What the Actual Fuck Was I Thinking?

There are probably easier ways to deal with your life falling apart than sitting down and writing about every questionable decision you've made since you were eighteen.

Therapy, I am doing it.

Yoga.

Meditation.

One of those wee journals where you're supposed to write three things you're grateful for every morning.

Instead, apparently, I'm writing a blog.

And if I'm going to do this, I'm doing it properly.

Not the Facebook version.

Not the version people have heard from somebody else.

Not the version where bits are conveniently left out because they make somebody look bad.

And definitely not the version where I pretend I've spent my entire life making sensible decisions.

Because I haven't.

Jesus Christ, I haven't.

There have been men.

Quite a few men, actually.

There have been babies.

Houses.

Break-ups.

Make-ups.

Cheating.

Engagements.

A wedding.

A miscarriage.

Rape.

Knives.

A machete.

Domestic abuse.

Police.

A fucking fish — we'll get to that one.

Friends who weren't really friends.

People I trusted who perhaps shouldn't have been trusted.

People I forgave who absolutely should have been told to fuck off the first time.

And more fresh starts than any one woman should reasonably require.

Somewhere in amongst all of that, though, there was also a life.

My life.

And that's the bit I don't want to lose while telling the horrible parts.

Because it wasn't all horrible.

There were nights out with my sister and my best friends.

There were Sunday nights at Strathy.

Cars.

Motorbikes.

Holidays.

Babies being born.

My kids making me laugh.

Sitting in the garden with Mum and Dad across the road.

Bright hair.

Makeup.

Music.

Friends.

Family.

There were times when I was genuinely happy.

There were men I genuinely loved.

There were good memories with people who later hurt me.

And that's one of the things I've realised while trying to put all of this together.

Life isn't neat.

People aren't either.

Somebody can give you some of the happiest memories of your life and still be responsible for some of the worst.

You don't have to rewrite every good day just because you eventually discovered how the story ended.

For years, though, I think I've told my life through everybody else.

I was somebody's girlfriend.

Somebody's fiancée.

Somebody's wife.

Somebody's mum.

Somebody's daughter.

Somebody's friend.

I spent a ridiculous amount of time worrying about what everybody else needed.

Whether everybody else was okay.

Whether the family was okay.

Whether the relationship could be fixed.

Whether somebody deserved another chance.

Whether I'd been too harsh.

Whether I should forgive them.

Whether I should go back.

Spoiler alert:

I usually fucking went back.

And if you've ever watched a horror film and screamed at the woman on the telly,

DON'T GO BACK IN THE FUCKING HOUSE!

You're probably going to experience that feeling quite a lot while reading this.

I know.

I'm the woman in the film.

I'm watching it back now thinking exactly the same thing.

But hindsight is a wonderful thing.

When you're actually living it, things don't arrive neatly labelled.

RED FLAG.

THIS MAN IS A DICKHEAD.

DO NOT MARRY THIS ONE.

YOUR FRIEND IS NOT HELPING.

SERIOUSLY, WOMAN, GET IN THE CAR AND DRIVE.

It happens slowly.

You love somebody.

You make excuses.

You remember the good version of them.

They apologise.

You have children together.

You've built a home.

Your lives are tangled together.

You don't want to start again.

You don't want your family to fall apart.

And sometimes you're so busy trying to keep everybody else together that you don't notice you're the person falling apart.

I didn't.

Not for a very long time.

And when I look back now, there is one thing that runs through practically my entire adult life.

Starting again.

Something would happen.

I'd pack my stuff.

I'd go back to Mum and Dad.

I'd rebuild.

I'd meet somebody.

I'd believe this time would be different.

I'd build another life.

Something would happen.

And there I'd be again.

Back at the beginning.

Except you never really go back to the beginning, do you?

You take everything with you.

The hurt.

The insecurity.

The things you've learned.

The things you haven't learned, despite apparently being given the same fucking lesson fourteen times.

And all those experiences quietly change the decisions you make next.

I can see that now.

I can see the young woman who desperately wanted relationships to work.

I can see the mum who wanted her children to have a family.

I can see the daughter who knew Mum and Dad would catch her whenever everything collapsed.

I can see the woman who thought forgiving somebody meant loving them.

I can see the wife who stayed long after parts of the marriage had already disappeared.

I can see the grieving daughter who never properly stopped long enough to grieve.

I can see the lonely woman who desperately wanted somebody to notice her.

And I can see how that woman eventually ended up in a relationship so controlling and violent that I genuinely believed I was going to die.

Not I thought the relationship might end badly.

Not he frightened me a bit.

I thought he was going to kill me.

There were strangulations.

There were injuries.

There was a fractured arm.

There were times I lost consciousness.

There were hospital visits.

There were videos.

There was police involvement.

Eventually, there was an arrest.

And five weeks after that arrest, I was sitting in my house trying to understand how the fuck my life had got there.

Because that's another thing people don't really tell you.

When the dangerous person is finally gone, everything doesn't magically become okay.

The door closes.

The chaos stops.

And suddenly it's quiet enough for you to hear your own thoughts.

That's when I started looking backwards.

Not just at him.

At everything.

At eighteen-year-old me.

At twenty-year-old me with a baby.

At the relationships.

At my children.

At Mum.

At Dad.

At my sister.

At the people I trusted.

At the times I'd been betrayed.

At the times I'd been hurt.

And also at my own choices.

That's an important distinction.

Because I'm not writing this to take responsibility for other people's behaviour.

Their cheating belongs to them.

Their lies belong to them.

Their violence belongs to them.

Their manipulation belongs to them.

Their choices belong to them.

But my choices belong to me.

And there are questions I need to ask about those too.

Why did I accept so little sometimes?

Why did I always worry about everybody else's feelings before my own?

Why did an apology so often equal another chance?

Why did I think keeping a family together mattered more than whether I was happy inside it?

Why did I keep trying to fix people?

Why was I so frightened of being alone?

And why, every time my instincts whispered,

Something isn't right here...

did I apparently tell them to shut the fuck up?

I don't have all the answers yet.

That's partly why I'm writing.

Maybe I'll find some of them along the way.

Maybe I'll read this back one day and want to crawl inside a cupboard from embarrassment.

Probably both.

But there's another reason I'm doing it.

For a long time, other people have had versions of my story.

Things have been said about me.

People have believed things.

People have made decisions about who I am based on conversations I wasn't part of.

And I can't control that.

I can't make everybody understand.

I can't make everybody believe me.

I can't force anyone to listen.

What I can do is tell my story.

My way.

The good bits.

The fucking awful bits.

The ridiculous bits.

The bits where I should absolutely have known better.

The bits where I was simply trying to survive.

And the bits where, against all fucking logic, I somehow got back up again.

Because I did.

Every time.

Maybe that's actually the story underneath all of this.

Not the men.

Not the cheating.

Not even the abuse.

Maybe it's the number of times I lost myself while trying to love everybody else.

And what happens now that I'm finally trying to find her again.

But to understand how I got here, we need to go back.

Right back.

Before the husband.

Before Pinocchio No Strings.

Before the wedding.

Before the nightmare.

Before any of them.

Back to an eighteen-year-old girl who fell in love.

And had absolutely no fucking idea what was coming.

Next: The One Who Made Me Mum.