My Invisible Heart

2022 will always be a difficult year in my memory. Not necessarily because of the things that happened in it, but because it was this year that my eyes were truly opened to the reality surrounding some of the people who were and still are - at least by blood - the closest to me.

I expect, at the outset, not to be understood by those close to me. It is a universally established truth that most people would rather stay asleep in the comfort of a lie than be painfully awoken to an undesirable reality. It is also true that we are at some level hardwired to love and defend and take the side of our families, because blood is thicker than water. But sadly, when that allegiance is blind - when it means defending and excusing those who behave badly while dismissing those hurt by them - that loyalty has gone too far.

In March 2022, I came to know that my brother “Josh” is an alleged rapist. Alleged by someone I believe to be very credible. Not only did he drug, take advantage of, and rape a girl he met through his social media platform, she actually became pregnant and had an abortion. She went on to file a Title IX allegation against him which is currently ongoing, and it is my understanding that her report was matched to at least one other report previously filed against him for sexual misconduct.

This is coherent with what I know of Josh: he sexually abused someone I love dearly during our childhood. He shows no moral compass and lies prolifically. He built an entire social media following and got the fame he has today by telling lies about how he had overcome abandonment by his family and faced a period of homelessness, which is absurd seeing as he both moved out and cut contact with our family on his own terms and was only homeless if you consider living at other people’s homes for months to years rent-free to be homelessness.

It sickens me to watch him lie to the whole world, even involving some of our more distant relatives who don’t know our family well enough to see through his lies. He is a wicked, dangerous, and completely self-absorbed individual, and being hard-working and successful doesn’t atone for being a sociopath and a rapist.

But most of the time, wicked, deceitful people are not simply born that way. They are made. There is a thread weaving through all the most tragic, regrettable circumstances in my immediate family history, and it has come - sadly - through my own mother.

I do not believe there is anything that can ever fully take away a child’s desire to love and be in a healthy relationship with their mother. That desire remains so strong that for many years I practically worshipped my mother, as I’m sure she appreciated. Even as the cracks began to appear and adulthood gave me increased exposure to healthy adult emotional behavior, I still loved my mom and believed that she just had a few blind spots or areas that needed improvement.

But after several fits and starts, it became apparent to me that trying to be loved or understood by my mother is like trying to see your reflection in a wall. The personal things that I trusted her with were, on many occasions, later used as areas of weakness to specifically attack and cause distress. Over my life I have seen her behave in ways I have never seen a well-adjusted member of society act - screaming on a frequent basis, accusing, seeking to cause hurt, withholding affection, giving the silent treatment as a way of “punishing” anyone who drew attention to her bad behavior, and worst of all, enjoying it. After an extremely petty situation 2 years ago, the details of which are really too silly to go into (in short, I left something of my mom’s out in the rain unintentionally for 10 minutes with no resulting damage), she escalated this into a situation in which she spoke viciously to her roommate at the time and in the aftermath refused to take responsibility for her behavior entirely. We did not speak beyond the occasional email for nearly 4 months. My mother has proven repeatedly that whether she is involved in my life or not means very little to her by her very minimal investment in our relationship, even in the absence of conflict. Being “right” or rather, believing herself to be right is much more precious than any family relationship.

Again, as I am writing this, it has been over five months since my mother and I have spoken in any meaningful way. Five months ago she calls me, and not five minutes in has - out of the blue - questioned me of being a lazy procrastinator. “Tell me the truth, do ANY of your coworkers struggle this much to get their work done?” Spoken in a condescending tone that says she can’t wait to hear me squirm when I admit I am the only one.  (I am far from the only one and have explained many times the difficult situation our staff faces at work.) She is aware of this, yet goes and paints this struggle in my life as one of my own making - my own moral failure. When I tell her her behavior is completely hurtful and unacceptable, she simply refuses to answer. Lets the line go silent without hanging up. After a few minutes of trying to give her a chance to speak, I have no other option but to end the call. An hour or so later she texts me - “Sorry you’re stressed, but those things you said about me aren’t true. I don’t accept them. We can talk sometime when you’re feeling less stressed. But not tonight.”

She can yell and name call and say horrid things about her roommate and about me, but that’s not her fault. She can call me up and pick a fight within 5 minutes by asking an insulting question for absolutely no reason other than a desire to see the worst in others, but that’s my fault. If her behavior upsets me, it’s not her behavior that’s wrong, it is always, always my fault for being upset. That’s not a house of mirrors I’m willing to live in.

