Whispers of Wisdom

Ghosting me, keeping me on hold wearing a promise ring while you were running around having fun. I sat at home for weeks crying over the man I thought I would spend the rest of my life with, and he was with someone else. He claimed I had a breakdown and I broke up with him, swore it till he was blue in the face. I don't care what he says. We both know I never did. My actions clearly show where my intent was. Can he say the same?

If his intent wasn't to put me on the shelf, he would have been honest with me, like I had asked him too. Before i agreed to sacrifice our friendship i asked him to be honest with me. If your feelings change. If you need to be free to heal just tell me. It would have hurt but not the way this did. I could emotionally handle him walking away. It’s fine to say I had a breakdown, but maybe it's about time you start telling people why.

You entered a relationship knowing I was codependent and struggling. You purposely kept me that way by flirting with other women and bragging about it to me.

I’m not sure you ever even realized you admitted point blank you loved how jealous I was getting. While I was telling you how much I hated it. How awful it was making me feel.

This statement, the insistence that I broke up with him became the end of us. It also became a puzzle I just couldn't solve. How did I'm struggling with the distance and pressure become I'm done ? He tried to gaslight and manipulate me into saying I ended things with him and part of me never understood why.

Then in the argument he mentioned that our mutual “friend” told him I had confessed all these feelings about our relationship to him. The thing is it was his friend and he's shitty at picking them. This friend had spent days convincing me he was leaving me, telling me he was pulling away and wanted nothing to do with his old life. I kept trying to reassure the friend and myself he was just busy, he was trying to build. I did feel him pulling away, his friend said something about telling him if he didn't smarten he'd lose me. I asked him to stay out of it, he’d talk to me when he was ready. Shortly after he ghosted me this “friend” suddenly started telling me he loved me like a sister. Then it was "I love you" with a pause, then like a sister. Eventually he said i love you. The red flags hit the field real fast. At first I thought he was being supportive. He was shitty at it, but I grade on a curve. Every time I mentioned my ex positively, he would tear him down. Then I noticed the conversations started to circle around what he was like in a relationship. How much money and gifts he provided for his ex-wife. I realized he was trying to impress me, Trying to show he was a good man. Ironically once the pieces clicked, I realized he had been playing both of us, telling me one thing, my ex the other. I cut him off immediately. Then I started to wonder, what was being said about me. He actually believed money, gifts, and paying my bills was what I wanted from a man. He was delusional.

This is the truth of the hurt, the betrayal, the lies, the unneccesary drama and immaturity. They were not what broke me, not even close. It was that for 20+ years, the only time I ever got to be truly myself, truly free was with him. It didnt matter if it was scrubbing a boat, clearing brush. I was with him and I was free.

No secrets, No Masks, Just my authentic truth.

He believed a guy he'd known for a few years and a couple he had met less than a few months ago over my character. The only person on this planet that truly knew me, believed I could be all of those things. That I could even act with the intent, manipulation and honestly pure evil I felt off those people's energy makes me sick. Being in thier presence felt like poison. The greed, unhappiness and just vile use of energy that reeked off them was the most sobering thing i've felt. The worst part is I never wanted any part of it, Just the life we were supposed to build. I tried to warn him, and you'd think after years of calls on people turning out correctly He might heed my warning.

I’m a sucker though because all my he had to do was look at me with those eyes and ask me to reconsider. Even now, I struggle to believe that he intentionally hurt me. Much of this stemmed from unresolved trauma. So I chose to ignore it and make excuses. I never learned my lesson. I truly thought I had found my perfect match. He was everything I ever wanted. People warned me about his flaws, but I wasn't blind this time. This time, I was naive—naive enough to believe that despite his patterns, he wouldn't act the same way with me.

What I do know is that the night he tried to gaslight me into admitting something I never said, I snapped. It was one thing for him to ghost, abandon, and break me, but I wasn't going to take the blame this time. Throughout our relationship, I tried to communicate my needs, tell him when I was struggling, and when I needed reassurance. Instead, he kept me triggered to boost his own ego, and to this day, I'm not sure he realizes it.

I always warn people that I see more than I say, but they never believe me. I saw everything, and I understood it was all through the lens of his trauma.

However, a lesson from his dad came to mind: You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. I was dealing with one of the most stubborn and self-righteous individuals I had ever met. Explanations were pointless, and conversations only led to more confusion. "I miss you, I'll always love you, I miss my friend"—make up your mind. Do you love me or am I just a friend, what do you want? I had no idea, and I was anxiously waiting for texts and calls that never came, while trying to build a business for us.

I couldn't get clear answers or responses. He broke me in ways that my marriage, the assault, and years of feeling unwanted and unloved never did. I wasn't even enough for him. The one person who truly saw me, and even he couldn't love me. I cried for weeks; I'd like to pretend it was functional, but it wasn't. My body shut down from stress, causing flares and pain. I was already losing my family. He was all I had, and now I was truly alone.

I spent weeks broken and crying myself to sleep after I cut off contact with him, not because I wanted to. I honestly believed he was my twin flame, my divine counterpart, and at one point he was sure we were soul mates as well. Spirit kept telling me to wait; she kept assuring me we both needed to heal, and that was all I needed to hear: just focus on healing, focus on moving forward without him so he can heal, and you’ll get your happily ever after.

