What’s Left After the Truth

Self‑Mothering Playlist →

You face the truth.
You name the wound.
You stop defending them.
You let the illusions die.

And then…

You’re just tired.
Not healed.
Not free.
Just empty.

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🧱 What I Thought Would Happen

I thought there’d be some kind of clarity.
Some release.
Maybe even a sense of pride for having faced it all so directly.

Instead, what I feel is more like collapse.
Like the adrenaline of lifelong hope just ran out.
Like I opened a door that led not to light, but to silence.

It’s not despair.
It’s not rage.

It’s the dull ache of nothing.
The quiet aftermath of surviving your own childhood with your eyes finally open.

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🕳 The Void Where Hope Used to Live

I don’t want to engage with my mother again.
That feels clear now.

But my father…
That’s the more painful one.

Because part of me still wants to believe he loved me.
That the warmth I felt, even if only in fragments, meant something.
And maybe it did — to him. But that doesn’t mean it landed in me.
It didn’t hold me.
It didn’t protect me.
It left me confused.

And now I sit with that confusion, no longer trying to resolve it.

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🧠 Was It All Projection?

Maybe the love I thought I felt from him wasn’t about him at all.
Maybe it was a child trying to hold onto something — anything — that felt softer than what my mother gave me.

Maybe his distance mirrored how he handled his mother.
Maybe I inherited not love — but a system of managing neglect.

I don’t know.
And that’s part of the grief: there’s no answer coming.

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💬 The Hardest Truth

If he had just loved me clearly, that might have been enough to keep me okay.

Not special.
Not perfect.
Just okay.

But the fact that it was so cryptic… so indirect… so lost in silence and distance…
That’s what damaged my self-trust.
That’s what makes relationships so hard.
That’s what leaves the hole.

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🪨 What’s Left?

What’s left after the truth is this:

• Fatigue
• A strange peace that feels more like absence
• A rawness I don’t know how to dress
• A quieter relationship with hope

And maybe…
Just maybe…
That emptiness isn’t a failure.

Maybe it’s the beginning of something cleaner.
Not better.
But more real.

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I don’t feel resolved.
I don’t feel healed.

I just feel like I’ve finally stopped lying to myself.
And that has to count for something.

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