It didn’t start in adulthood.
That’s just where it became harder to ignore.
The first crack was my parents’ divorce.
I was eleven.
Old enough to know something had changed.
Too young to understand what it meant for me.
There’s a certain kind of instability that comes from realizing the structure you thought was permanent… isn’t.
No one explains how that lives in your body.
You just adjust.
And I did.
On the outside, I stayed the same.
Still achieving.
Still doing well.
Still being the version of myself that made things easier for everyone else.
But something else started happening underneath that.
I wasn’t just adapting.
I was also pushing back.
Quietly.
Closeted, in a way that didn’t draw too much attention.
Smoking cigarettes in the woods.
Crossing small boundaries.
Testing limits just enough to feel something different.
Not loudly rebellious.
Just enough to create space.
Because at the same time, I was being pulled into things that didn’t belong to me yet.
Adult conversations.
Emotional weight.
Being spoken to or relied on in ways that blurred lines.
You don’t realize it while it’s happening.
But when you’re used as an emotional place for a parent to land—
you start responding like you’re older than you are.
I talked back.
Not like a kid pushing buttons.
Like someone who felt like they had a say.
Like someone already standing halfway in an adult role without being ready for it.
So there were two versions of me forming at the same time:
The one who performed well.
And the one who resisted quietly.
The second crack came at fifteen.
I moved in with my dad.
Different house.
Different energy.
Different expectations.
And something subtle happens when you move like that in the middle of becoming yourself—
you don’t fully belong to who you were before,
but you’re not fully settled into who you’re becoming.
So you exist somewhere in between.
At sixteen, I thought I was making a choice.
Losing my virginity.
But what stayed with me wasn’t the moment itself.
It was what came after.
He left me.
For my step-sister.
There are some kinds of humiliation that don’t need detail.
That was one of them.
It wasn’t loud.
It just settled in quietly as:
you are replaceable.
And when it happens inside something that already feels uneven, it doesn’t stay contained.
It spreads.
That was also around the time I first tried to not feel so much.
Not out of rebellion.
Not out of curiosity.
Just… relief.
Even if I didn’t have that word for it yet.
Freshman year of college was supposed to be a reset.
A clean start.
But I ended up in a roommate situation that didn’t feel right.
And I stayed.
That part matters.
Because I had the option to change it.
I just didn’t trust that a different situation would be better.
So I chose something uncomfortable that I understood
over something unknown that might have been worse.
That became a pattern.
Then came the uncertainty.
Majors shifting.
Direction unclear.
Trying to find something that fit
while also being afraid of choosing wrong.
Because wrong didn’t just feel like a mistake.
It felt like something I might not recover from.
For a while, things stabilized.
Or at least, it looked like they did.
I was in a relationship.
A serious one.
The kind that gives structure.
He became my main relationship through college.
Eventually, my fiancé.
And for a while, I thought:
This is where things come together.
But stability on the outside doesn’t always match what’s happening underneath.
Adulthood started getting real.
Quietly.
Marriage.
Permanence.
Expectation.
And underneath it—
fear.
Not loud.
Not obvious.
Just a steady sense of:
What if I don’t actually know what I’m doing?
So I ended it.
The engagement.
At the time, the reasons felt real.
Important.
Looking back, some of them seem small.
But when your internal foundation isn’t steady,
small things don’t feel small.
They feel like proof.
Around that same time, religion became heavier.
Not grounding.
Heavy.
There’s a version of faith that brings peace.
And there’s a version that magnifies everything you’re already unsure about.
I lived in the second one for a while.
Normal human behavior started to feel like something that needed to be corrected.
Confessed.
Managed.
Fixed.
So I tried.
Christian counseling.
Therapy.
Trying to align myself into something that made sense.
Trying to become someone who didn’t feel off all the time.
What I didn’t understand then—
was that I was trying to solve everything at the level of behavior and morality
when part of what I was dealing with lived somewhere else entirely.
Something that looked like:
overwhelm
scattered thinking
inconsistency
bursts of doing everything followed by not being able to do anything
identity tied too tightly to achievement
not knowing how to exist without structure
But at the time, it didn’t have a name.
So it became:
something is wrong with me.
And still—
I kept going.
Because that’s what I had always done.
Each crack didn’t break me.
It just shifted something.
Slightly.
Quietly.
Until there were enough of them
that holding everything together
started to take more energy
than I actually had.