A house of mirrors distorts everything that is reflected in it, and I see - more clearly now - how my mother has always distorted the narrative.

It hurts me to write this, but a frequent refrain in my childhood memories is what happened late at night. Late at night, mom and dad would fight. Dad would raise his voice, but mom would scream. If you imagined the most hateful, passionate accusing shriek that should somewhat do the trick. It’s how I imagine the lady from the woman vs cat meme would sound in video. Mom has before told me the story of how embarrassed she was when I proudly went around at age 2 at a family party saying “You pig!” because she knew it would be obvious where I had learned that behavior. She was embarrassed for herself, and was reminded to watch her speech. Not a bad takeaway, but I have yet to hear her express any concern for how it might have affected me to go to sleep to the lullaby of her hateful screaming. Things changed dramatically when I was 10. The day before my father died, I was upset with him about something. I think it was him embarrassing me at the public pool with his manic antics. He made me hot chocolate and sat down on the couch with me and I don’t know what all he talked about but there was a brokenness in his face and I’ll never forget him saying, “It’s been 18 long, hard, years of marriage.” I don’t know if he knew then how close his marriage was to being over. But we lost him the next day, after my mother felt it was reasonable to leave my father in a manic state, immediately after a 3 am fight, highly upset, and alone. And may I add, unmedicated. Medication was not something he ever wanted to take, but neither was it something she encouraged for him. Mental illness is a punishment for sin, it is the consequence of a guilty conscience, she would express.  The cure was prayer and being right with God.

My mother never took any of us to therapy after our father died. Instead she comforted me by telling me how it was really for the best that our dad had died, our lives would be better now that he was gone, and that God was rewarding her faithfulness to her marriage vows (by killing my dad off so she could be free of him without divorcing him). I loved my mom and so, as disgusted as I feel to say this, I believed and agreed with her. In the time that I have been alive, my mother has never been without someone to be a punching bag, a proverbial scapegoat, someone to pawn all of her problems off onto. From my birth until age 10, that was my dad. After he passed, at some point it became my brother Josh. The way things worked in our family was that there wasn’t really much in the way of emotional love, or heart connection. About the closest thing to that was Mom’s “approval.” Sure there were hugs and “I love you’s,” there just wasn’t much of the kind of stuff that makes that feel genuine. The way you got the most approval was by being the most like my mom, the most compliant, the most well-behaved, the most like her. Josh was, and by a long shot, the least like her.

Growing up, Josh was mischievous and got his share of spankings and then some. I think the seeds of deep dysfunction were there from the start but there was a period of time, really up until about the time I went off to college in 2011, where his dynamic with my mom was not nearly so dark. Retrospectively though, this is around the time he began perpetrating sexual abuse. Further into his teens things became very rocky and I was deeply disturbed at how bad the dynamic had become at home when I would come back for breaks. Around that time I had begun using an audio recorder at college for my classes. The way my mom and brother would talk to each other in the kitchen at the breakfast table no less was very inappropriate to me and so I essentially said, “If you guys are okay with talking to each other this way, then it shouldn’t be a problem if I record it.” With their knowledge, I recorded a number of conversations during 2013/2014 while visiting from college. Only recently, with fresh and distanced ears could I really hear how badly each one treated the other. Josh picked fights constantly, never missing a chance to provoke, manipulate, and spin things around in his favor. His ability to create a 60 minute issue out of the most minor things is almost an art form. My mother either would not or could not put him in his place, seemingly completely reactive and always playing defense rather than offense in their conversations. Unable to skillfully converse with him, her weapon of choice was either telling him he was wrong (not that he cared) or cutting him down and saying incredibly demeaning and disheartening things to him. In the same way that my mother spoke nothing but badly of my late father virtually every time we talked about him, there was more than one conversation in which she and the other siblings all agreed, nay, took for granted that Josh was the problem. Josh was persona non grata. I don’t think I doubted by the time of these recordings that Josh had a problem. What I was surprised by, years later, was how appalled I was at the things my mother said to him. A relationship between a parent and a minor is not an equal one. Although my brother was an extremely difficult child, that in no way excuses my mother’s constant outbursts, terrible example, and complete failure to demonstrate any emotional maturity. She gave full expression to everything she thought about him (99% negative) with no thought of how it must feel as a child to be verbally gut-punched by your only parent. I was told he ended their relationship after she told him he was going to hell, or going to burn in hell, something to that effect.

