For a long time, I thought that if I just gave myself enough space, everything would eventually be “processed.”
I imagined solitude as something with an endpoint — that if I sat with it long enough, the layers would run out.
What I’ve learned instead is that healing doesn’t move in straight lines. It reveals itself in layers, and then in perspective.
The wound left by my last relationship wasn’t the first one. It sat on top of older places where I hadn’t been met — places where I’d learned to tolerate confusion, dismissal, and emotional ambiguity. What made it so destabilising wasn’t just the betrayal. It was the delayed truth. The experience of knowing something was wrong while being told it wasn’t.
That kind of dishonesty doesn’t just break trust with another person.
It fractures self-trust.
For a long time, I stayed not because I didn’t see what was happening, but because I needed to know I had done everything I reasonably could — for myself, and for my son. I needed to leave without ambiguity. I didn’t want to walk away wondering if I had abandoned something that could have been repaired.
What I didn’t understand then was this:
Honesty that comes too late isn’t repair — it’s prolongation.
When truth is delayed, it doesn’t soften the ending.
It makes it heavier.
There is still resentment here. Towards my ex. Towards members of my family. Towards myself, at times, for how much I tolerated. But that resentment is changing. It’s no longer a global bitterness. It’s becoming specific, contextual, and less charged.
And that matters.
I’ve also noticed something unexpected. As I’ve become more honest with myself, I’ve stopped romanticising relationships in general. When I listen carefully — even among emotionally articulate people — I hear a lot of resignation, unmet needs, and quiet compromise. Relationships that function, but don’t nourish.
It’s made me realise something both sobering and relieving:
Good, compatible, growth-oriented relationships are rare.
And because of that, being single no longer feels like failure.
It feels like space.
Space to uncover who I actually am when I’m not contorting myself to be chosen.
Space to build self-trust instead of negotiating it away.
If I meet someone in the future and they decide I’m not the one for them, that doesn’t scare me anymore.
That’s clean.
That’s adult.
I can handle that.
What I don’t want again is dishonesty.
Confusion in my body.
Staying because truth is being rationed.
I don’t need perfection — in myself or anyone else.
I need alignment.
I don’t need to be healed to love well.
I just need to stay honest with myself.
And that, finally, feels possible.