The Life I Built Anyway

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For a long time, I thought love was something you proved, not something you received. It was something you worked for, something you held onto, something you didn’t give up on no matter how hard it got. I didn’t question that because it felt normal to me.

When you grow up in instability, you don’t always learn what love is supposed to feel like. You learn what it takes to keep it. You learn how to adjust, how to read people, how to stay when things get uncomfortable.

And I was taught something else too. That if someone did something wrong, something hurtful, something they shouldn’t have done, but they were drinking or using or struggling, then that explained it. And if it was explained, it was easier to accept. So you forgave it. You stayed. You loved them anyway.

That was what I saw, and that was what I carried with me.

So when I got into my teenage years and early twenties, I didn’t walk into relationships with boundaries. I walked in ready to understand, ready to be patient, ready to give people the benefit of the doubt even when it cost me something.

A lot of the relationships I found myself in were with people who struggled with addiction, and at the time, I didn’t see it as a pattern. It just felt familiar. The ups and downs, the inconsistency, the apologies that came after. I knew how to exist in that. I told myself that if I just loved them the right way, it would be enough. That if I stayed steady, they would eventually become steady too.

And somewhere in the middle of all of that, I crossed a line I never thought I would. I allowed myself to get pulled into it too. It didn’t last long, but it was enough. Enough to see how easy it is to fall into something you’ve been surrounded by, enough to understand how quickly things can shift. And just as quickly, I knew it wasn’t for me. Not because it wasn’t hard to walk away, but because I had kids who needed something different from me. That was a line I wasn’t willing to cross twice.

What I didn’t understand yet was that I had been confusing love with endurance, with tolerance, with survival. I didn’t know the difference between having compassion for someone and excusing behavior that was hurting me. So I stayed longer than I should have, ignored things I shouldn’t have ignored, and explained away things that should have been deal breakers.

Not because I didn’t see them, but because I had been taught that love made room for them.

It took time to unlearn that. Time to understand that addiction might explain behavior, but it doesn’t make it okay. That you can love someone and still not accept what they’re doing. That staying isn’t always the right thing, and that walking away doesn’t mean you didn’t care. It means you finally understood that love isn’t supposed to come at the cost of yourself.

Looking back now, I don’t judge that version of me. I understand her. She was doing what she had been taught, what she thought love required. She just didn’t know yet that it could look different.