And now she is back to the drawing board - one punching bag dead, the other punching bag estranged. (Another punching bag/roommate driven off.) I don’t believe she has a single punching bag now so much as an uncomfortable void, a lack of people to absorb her deep darkness and negativity. And so she calls me up on a peaceful Sunday night with her sleeves rolled up and the gloves on.

But this time, the call won’t go through.

Although wordy, this essay is necessary to begin to capture some of the breadth and depth of deep dysfunctional patterns in my immediate family. I have come to understand that my mother fits the description of a covert narcissist, someone who, definitionally, lacks empathy and is unable to truly connect their heart to another person’s heart. My mother could not do this with her spouse or any of her children. She is unable to take responsibility, genuinely reflect, or give an unprompted genuine, heartfelt apology. She believes she is always right, and if not perfect, “did the best she could.” (I highly disagree with the notion that she could not possibly have behaved better than the type of behavior I witnessed for 18+ years - that’s a bold claim for anyone.) But in spite of all these things, my mother does not wear the typical gaudy mask of classic narcissism. Covert narcissism is the same self-absorbed inside with a different exterior: solitary, brooding, forever playing the victim and seeing themselves as misunderstood.

I don’t think I need to explain to anyone what type of narcissist Josh is… he pretty much wrote the textbook on that one.

I continue to unlearn and deprogram from the things my mother told me growing up:

You’re more spiritual than the other kids at church. People who let their kids watch Harry Potter and play in marching band and listen to rock music aren’t real Christians.

I’m concerned that band has become an idol in your lives. I don’t think I’m going to let you participate in the future. (Followed by weeks of sheer terror trying to talk her out of forbidding us from the one extracurricular outlet we had and loved.) This emotional terrorism happened on multiple occasions.

Trash-talking our relatives. Despite the fact that all of them were/are extremely kind and generous to our family. Calling them materialistic, worldly, criticizing their parenting, etc.

Telling my dad I was getting chubby around age 8 or 9.. after which I went the whole summer eating only one meal a day and had actually lost 3 lbs at my annual checkup the next year.

Demonizing all fat people and saying they aren’t real Christians (but I’m thin, I fast twice a month, etc). Always stressing the importance of being and staying thin

People (esp men) only go for looks. That’s why no one likes me or understands me, just because they judge me for my looks. They’re all shallow.

Using Christianity as a reason to feel superior to other people, even if subconsciously. Because she sure as hell looked down on other people and encouraged me to as well.

If people dislike you, it means you’re doing something right. And if you’re a Christian, doesn’t matter what it is you did that they don’t like, they definitely are persecuting you because you’re a Christian!

And more quality content:

When I was struggling with bad anxiety one summer in college: “I don’t know how to help you.”

Anytime I want emotional support: “This isn’t really something I can help you with. At your age you need to learn to rely on God.” Translation: You’re over 18, my job is done, I can’t - and what’s more - have no desire to share your emotional burdens

When I was under a ton of stress my first semester of grad school and having panic attacks: “Are you sure there’s not some hidden sin in your life?” Interestingly, the onset and end of the panic attacks correlated precisely with my time in grad school. I guess my sin was studying too much?

When I was experiencing imposter syndrome in grad school: “You may be right.  Maybe you have bitten off more than you can chew.” Not, “remember the ways you’ve overcome in the past and the hard things you’ve done” but “yeah, you may have a point there. Maybe you should quit.”

Having a casual conversation about the possibility of her watching my children someday: “What makes you think I would want to? They’ll probably be brats”

Three months ago, I turned 30. If I live to a ripe old age, a full third of my life will have been warped and darkened by the endless vortex of negativity and projected self-hatred that a person with narcissism brings to the table. That is quite enough for one lifetime. I have accepted the reality that narcissism is not a problem which can be fixed, it is a permanent mental prison for the narcissist - a prison they have locked themselves in and refuse to leave. I wash my hands, because the Lord knows, I have tried. The Lord knows who suffered during our first estrangement. And I know who sat back, enjoying a break from the obligation of talking to me, enjoying the power trip of having the leverage to hurt me. The Lord who made us knows that there are needs in our hearts that go much deeper than mechanical motions of putting food on the table and clothes in the closet. And when the one person capable of meeting those fundamental emotional needs to be seen, understood, and unconditionally loved, does not meet them, that - to say nothing of the death of the other parent - is a massive wound.

