You Didn’t Lose Yourself. She Was Taken From You.
Let’s start with the thing nobody says out loud, because I’m tired of women being told they “lost themselves” in a relationship like they misplaced a set of keys. Babe, you didn’t lose her. She was systematically dismantled by someone who benefited from her being smaller. There is a difference. A massive one. The language we use to describe what happened to you matters, because if you think you lost her, you’ll blame yourself for being careless. If you understand she was taken, you can start the actual work of getting her back.
I spent almost six years in an abusive relationship in Scotland, and by the end of it I was crying myself to sleep every night, in constant physical pain, and incapable of trusting a single thought in my own head. The shine was gone. The sparkle was gone. The loud, warm, slightly-too-much version of me had been filed down into someone quieter, smaller, more apologetic. I escaped in 2022 and came home to Australia looking, frankly, like a photocopy of a photocopy. So when I tell you the woman you used to be is still in there, I am not theorising. I have personally been excavating mine for years.
This isn’t a healing-journey post with crystals and a meditation playlist. This is the practical, slightly unhinged, occasionally tearful business of putting yourself back together when someone has been chipping away at you for years. Pour yourself a matcha. Sit Lulu, or whichever fluffy chaos creature you have nearby, on your lap. Let’s get into it.
Stop Arguing with Your Own Memory
The first thing abuse does is install a tiny lawyer in your head whose entire job is to dispute your version of events. You’ll remember something he did, and the lawyer will immediately stand up and say, objection, were you really paying attention, are you sure that’s what happened, you’ve always been dramatic, m’lady. This is not a personality flaw. It’s a sustained psychological campaign that worked. Of course you don’t trust your memory. You were trained not to.
Reclaiming yourself starts with a quietly radical move, which is letting your memories sit there without a panel discussion. He said the thing. He did the thing. You were the one on the floor. There is no footnote required. There is no asterisk. There is no helpful little, to be fair, I might have provoked him, because babe, no. The provoking-him framing is a souvenir from the relationship. You can throw it out with the rest of the rubbish, along with the inner monologue that still tries to make excuses for behaviour that had no excuse. You don’t need to be fair to him in your own head. He wasn’t being fair to you in real life.
Try this. The next time your brain tries to dispute one of your own memories, say out loud, “no, that happened, and it happened exactly like that.” Out loud. To your kettle, your cat, your reflection, whoever’s available. It feels deranged the first few times. It feels like talking to yourself in public, like a slightly damp Shakespeare character. Do it anyway. You’re not having a moment. You’re rebuilding the part of you that gets to be the authority on your own life again, which is the bit he worked the hardest to dismantle, because the moment you stop disputing your own reality, his version of events stops being able to follow you around.
Believe Yourself in the Smallest, Stupidest Ways
The big reclaiming-yourself moments get all the airtime. The grand resignation. The dramatic chop. The solo trip to somewhere with very expensive olive oil. Look, I love a montage, but the actual rebuilding happens in the tiny, deeply unglamorous decisions you make on a Wednesday afternoon when nobody is watching. This is where the real woman gets her job back.
So start absurdly small. You’re cold, put a jumper on instead of toughing it out like a Victorian governess. You don’t want to go to the thing, cancel like a chaos goblin God intended. You don’t want to text him back, don’t. You want the matcha even though you already had one, get the matcha, you’re a grown woman, you can have two matchas. You want to leave the party, leave. You want the nap, take the nap. You want to wear the outfit he hated, wear it twice. You want to order the food he turned his nose up at, order it with a side and a smug little smile. Every tiny act of believing yourself is a little, oh, my opinion still counts in here.
It will feel embarrassingly small. You will catch yourself thinking, this is meant to be healing, why am I just putting on socks. Because, honey, that’s exactly how it works. You weren’t unmade in one grand gesture, you were dismantled one small dismissal at a time. You won’t be remade in one either. You’ll be rebuilt one tiny act of self-trust at a time, on a random Tuesday, in your kitchen, while the kettle boils. It’s not glamorous. It won’t post well. But it’s the actual work. Socks today. Boundaries tomorrow. Empire by Christmas.
Let Yourself Be Soft Again, Not Just Strong
There’s a particular kind of post-abuse woman the internet absolutely loves. Sharp eyeliner, sharper opinions, a slightly murderous expression, captions about how she’s iron now. I get the appeal. I had a solid year of being her. Strength is the easier rebuild because it has visible edges. You can wear it like armour. You can post it. Nobody can hurt you if you’ve turned into a knife first.
But here’s what nobody mentions in the empowerment Pinterest boards. Abuse doesn’t just steal your strength. It steals your softness too. It steals the bit of you that can be tender without bracing. The bit that can accept a compliment without batting it away like a haunted volleyball. The bit that lets people close without first running their entire dating history through Interpol. If you only rebuild the strong bits, you’re not healed. You’re just a fortress with a moat and an attitude.
Soft is allowed. Soft is, in fact, the bravest bit. Let yourself cry over the laksa, the song, the unexpected kindness, the random Tuesday. Let your friends say nice things without deflecting them with a joke like a haunted little vaudeville act. Let yourself want stupid little things again. A particular nail colour. A new pillow. A morning where you don’t have to be useful to anybody. A green tea that takes a full half hour to drink. Let yourself be tender with the people you love, and tender with the woman you’re slowly becoming, and tender with the woman who survived. Softness wasn’t what made you vulnerable to him. He did. Letting your softness come back is a sign you’re starting to feel safe in your own life again.
You Are Buried, Not Erased
If you’re reading this in the hollow bit, the bit where you don’t recognise yourself in the mirror and you’re not sure if she’s coming back, hear this clearly. The hollow bit is not the ending. I know it feels like the ending. I know it feels like he took everything and posted you back as a shell with your name still printed on the front. He didn’t. He buried her. There is an enormous difference. Buried things can be dug back up. Erased things cannot. And babe, you are absolutely not erased.
You won’t wake up restored one morning with a soundtrack and a montage of your best outfits. That is not how this works. You’ll feel like yourself for thirty seconds on a Tuesday afternoon, then lose her again by Wednesday morning, then catch her again at the nail salon on Friday. The moments stretch out. They get longer. They get closer together. One extremely ordinary day, you’ll realise she’s just back. Not the woman you were before him. A newer one, who knows exactly what she survived, and is not, under any circumstances, going back.
Be patient with the woman in your mirror. She has been through it. She’s still working out which thoughts are hers and which were installed without her consent like a dodgy app. She’s still relearning what she likes, what she wants, what her own laugh sounds like when nobody’s about to make her feel stupid for laughing too loud. Hold her gently. Feed her properly. Let her have the matcha, the cat cuddles, the loud opinions, the soft bits and the sharp bits. She was always in there. She’s just coming home.
We Need to Stop Clapping for Basic Decency – Chaos, Crumbs and Clarity
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