconditionally, away so that you could stay safe and not feel any pain.

You preempted your past experiences and brought them into the present, making them a continual state of who you were.

You saved the best parts of yourself for strangers. You were the good guy who went out of his way to help them, even though they weren’t part of your life. That was your protection. With them, you had the control to walk away whenever you wanted, rather than letting them get close enough to hurt you.

But the patterns that I saw and lived every day stayed inside my nervous system. Even when you weren’t doing anything I would still feel the pain of the times that you did. Reliving them through my waking moments stored them deep within my body. They lived with me on days and nights when my body was at rest. They became so ingrained in my DNA that any slight elevation of voice, look that went awry or crack of a can would send my nervous system into a state of despair.

Eventually I found operating normal tasks so difficult. Jobs were stressful, but I would take on more work just so I was so busy to think of nothing else. The stress only added to the pain that was already there. I could not look at what I was feeling and I could not change my physical environment. I was trapped emotionally, energetically and physically and I did not know how I could escape. I went through emotions and lived the loop over and over in my mind as my eternal reality.

After years of feeling this way I made my own decisions that began the ultimate demise. Eventually I chose to start over, to make a different choice. The decision that would finally change the direction of where I was and where I wanted to be.

I had no clue what I was moving toward, but I still wanted you to come with me. The experts around me all told me that the person you are with either grows with you or you will grow apart. I begged you to join me to create a life that was going to be happier and easier. Where we would not have to continue to run from both of our personal demons. We could finally face them together.

I had this conversation with you so many times and I know that you were never ready. I couldn’t force, you but I so badly wanted you to choose this. To choose me, your family and a version of you that you would finally be proud of.

My only resolve was that regardless of your choice I would need to make my own. If I was becoming a different person and you weren’t, then how do we coexist in the same space. I saw visions of me with the children living a life separate to yours and knew it was the only solution.

After you blew up about a scratch on the car, I had to have that final discussion with you. We drove to a park and I spoke of what I wanted, where I was going and how you needed to either come with me or we had to move on. You promised me that you were ready, that you wanted this as well. That you were ready to make a change.

Two days later you died.

You made your ultimate choice.

But whilst your physical body may have left, your energetic and emotional body did not. I held onto it knowingly and unknowingly. Each night you would haunt me and treat me the exact same way I had wanted to escape from. I thought I had made a choice to move toward the direction I wanted to travel in, I thought I had worked through the pain I was holding onto, I thought my nervous system was rebooted, but my dreams told a different story.

Each day I’d wake up with that same dreaded feeling of what you did to me or really what I allowed myself to feel. I had held onto this purposely I guess. Initially I wanted to feel all the pain so much that I saw it and then I could finally release it.

But I also wanted to share my experience with others, to show them what I did to live through this and how to get on the other side of it. I started writing a book after you passed away. I wanted to share the growth that I had made to inspire others. To show that there is life on the other side of tragedy. From writing about what I had lived through, I found how my feelings were all tied to other experiences of my life. How patterns are created and repeated, how choices are made over and over and how we live inside these loops without ever knowing how to break or complete them.

This book was supposed to be my final hurrah, a way to write through the somatic experience until my body finally forgot it. But it did the opposite. It locked the pain, the loss and the fears in place. As I relived each moment, the running theme of every version of myself was the death of you. I wasn’t healing. I was just holding onto the grief. I was still holding onto you.

The desire for the new version of me to appear was only a distraction so I didn’t actually feel the loss. I realised that even though I had many days sitting inside tears and pain that I had never actually allowed myself to feel it properly. The first anniversary may have been the one moment I felt it all, but the grief was still there.

From the moment you died, I used my journey of what many call a spiritual awakening as my reason for existing. Couple that with my eventual jail sentence, which then took nearly another two years of my life to deal with and the restart afterwards. All these major moments were more distractions to what was really going on.

The grief, even though painful, was making me who I was. It was my personality. I can hear people talk about their lives and whine that someone said something bad about them and I think well did your husband die? I thought of grief as the tool to show how strong I was. If I survived one of the worst things in the world, and I am still out here doing things, creating businesses and helping people, then I must be a better version of everyone else around me.

I wanted the world to feel me.

The story I was writing was the proof. I wanted to show the world what I survived. I wanted you to tap me on the shoulder and give me a high five and say good job kid. Tell me how you knew that, you couldn’t have done it, but you are glad that I did. The grief and all of my stories were who I thought I was. Everything I had created from that point was born from proving that I survived grief.

Still my dreams were telling me differently. The story I held onto is not in fact a breakthrough of life, but a chain holding me back. You died. I survived grief. There are emotions that surround that regardless of how you made me feel or how I was remembering the past.

Grief was just the catalyst. An addictive virus. It found the slightest pain or lower emotion and attached itself to it. Making every past experience feel more intense. It was inviting, like a warm hug. It became so familiar that all the pain that I felt was more welcoming than hindering.

I became blind to what I truly felt around my life experiences.

I loved you and you loved me. But you also treated me badly and I treated you badly.

I am sad that you left our life, but I am so glad that you did.

This became my living paradox that I constantly looped over and over.

I walked around presenting as this strong character who has survived horrific and traumatic events, who has the intellect to reflect and all this creativity to share. And maybe this is true, but is the story of survival what makes me, me or is it an excuse to not look at what’s really underneath?

If I drop the proof of my life, does it still exist?

Do I need to tell my story?

I woke up last week and decided that it was time to let go of the entire history that was my pain, the receipts I kept of a life that has been more eventful than others, the deep descriptions of the pain I felt, the tragedies I lived through.

I deleted my story.

The whole file.

No back up, no return.

I threw up straight afterwards. Purging the emotions I had held onto for so long. Feeling like I was living through every single moment again and all of them at once. I cried and cried and finally decided to let it all go.

You weren’t in my dreams that night. I didn’t wake up angry at you. It was finally over.

All the other pieces to who I am, I can feel them try to hang on. Memories of people from the past, events that happened long ago. My body is still releasing.

Who am I without the story as my supporting actor?

She is emerging as we speak.

I write about my life. I write about what I have learnt. I write about the patterns that I see.