So I did it. I sat with my darkness, all my choices, my beliefs, my insecurities, my wounds, and I tried to focus on the smallest.

In all the pain and in all the darkness, I just kept hearing, Why don't you build for yourself? You don’t need anyone else...And there she was again, spirit with the littlest nudge. I sat with myself for a while trying to figure out what exactly my purpose was. I mean, I was good at marketing, but did I love it? How does that work in the community? How can you sell it? How can you sell yourself and that ten-year gap? How are you going to sell the disabilities? Suddenly I was looking at myself and my life like a marketing problem. A problem that made sense. What did I offer that others didn’t? What's my USP? If I were a brand, what would that look like, what would I offer, what would I sell? I ended up in two places, both ideas I had built and chucked away years before in self-doubt: one,

Fyra: a digital marketing firm focused on consumer-centric strategies and SMBs.

The Unfowled Owl: a content brand for Poetry & Spirituality

The idea of putting my pain on the internet though, of having to answer people's invasive questions, I wasn’t down for that. So I focused on Fyra, and on healing, and I started to listen to all those little nudges, a change in direction here, going back to something I didn't want, random songs, the urge to go somewhere. Every time I listened, something good happened. We aren't talking life-changing moments, we are talking about the little ones like going to a thrift store and randomly finding the book you wanted that was on backorder, finding an item that brought me joy, running into an old friend.

Like I said, normal day-to-day stuff. I saw the pattern, listen to the little voice, get a reward. Yes, I got the Pavlov jokes, please. As I listened, I could hear and feel more. Suddenly, I started to feel like myself again; my intuition was back, which, to be honest, can be hard to get used to. Before I realized what was happening, it finally made sense:

The energy around me that felt like anxiety was not me. I wasn’t anxious; I was happy...

I was enjoying myself, and there was absolutely no reason for me to be feeling it. It finally clued in that I had lived in so much unhappiness I couldn't tell my own energy from the ones I felt around me. The anxiety and overwhelm, years of feeling other people's energy on top of my own, each one amplifying my own anxiety and fears. The overwhelm I always felt from being so negative, so angry without reason, the exhaustion in public.

Here I was, walking around just absorbing people's negative energy and putting it on myself. I’m not sure where along the way I had started denying that part of myself, but I had; spirit had become God again, and I had been praying to Him and getting clear answers from Her. Now that I recognized what was going on, it was like it got stronger. The overwhelm of knowing I could feel what other people were feeling. To say I hit a whole new level of WTF was an understatement. Going to Walmart and having a breakdown in the car afterward suddenly started making sense; social gatherings weren't tiring because I was anxious, I was feeling everyone else's anxieties and fears. It took a while to figure this out.

Once I did, though, things got easier. I didn't feel so overwhelmed, so unhappy. I enjoyed being around people again.

Learning to turn it on and off was such a big difference in my life, and I have to thank Kayla, a practitioner I did my first cacao ceremony with. That ceremony taught me what I needed to know to at least understand what was going on, and it healed so much of my soul that was broken. I was able to connect with my ancestors and my guides, and when I get to that space, I always find my grandmother. She never denied my gifts because she damn well knew I had every one of them. The thing I find about energy is, as awful as negative energy is, love feels magnificent. When someone who truly loves you hugs you, you feel them in a different way. My grandmother used her love to fill me with positivity when I was too young to understand how to transmute it myself. I didn't understand until that ceremony that for years my grandmother's hugs were her way of refilling all the positive I was pouring out and all the negative that I had been absorbing. She would hug me, and it always felt like this beautiful light washing over me.

In that first meditation, I felt that feeling for the first time since she left me, and I felt at peace. In that first meditation space, I got to speak with my ancestors and hear their stories and their pain, all of which I had faced in this lifetime in some way, shape, or form. I’m not telling this story just to heal my own pain. This is also to heal theirs. I am freeing myself from the cage I allowed myself to be put in, and with me, I plan to set free the pain of the women before me, their rape, their mistreatment, their judgment, their betrayals.

I know how much my truths have broken my family, and I need them to truly understand that none of it was on them. Nothing could have changed about what happened to me, first off because I allowed all of it and second, you can’t fix what you don’t know. This story isn't about guilt or blame, it's about one person saying goddamn it, I’m a mess and I need to be heard for myself. I realized over the last three days of typing this that I don't need other people to validate it anymore, writing it out was enough.

Then I thought about that little girl. To afraid to speak. To ashamed to accuse. So alone for all those years. How many other little girls have held on to that kind of pain?

I started this to finally heal myself, but now I am hoping my truth will help people like me gather together. A place to talk freely, explore without judgment, and have a few laughs as I mess this up royally! As I reconnect with spirit and the energy all around us, I've started to feel whole, grounded, and I am starting to find a balance in my life. I've got a lot of reawakening to do and a lot of learning along the way, but since you made it this far, I hope you’ll continue with me on my journey. Thank you for hearing this, and I’ll continue to share my journey, life, and everything I learn along the way.

Welcome to Unfowled’s Roost, I hope you find a branch and