I feel very confident in saying at this point in my life, that both my brother and my mother are narcissists and abusers. I feel sympathy for my brother in that our mother did emotionally abuse and mistreat him, but I realize this was a multifactorial issue and ultimately he has chosen to become an abuser himself, repeating the cycle. I do not excuse him.

Neither do I excuse my mother. My mother has suffered, mostly because of the consequences of her own choices, which she frequently seems to miss. She did not lose a spouse and become a widow in some freak accident. She married a highly mentally ill man, did not insist on proper treatment for his illness, and left him in an extremely vulnerable state, after which he ended his life. Choices have consequences. Raising 4 children alone takes strength, and she did well on paper with a good support system. But no amount of physical care and education makes up for the complete emotional vacancy in our lives. But honestly, the stuff she did right WAS the hard stuff. What’s not (or shouldn’t be hard) is to be kind. To have conversations with your kids, get to know them, care about them, love them, be wiser than them in the arena of human relationships and interactions. Instead my mother showed me how to fight, how to judge, how to be defensive, how to hate, and how to deal with conflict by giving the silent treatment. Ultimately, her failure to ever develop emotionally as a person made her a devastatingly poor parent in terms of emotional intelligence. Emotionally I was an orphan from the age of 10 on. Despite a very rocky start after leaving the coop at age 18, 11 years later I can say I have a much better grasp on human emotion and relationships. There are huge bumps in the road but I’m learning because I want to and am committed to break these patterns. Meanwhile, my mother has not moved from the level of emotional maturity she had when I left home. Her dysfunctional narcissistic manipulations continue over and over as though I’m too dense to pick up the pattern after this long.  And so our worlds drift ever further apart.

In conclusion, as I said at the outset, I expect to be misunderstood. People understand abuse when it is physical, but emotional abuse is much more difficult to believe or take seriously. It is more easily brushed off. But God knows I have told this account honestly. And I know that those who know - not one or two, but every member of my immediate family - have described the experience of living with my mom as a difficult one and shared the same sentiment that her behavior is far, far outside of what is normal or healthy. A few extended family and friends have gotten close enough to observe this pattern as well. But my mom does have a distinct public vs private persona and tends to fly under the radar of most.

When my frustrations with my mom’s behavior began to mount in the past five or so years, I did many mental gymnastics to justify her seeming inability to grow or change. Any honest conversation where I brought up a concern about XYZ behavior being hurtful would be turned around and reflected back on me. Instantly she would shut down and begin accusing me of things. (I now know this is a classic pattern of communication with narcissists, called DARVO by therapists - deny, accuse, reverse victim and offender.) I thought maybe my mom was just “wired different” and perhaps she’s not really able to see her behavior for what it is, so maybe I should cut her a break. And then suddenly this year, the quite obvious realization dawned on me. She only reserves her worst and cruelest behavior for those closest to her, those whom she senses “cannot leave” or are somehow obligated to her. A family relationship is one in which she can act as badly as she likes, given the comfortable security that we will still be there when the screaming stops. The public never sees this side of her, because she knows it’s wrong to treat people that way and she would be held accountable.

It occurred to me this year, and it was a very sad realization, that I do not have any chosen friendships or even acquaintanceships with people who behave as badly towards me as my mother. Short of one crazy ex-roommate in grad school, I have never had the pleasure of being as despised and belittled as I have in conversations with my own mom. The one person who should cherish and support me unconditionally and always have my back is sadly incapable of being a cheerleader for anyone, including her own children. She enjoys power and control, which she now has little of seeing we are grown and also out of her tightly controlled worldview. This phase of being a parent has little in it for her that she wants - she has to maintain a relationship with us (something she never did much of growing up) while simultaneously having no control over our decisions. But I am still useful for a few things. I am a decent punching bag, on occasion. I am close enough to be a target for her negativity.

I can recall many times where the good mood I was in was ruined in mere moments by something my mom said. Short of times where she simply passively listened and let me talk out my problems without any real feedback (which honestly anyone can do) I cannot think of a single time where she stooped to lift me out of a bad mood. You cannot pull someone up to a higher state than the one you are in, and I think this plays a large role in her inability to transmit love, joy, and positivity.

To those who will inevitably disbelieve me and consider what I am saying to be unfair, harsh, and vindictive - you were not there. I was there, daily for 18 years and in a lesser capacity for the next 12.

