How Did We Get Here?

How did we get here?

God, what a question.

If there was one neat answer, I would’ve solved this already.
Instead it feels like a web — childhood trauma, old wounds, fear, attachment patterns, culture, timing, hormones, life fatigue… everything tangled.

I could blame my childhood.
The way growing up on emotional eggshells wired me to grip love too tight.
I hate that. I hate admitting that sometimes my fear of being abandoned makes me act like it's already happening — like I'm constantly trying to prove I’m worth staying for.

I could blame his childhood too.
He learned running feels safer than staying.
I chase, he withdraws — classic trauma tango.
It’s exhausting. For both of us.

I could blame gender roles.
Culture.

The weight of routine after a decade together.
A body that doesn’t feel like the same one I started this marriage in.
My scars. His silence.
Our blind spots.

I could say it’s a mid-life crisis.
I could say it’s me being terrified of losing love again — because I’ve already lived through that nightmare twice.

And honestly?
Some days I do blame all of it.
Everything. Everyone. Me. Him. Life.

But blame is a trap.
It keeps me small and keeps me stuck in the story where everything is happening to me instead of through me.

I don’t want to live in victim mode anymore.
I’ve survived too much to hand my power away now.

So I'm trying — really trying — to do this differently.
Healing isn’t pretty for me. It’s messy and shaky and uncomfortable as hell.
I see the patterns. I feel them.
Sometimes it’s like watching myself from outside — seeing the spiral happening in slow motion and not knowing how to stop it yet.

But I’m learning.
Not healed. Not enlightened. Not “fixed.”
Just learning.
Trying to sit with the fear instead of drowning in it.
Trying to stay instead of scramble.
Trying to breathe instead of beg.

And then there was the fall.
A stupid icy driveway.
A split second that knocked more loose than I realized at the time.
Pain that burrowed deep — physical and otherwise.

That’s where things shifted.
That’s where the story bends.
Not in some symbolic, poetic, Hollywood-moment way.
In a “holy sh*t, I didn’t know life could break like this” way.

I didn’t know then that it would reroute my marriage.
Or my mental health.
Or my sense of stability and self.

But it did.

And that’s where the next part begins.