If That Was Love, Why Did It Almost Kill Me?

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I’ve been trying to make peace with a question I never asked out loud for most of my life:

If that was love… why did it almost kill me?

Why did it leave me suicidal, psychotic, and broken?
Why did it destroy my trust in my own instincts?
Why did it feel more like punishment than protection?

This isn’t me being dramatic.
This is what it feels like when your mother never loved you, and your father — the one person who might have — pushes you away and acts like he doesn’t care.

And maybe, just maybe, he thought he was doing it to save me.
But what kind of love does that to a child?

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🧠 The Story I’ve Been Told

The story I try to believe is this:

He pushed me away so I’d leave. So I could be free. So I could escape the house, the pain, the legacy.

But I still don’t understand it.
Why couldn’t he just tell me? Secretly reach out? Show me something softer behind closed doors?

Why did he have to become a version of himself that made me doubt the one thing I always felt deep down — that he actually loved me?

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💥 When Love Becomes Confusion

That’s the wound.
It’s not just the loss of love.
It’s the loss of trust in myself.

Because I felt the love. I knew it.
And his actions said the opposite.

That kind of contradiction doesn’t just hurt — it breaks something inside you.

It leaves you questioning:

• Am I crazy for thinking he cared?
• Was I imagining things?
• If love feels like this, what else am I wrong about?

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⚖️ Was It Ever Love?

I don’t know.
Maybe it was love.
But it wasn’t safe.
It wasn’t kind.
It wasn’t expressed in a way that a child could receive without becoming emotionally fractured.

And if that was love — then love has a lot to answer for.

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🔥 The Rage That Heals

This is where the rage comes in.

Because I didn’t deserve to be treated like that.
Because I could have died.
And even if he thought he was doing the right thing, he was wrong.

Love that leaves your child suicidal isn’t love that succeeded — it’s love that failed.
And I need to say that.
For the boy I was.
For the man I’m becoming.
And for the child I’m raising.

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🗣 A Letter to the Father Who Thought He Was Protecting Me

You thought I wouldn’t understand.
You thought it was the only way.
You thought pushing me out would save me.

But you didn’t see what it did to me.
You didn’t see the nights I wanted to disappear.
You didn’t see how deeply I questioned whether I mattered to anyone at all.

I felt your love.
And I needed your presence.
But what I got was your silence — and your disdain.

And it almost killed me.

So if this was your love…
I don’t forgive it.
But I will learn from it.

I will not abandon my child in the name of strategy.
I will not confuse pain for protection.
I will not call rejection mercy.

I will love in the open.
Fiercely. Clearly. Softly.

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There are still days I want to believe there was more goodness in him than I ever got to see.
But that belief isn’t enough to make it okay.
And if I’ve learned anything from this, it’s that love only counts when it can be felt — not just imagined.

If it almost killed me, it wasn’t the kind of love I needed.
And I won’t pass that silence on to anyone else.

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