I am not saying that I am perfect. We are all imperfect, but most of us have the ability to love genuinely, listen to and care about others, empathize, feel guilt for hurting others, and apologize honestly, regretting the harm we caused. These are things that I and many/most people do, however my mother is very limited in doing any of these things, to the harm of herself and those around her.

I am not saying that my mom never did anything good. She was very disciplined and got the job done when it came to educating and raising us. In many ways she was a fantastic mother, but not in the key area of showing love, wisdom, or emotional control/maturity to her children. Her lack of self-control with her temper was abusive and did much to discredit her consistency as a professed Christian. Her emotional absence was devastating, a wound of omission.

I am not saying that my family never experienced any happy moments. We did, on many occasions, but good days do not erase very very bad days. When there are too many very bad days, the happy moments seem like a weird cognitive dissonance.

I am not blaming anyone (outside of my mom) for my mom’s behavior. She has cemented herself over time into who she is and I do not believe she will ever change. Experts know that narcissism is a persistent disorder across the lifetime, and their input corroborates my personal experience of what it is like to try to bring such a person to the light and have them call it dark. A narcissist cannot, will not, does not see the world or themselves, accurately. Because in reality, we are all wrong sometimes, but a narcissist is never wrong. And when they are in fact wrong, it is you who is wrong and needs to apologize.

I am strong enough to apologize for doing what is wrong. But I am not weak enough, or compliant enough, to be bullied into taking the blame for someone else’s wrongs, which is exactly what is required to stay in my mother’s good graces.  My mother has allowed her personal insecurities and narcissism to permeate and permanently scar our family. It has rested on the shoulders of her children to “suck it up,” keep a straight face, and deal with the abuse, or as some have done, to cut their losses.

I am strong enough now to say, I refuse to play this game. I will no longer pretend my mother is a nice, normal person. I will no longer pretend her hard life makes her abuse of us okay. I will no longer pretend that change is realistic for her - she has refused growth. I will no longer pretend or question whether I am really the problem. That’s a question I’ve pondered honestly and deeply over the years.

I’ve beat myself up just as many for letting it matter, because it shouldn’t matter. Don’t react. Don’t respond. Don’t be affected. Don’t feel. Rise above.

And yet, I find it impossible to deny the effect on my life of the role you played in it. As I wrote in my personal statement, penned during that time in which our lives overlapped, the difference between a life lived and a life well-lived can be seen in the marks we leave on those around us. We indelibly mark the lives of the people whose stories intersect with our own, and you left your mark on me in the form of a scar. 

Heart attacks don’t always kill, but even when survived, they leave a scar in their wake. Ischemia to one wall of the heart supplied by the blocked blood vessel results in death to a section of the heart. The body eventually repairs this damaged tissue, but it becomes merely connective scar tissue, the structure without the full range of electrical conduction and function it once possessed. 

The scar you left on my soul is something I live with every day. It cuts across the part of my heart that would love again. It compromises the part of my soul that was operative in my faith. I no longer love well; I am suspicious, untrusting, cynical, jaded. My faith wears thin, more a charade anymore than anything real. I believe mentally, but my heart has lost the capacity for affection. Affection for people or affection towards God.

I want to be the person I was before you left your mark on my soul. I want to love purely. I want to believe that I should be loved for who I am, and that someone actually could. Because the one person I loved the most, the one person I let in, the one person I believed really saw and loved my soul and appreciated me like no other - he showed me how wrong I was. That I was not valued for who I was, but for the weakness I seemingly manifested, the ability to be coerced and manipulated. That my strong convictions were not something worthy of respect, but rather a reason to walk away.

You showed me what it meant to date the type of person I always thought I would marry. You walked straight out of the pages of those courtship books I read at 15 and 16. You showed me that the man I thought I would marry wasn’t looking for a woman like me. You showed me that Christian men want weak-willed women. The less brain activity, the less critical thought, the better. Don’t question; conform. You showed me how to use the Bible to prop up misogynistic beliefs and how to miss the mark so profoundly when it came to religion. 

At subconscious levels that evade my ability to understand, much less articulate, your influence on my life shattered the foundations of so many things I had once fully believed to be true. I attempt to stand on tectonic plates which are forever shifting and sliding underneath me. When do I walk away from this broken foundation to build on new ground? How do I tear down every schema in my life and simply start over?

