What I Still Struggle to Accept, a Year Later

Have you ever felt like your heart is trying to understand what your mind already knows?

Like, there’s this impossible gap between what you know to be true and what you can actually accept? Some mornings I wake up and for a split second, everything feels normal. And then the memory crashes in - not as a thought, but as a painful physical sensation. The kind of heaviness that makes breathing feel like lifting something enormous.

Part of my healing has been about learning how to hold what happened so that the pain doesn’t consume me and learning to be with the things I still can’t fully accept. Even a year later.

Some days, I still can’t believe it happened the way it did, not in some dramatic denial, but in that deep, cellular way where my body refuses to make sense of how he could love me and in a few seconds become this vacant, soulless monster who’s staring straight through me.

I replay these moments of connection so real that I could almost touch them. The way he would hold me, look at me. How is it possible that he could then treat me like I never mattered or existed?

I keep waiting for some kind of repair. Not to get back together, but just... something. An acknowledgment. A real apology that actually sees me. I know how it sounds. I know it’s not coming. But a small part of me, that quiet, hopeful part, still waits for what will never come. I can’t help it.

Is hope just another word for being unable to let go?

The most brutal truth I’m learning is that his emotional shutdown wasn’t just a failure of capacity. It was a choice. Active. Intentional. And ongoing. I understand the psychological reasons: the childhood wounds, the avoidant patterns, and the self-preservation. But understanding isn’t the same as accepting.

I’m grieving the version of him that no doesn’t exisit anymore. The one who could make me laugh until my sides hurt. The one who knew exactly how to hold me when the world felt too big. Now that version of him only exists in memories. Those moments of safety and love now feel like artifacts from another life.

How do you convince yourself that it’s really over when it still feels like you’re waiting to be chosen again?

One of the most difficult things for me to accept is that I didn’t do anything to deserve it. My mind knows that. My friends remind me of it. My therapist says it over and over. But there’s a part of me that still searches for the why. If I can find the reason, maybe I can make sense of this pain. Maybe I can fix whatever I broke or what I did wrong. The trauma of it all tries to convince me that logic is safer than randomness, that it’s better to believe I caused it than to accept that someone could just all of a sudden harm me and walk away in silence.

His silence is its own kind of violence. I’m learning that harm doesn’t require words. That emotional abandonment can be as loud as any screaming match. I’ve healed so much without his validation, without his apology. But some days, the silence still feels like a wound that just won’t heal.

I used to think that acceptance was some sort of finish line but I’m realizing that for me, it’s learning how to live with this echo inside me. I have to let it move through me without mistaking it for the present.

Maybe you know that feeling too…the way the past still hums beneath the surface. The way we learn, eventually, to stop trying to silence it and just let it hum. That’s where I am now. Somewhere between remembering and release.