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August 18, 2026 at 2:41 pm #460468
LuParticipantThe detail that jumps out is that your boundaries were ignored and you were made to feel bad for having them. Resentment usually keeps bubbling when part of us is still waiting for someone to admit the unfairness. Maybe it does not need to go away so much as to be agreed with: you were treated unfairly, full stop. Saying that plainly to yourself, without arguing the case anymore, tends to quiet the loop over time. And one one-sided relationship is not a verdict on how love works. It is one data point from someone who was not ready, and it says nothing about what you are worth.
August 18, 2026 at 4:16 am #460452LuParticipantI am the one who started this thread a while back, and I still stop by to read how it keeps growing into something none of us could have built alone. Girija, I am so sorry about your grandmother. No rush to respond to anything, please just take care of yourself and your family these days. Anita, the steady care you keep showing people in this space does not go unnoticed. Reading this thread was part of what taught me that optimism is not forcing a bright mood, it is permission to feel everything and still show up. Lately that looks like small routines for me, morning tea, a walk before the day starts, and letting the low mornings be low without turning them into a verdict. Glad this corner of the internet is still here.
August 17, 2026 at 11:02 pm #460448LuParticipantNea, I’ve been reading along and want to add one small thing from my own family experience. The shift for me came when I stopped waiting for the sit-down that was never going to happen. Like your dad, mine never did accountability — things got swept under the rug until he decided they were over. For years I read that as “it’s resolved.” It wasn’t. It was just buried.
What actually helped was much smaller than any confrontation: I stopped expecting the conversation to repair anything and started protecting the hours around it. Shorter visits. An exit I didn’t have to justify. Not announcing every decision in advance.
You’re about to need every bit of your energy for yourself and your baby. Your family may never become the family you deserved growing up — that grief is real. But you get to decide how much peace each visit costs, and pay less.
August 17, 2026 at 6:38 pm #460439LuParticipantHi Confused,
I’ve been reading along and want to say one thing first: what you’re grieving is real, even if the relationship never got its “practical” chapter. Three days in person doesn’t erase a year of emotional investment — hearts don’t count hours, they count meaning.
And that line of hers — “imagine I was convincing everyone you were different, how stupid I was” — please don’t adopt it as a verdict about you. That’s her rewriting the story so leaving feels easier on her. People do this at the end of relationships. It says something about her need to justify the exit, not about your worth.
The crying in the helmet, feeling empty in a room full of friends — that’s grief doing what grief does when there was no shared apartment to empty and no rituals to lean on. You don’t get the usual milestones, so your body becomes the only witness. That makes it lonelier, not smaller.
“I want to somehow escape” — I read that with care. Escaping the pain for an evening (music, a movie, sleep) is fine and needed. If the escape ever turns into not wanting to be here at all, please tell someone you trust tonight, not tomorrow — that thought is a signal to reach out, not a plan to follow.
One small thing that helped me through something similar: motion with a destination. A drive to a place you know, a walk to a specific shop, cooking one exact meal. Not to feel better — to prove to yourself the day can still be moved through.
You kept your word through a lot of hardship. That trait is yours, and it stays with you after she’s a memory.
August 17, 2026 at 6:21 pm #460437LuParticipantSomething in your first post stopped me: ‘for the first time, I want to dare to be optimistic.’ That sentence is not small. When hope has been punished before, letting it in feels dangerous — like setting yourself up for the fall.
Here’s a small thing that helped me: treat optimism as an experiment, not a promise. Not ‘everything will work out,’ but ‘today I’m allowed to collect evidence that things can go right’ — one line in a note each evening. The what-ifs still show up; they just stop being the only voice in the room.
Wishing you steadiness on the new team. You’ve clearly already done the hardest part, which is staying in the conversation with yourself.
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