CHAPTER 3: THE CRACKS

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.

Chapter 2 (refer to my previous post for the beginning)

CHAPTER 2: BECOMING USEFUL

I didn’t decide to become useful.

I became useful because it worked.

It kept things calm.

It kept people from asking too many questions.

It gave me something to stand on when everything else felt like it could shift.

There’s a difference between being capable and becoming identified by your capability.

I crossed that line early.

I learned how to:

show up

say the right thing

do what was expected

manage situations

help other people regulate

Even when I didn’t know how to regulate myself yet.

Especially then.

School made sense to me.

There were rules.

There were right answers.

There was structure.

If you did the work, you got the result.

It didn’t ask me how I felt.

It didn’t ask me to explain anything.

It just rewarded output.

So I gave it that.

And I got good at it.

There’s something no one really talks about with high-achieving kids.

Sometimes it’s not confidence.

Sometimes it’s survival dressed up as discipline.

You don’t slow down long enough to ask:

Why do I need to do this well?

You just keep doing it.

Because somewhere along the way, you learned that:

being “good” keeps things steady.

College wasn’t one straight path.

It looked like one from the outside.

But internally, it felt more like shifting.

Trying to land somewhere that felt right.

I started one direction.

Then another.

Then another.

Nursing.

Then Family and Consumer Sciences.

Then general studies.

Then later, rehabilitation counseling.

It might look scattered.

But it wasn’t random.

Every direction still pointed toward:

people

helping

support

structure

I just didn’t know yet where I fit inside of it.

There were cracks even then.

I struggled with writing at times.

Got behind.

Dropped classes.

Picked them back up.

There were moments that felt heavier than they should have.

Moments where something in me just… stalled.

Like my brain had too many tabs open and couldn’t close any of them.

But I still kept going.

That’s the part people saw.

I worked while I went to school.

Customer service.

Cashier.

Whatever was needed.

There’s something humbling about those jobs.

You learn quickly:

how people treat you

how much patience you have

how to keep your tone even when someone else doesn’t

It teaches you control.

Not emotional resolution.

Control.

Eventually, I landed in rehabilitation counseling.

That felt closer.

More aligned.

It made sense that I would help people rebuild their lives.

It felt… familiar.

Even if I didn’t say that out loud.

Graduate school, for a while, felt like proof.

Like maybe everything had added up to something real.

I did well.

Honor societies.

Independent studies.

Presentations.

Passing major exams on the first try.

COMPS.

CRC.

NCE.

All of it.

On paper, I was exactly who I was supposed to be.

Capable.

Educated.

Qualified.

But here’s the part that doesn’t show up next to those accomplishments:

I was tired.

Not physically.

Something deeper than that.

A kind of tired that doesn’t go away with sleep.

Because it’s not about rest.

It’s about holding too many things internally for too long without fully processing them.

I moved into helping roles professionally.

Addiction work.

Mental health.

Vocational rehabilitation.

Case management.

I sat across from people who were:

struggling

hurting

rebuilding

trying to make sense of their lives

And I understood them.

Not from a textbook.

From somewhere else.

There’s a certain kind of connection that happens when you’ve lived close to emotional instability yourself.

You can hear what people don’t say.

You can feel shifts in tone.

You can sit in silence without rushing it.

That made me good at what I did.

Really good, in some ways.

But there’s also a cost.

When you’re the one people come to for stability,

you don’t always notice when you’re running low yourself.

Or maybe you notice—

but you don’t stop.

Because stopping would mean:

feeling everything you’ve been holding.

So I kept going.

Different jobs.

Different agencies.

Different roles.

Some ended because of contracts.

Some because of fit.

Some because I left.

Some because I needed to leave.

Some because I was offered something better.

Some because I couldn’t keep doing it the same way anymore.

From the outside, it might look inconsistent.

From the inside, it felt like:

trying to find a place I could stand without losing myself.

There were moments where things started to crack more noticeably.

Stress building.

Emotional weight getting heavier.

Things I hadn’t fully processed catching up in quiet ways.

And then less quiet ways.

There’s a version of burnout people talk about.

And then there’s another version they don’t.

The kind where:

it’s not just your job that’s exhausting you—

it’s your entire way of being.

I didn’t have language for that yet.

I just knew something felt off.

And of course… no bible or single book could give me all the answers I truly needed, but more on that as we continue…

…to be continued….

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Daring to Mend: This Is Not a Guide