You had no trouble walking away. Ignoring emotions or treating them as a female dysfunction was always your MO. And maybe the hurt left in your wake is none of your business.

“Hey! This is a super random message, but I saw an old post pop up in my memories on FB yesterday, and because you had commented on it I was like, “huh, wonder how he’s doing!” In short, that un-clickable comment led me to realize you had blocked me on FB. I have no guesses as to why since it’s been ages since we talked or interacted in any way. On my end, any weirdness between us is so far in the past as to be 100% forgotten, but if you feel otherwise, hey, that’s okay too. For my part, I like to be at peace with people whenever possible, even if it’s an old or past connection. Especially since our families are friends and all that. I hope you’re doing well wherever life has you these days!”

***

Yes, the guy I had a crush on nearly 10 years ago and haven’t spoken to in some 8(?) years blocked me on Facebook. We weren’t FB friends for many years, have not interacted in any way in longer than I can remember, and the blocking happened some time in the last year since I know his profile has popped up time to time in recent years. But indeed, he has blocked me, determined by my in-depth knowledge of FB indicators and confirmed by my alt-account.

I’m honestly spiraling over this. Instead of studying for my huge exam tomorrow, I’ve been dissecting this in my mind over and over and over. What the heck? He’s barely crossed my mind for 6-7 years aside from the occasional curiosity-driven social media glance which goes for the majority of my connections whenever someone crosses my mind while I’m on FB. So why did I cross his mind hard enough for him to block me? I’m lightyears over what happened back then and can only assume it was way more significant to me than to him, so why on earth would he be blocking me now, in 2020/2021, on social media? Honestly very disturbed. 

I’ve never blocked someone unless they were either harassing me on social media or made me feel unsafe/stalked in some way. Or to keep myself from checking up on them post-breakup. And certainly not 5+ years after our last interaction. Just bizarre. 

Don’t get me wrong - breakups can be miserable. When your heart is enmeshed, when you’re in love, when you had hopes and dreams of spending the rest of your life with this person and no one else, separation can be a hell on earth.

But not all breakups are bad. 

This afternoon I typed out a carefully worded text explaining to my boo-thang of two months why I could no longer see our relationship going forward. I planned to send it to him after he had a chance to get off work so it wouldn’t interrupt the middle of his day. Of course the little stinker beat me to it with his own (less literarily impressive) version of the same text, but regardless of the fact I never sent my own text, it felt good to come clean. Kind of like taking an emotional dump.

I had just spent the entire weekend with him since he flew out to see me and the whole time it didn’t feel right. I feel things quite literally in my gut, and my gut was not happy the whole 3 days. I was so constipated that we were literally joking about it as I downed coffee and contemplated drinking one of those clean-the-pipes teas. Nothing worked. Once I dropped him off at the airport and got back home.. boom we were in business again. (TMI, I know, sorry.)

Sometimes you’re in deep enough that you can’t see how much crap you have been putting up with (not intentionally trying to keep a poop theme, I promise). The water just gets hotter and hotter one degree at a time until you realize this isn’t a relaxing bath anymore.

That was me this go round. It’s funny looking back just how much I tried to rationalize away, everything from crazy conspiracy theories to disrespect for my chosen profession to language I don’t care for. Ultimately though, I was reminded again how much I don’t want to do life with someone who doesn’t understand the meaning of compromise. Someone who thinks the best way to show love is by micromanaging and controlling everything about another person’s life. 

And yeah, I’ll miss sitting out in the Texas heat and sharing heart to hearts with you. But I won’t miss the way you borrowed tomorrow’s problems. I won’t miss the way you saw my life as an oddly-shaped puzzle piece to be cut down to size to fit into your almost-finished puzzle. I’ll eat all the gluten and dairy I feel like without your judgment. I’ll drive my beat up Honda Civic into the ground and when it’s dead I’ll get the car I want, not the Tesla you insisted I absolutely ought to drive. I’ll work out to get healthy, not to build the booty you thought I should have. I’ll buy all the antique and second-hand stuff I want without you telling me that used things are beneath us. I’ll laugh again, something I didn’t do a whole lot with you always killing the mood. I’ll marry a man who appreciates and honors the choices I’ve made towards purity without speculating that I’ll be frigid in bed someday (still can’t get over how tactful that was, tbh). I’ll pour out my life raising kids if God chooses to bless me with them, and raise them with a man who views them as a joy, not an annoyance and a burden.