Won't you celebrate with me?

By Yedifer E Pina

“I’ve been afraid of changing because I built my life around you...” that lyric from “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac replayed over and over in my head as I dumped everything I owned into industrial sized black garbage bags. A few of my friends and I developed a tradition of opening our hearts to receiving one word that would define our year, the word that came to me at the beginning of 2020 was “control.” As I packed my stuff out of a Washington Heights apartment I shared with a former lover, I reflected on how I had lost autonomy and agency. It felt as if I saw my life being experienced from the outside but always knew I wanted and deserved more. I was not living in my full purpose and potential. My life was marked by covert unhappiness, complacency with routine, and bouts of sadness.

In March of 2020, I opened up to someone for the first time about the physical, verbal, and emotional abuse I was experiencing in my almost six-year long relationship, a secret I held tightly to my heart. There was a lot of shame and embarrassment attached with being a seemingly social butterfly–empowered, strong, and vibrant—but behind closed doors consistently allowing a man to remind me that my “place” was always below him. I felt ashamed that such a contradiction existed between who I presented to be in public and who I was privately in my relationship. How could this happen to me? How could I have fallen into this? How could I stay time and time again? I thought over time my love would be able to heal him, but time just made me weary. I was tired of holding it in, of pretending, and as resentment started to build within me, the future I thought we could build together became something I was now sure would be marked by more pain and sadness. March 3, 2020 was the first time I told someone. I planned to leave the next week on March 13. As I was walking home that day, my spirit told me that March 3 was the day of exit and there was no time to wait until next week. I listened. Timing is divine—I am an educator and March 13 actually ended up being the day quarantine due to COVID started and all schools closed. Had I not listened I would’ve been stagnant in an abusive cycle indefinitely.

Although I was actively living in my word of the year–control–life was not easy. I had to resolve both my new housing insecurity and my joint financial entanglements with my former lover. I asked a friend if I could live with her until I got back on my feet, she graciously and without second thought said yes. I remember carrying the black bags during a heavy thunderstorm and loading them into the cars. Rain poured, there was traffic everywhere, some of the bags ripped and my belongings fell out into the wet sidewalk. I was frustrated and emotional; feeling the fullness of my anxiety, uncertain of what my next steps would be. I remember seeing one of my former students, who was also my neighbor, in the lobby. I had vowed to watch over him and protect him ever since his mother tragically passed away during my time as his fourth grade teacher and we spent every weekday afternoon doing homework together. As I was carrying one of the heavy bags, he looked at me with the saddest eyes and said “Ms. Piña, why are you leaving?” I was speechless, Why was I leaving? Regret washed over me as I prayed that the universe had a higher purpose for me, that there was more out there for me, that I had not just made a mistake. “Well, I just want to let you know I’ll miss you, ok?” I gave him and his grandfather one last hug goodbye and dragged my last bag out of that building in the Heights, never looking back.

Regret was all I felt sitting in my friend’s bedroom with all my belongings in bags, with all of the pictures of my former lover scattered on the floor. Why couldn’t I fix him? Why couldn’t I make it better? I failed us. Was my love so mediocre that it couldn’t move mountains after six years? That it couldn't propel him to want to truly love me and change? Dammit. You’ve been through worse, you could’ve stayed. Was it really even that bad? It’s not like he did it all the time, only when he was angry. You could've just stayed– These thoughts raced through my mind and I cried…so much. I felt the pain of loss while memories of the good times and the bad times played on repeat. I hadn’t slept alone in a bed in almost six years (in hindsight now I recognize that I was always alone, someone else just slept beside me). For the first few weeks I convinced myself that staying would've been easier and better than what I was feeling. I didn’t know how to be alone and exist without a partner. It didn’t help my ego that my former lover started a new relationship shortly after our breakup. “Well then, you shouldn’t have left,” was all he had to say to me about it. I knew I didn't want a relationship with him but to see the love and care I didn’t receive being given to someone else was traumatic. I felt as if I had raised a man, was his “ride or die,” was present in the highest and lowest of moments, gave him all of the love, care, and attention I had in me...only for him to turn around and give everything that I ever wanted to someone else. I grew angry with myself for leaving…I thought, Well if you waited a bit longer, he could’ve been this good to you too, knowing that no amount of time would have changed him. I sat thinking of the ways I could’ve brought more calm and peace to him instead of anger. Why did I always bring anger? Why did I bring out the worst in him? I drew correlations between my childhood relationship with my mother and this romantic relationship and began to blame myself. Was I that frustrating of a human that there is no other way to deal with me except for with abuse? The violence of my childhood convinced and conditioned the way that I viewed myself as an adult. I internalized the idea that when things went wrong they were always my fault, that I could’ve done better, that abuse was the outcome of how frustrated I make others feel.

I enrolled in therapy because I realized that although I had exercised “control” in some areas, my mental health was spiraling and I needed healing. Through therapy I was able to make connections between my past and my present, between my childhood and adulthood, between the pattern of lovers I choose, between the true and false perceptions I have of myself. Through therapy I realized that to have the ability to remain soft and still love is not a curse, but rather a blessing. I realized that oftentimes our past rears its ugly head in different forms— and we invite it, and we welcome it, and we hold on to it tightly because we do not recognize it as part of the same vicious cycle. One of the best things I did for myself was choose to confront myself; digging deeply to make connections between the choices I made in my life. I learned about my propensity to seek codependent relationships, ones where I feel like there is someone that I can save, help, and heal. I also learned that I can not love someone into loving me, no matter how good I am to them. I learned that people only change when they are ready to and the decisions that others make are not a reflection of me but rather of their personal internal struggles. I can’t control how other people treat me but I do have a choice on how to respond. Time went on, I continued virtual therapy sessions religiously, Mondays at 6:30pm were my time to cry, vent, and reveal my deepest worries and insecurities. Mondays at 6:30pm were my time to heal. I discovered my love for writing and I published my first piece about my mother which brought me healing and closure. I replayed “Bag Lady” by Erykah Badu every day, deciding that I would “pack light” and remember that “all you must hold on to, is you, is you, is you.”

I recently saw a tweet that said no one over the age of 24 should be “proud” of having their own apartment. Ignorance. At the age of 25 almost 26, after being removed from my home in high school and having to hop around from home to home, after going through housing insecurity in college (shoutout to everyone that ever let me sleep on their couch, on their air mattress, in their spare room, invited me to spend holidays and breaks with their family), after feeling like I had no family to lean on and go “home” to, after leaving an abusive relationship where my living status was always used as a threat, I was finally able to secure my first apartment, a one-bedroom apartment in the Bronx that is mine. Home, a place that no one can take away from me, where I don’t feel like an intruder, that can’t be threatened, and truthfully, this shit means everything to me.

Here, in my home, there are many emotional moments I have in complete solitude. I think about how grateful I am to be alive, to have survived the lovelessness the world has shown me, to have survived the domestic violence, to have survived the sexual abuse, to have survived the financial and housing insecurity, and yet at every turn I have been blessed with good people that have helped me along the way. To have survived everything I have and to still be HERE, and to still be kind, soft, living in gratitude, and hopeful that there is love out there. I promised myself that everything I have gone through will not be in vain. This is why I write, why I share, why I continue to pour and invest into myself and others, because I know that there is healing that can happen from our stories.