It Stops With Me

 The second accident was non-displaced.

The words sounded almost reassuring. Nothing had shifted out of place. Nothing had broken clean through. But an injury doesn’t have to look dramatic to change the way you move through the world.

Maybe that’s true of the other things, too.

The scare after the accident. The ending of a connection that caused harm. The months of losing my period. The patterns I carried so long they started to feel like my personality.

For six years, I avoided the conversation I knew I needed to have with my spiritual healer. Maybe I wasn’t ready. Maybe I was afraid of what I’d hear—or what I’d have to admit to myself once someone finally said it aloud.

Then life made it harder to keep looking away.

I had to sit with myself. Not the version of me who knew how to keep everything smooth, who could read a room and become whatever it needed. The real me. The one underneath the coping.

Abuse can teach you to build a persona around survival. It can teach you to anticipate, accommodate, and protect yourself before you even know you’re doing it. That persona might keep you safe once. It might even help you get through the day. But over time, you can start guarding the mask as if it’s the person you were born to be.

Poppy held the pattern together. When he left, there was a vacuum. And instead of letting that space become mine, other men came in and held the pattern in place.

I thought freedom would feel like flight. Now I’m free. Now I can fly.

But I kept gravitating toward what was familiar—even when familiar meant repeating the very thing I wanted to escape.

That’s the part I’m learning to face without turning it into another reason to blame myself. A pattern can be powerful without being permanent. Understanding how it formed doesn’t mean I chose the harm. It means I can begin to notice what I’m reaching for—and ask whether it’s truly what I want.

The full moon came just in time.

The harvest moon, bright at the energetic peak of the lunar cycle, seemed to illuminate the places I’d been avoiding: the old habits, the hidden truths, the parts of my life that no longer felt aligned. Maybe the moon didn’t bring the answers. Maybe it simply gave me enough light to see the questions.

What am I still holding because I’m afraid of the space it will leave?

What if the empty space isn’t a vacancy to be filled by another person? What if it’s room to meet myself?

I don’t have to become someone new overnight. I don’t have to force healing into a tidy ending. I can start with one honest breath. One boundary. One moment where I don’t abandon myself to keep a familiar pattern alive.

So let go.

Not because it didn’t matter. Not because it didn’t hurt. Not because you should be over it by now.

Let go because you deserve to stop carrying what was never yours to carry forever.

Surrender—not to the pattern, but to the possibility that you can choose differently.

It stops with me.