Liminal Space.

In a seven-year period, I moved nine times.

I never thought moving so much would have such a negative impact on every aspect of my life. Finances, relationships, mental health.

I was that person who had NEVER moved. For eighteen years, I was rooted in one spot, for good or for bad (no internet). This is the house my parents lived in for forty years and just recently sold. I was that person whose parents somehow miraculously DIDN’T divorce. So despite everything else, I had a solid foundation.

So why did I move?

I pulled the lever and changed the course of my life for love.

And I want to be careful about how I tell this part of the story now, because I know how it ends.

At the time, I thought this was the one choice I had ever made that I had no regrets about. It was hard, and led to approximately five years of absolute suffering, but there’s something a lot of people don’t like to tell you: everything feels easier when you have a buddy. When you can build a makeshift foundation in another person, and take that and build a life together, you can get a lot done even when all odds are against you.

I was young. I was in love. I thought we were going to grow old together.

We eventually got married in 2015.

And for a long time, I genuinely believed that was the story.

It wasn't.

He eventually became abusive, and we are no longer together.

That doesn't erase the fact that I loved him. It doesn't erase the years we spent together, the things we survived, or the good things that happened during those years. But it does change the way I understand them.

So before we get to the ending, let's talk about the shit.

The Shit

I ran away from home because my mom forbade me from seeing my now-ex-husband again.

That’s literally the worst thing you can forbid a very hormonal and mentally ill eighteen-year-old from doing. Not only will your teenage child not go to the college of your choosing, they will also do anything to spite you, and yes, that includes very dramatically running away.

She had her reason for forbidding our courtship. She had caught us in a compromising position.

That’s already embarrassing and traumatizing enough, but in a Catholic household you might as well kill yourself the instant you’re caught with the apple.

This moment is still in my top five for lifetime absolute shame moments.

Maybe we’ll get to those stories, and we can laugh like ‘laughing Jesus’ about my suffering.

I robbed myself of a wedding so we wouldn’t be “living in sin” under her roof a couple of years later.

But we aren’t there yet.

So, I ran away from home to live with H.

And by H, I mean his mom, stepdad, and siblings.

What could go wrong?

Everything.

On a rainy day at the end of July, I packed up my life and left home.

My biggest regret with that was leaving my cat. I wouldn’t have a cat again for three more years, and that’s the longest I had ever been without a cat in my life.

Animals are saviors of mankind, and I’m so thankful I got to have two juicy little grandmas.

But anyways, H’s mom came to get me.

All my belongings got soaked on the coverless trailer we trekked over state lines.

That’s right, I moved to an entirely different state.

No friends.

My family hated me for running away.

The first two years of living away from home, my mom played mind games and made me feel like absolute horseshit whenever I called or visited.

Older me would never have subjected myself to that, but younger me was stupid.

I, their only daughter, had ruined their life.

My support system was gone.

My “alone” passport was now just a scrap because I couldn’t have fucked up worse than this.

So H’s mom had to supplement, mostly financially, because I had taken my life savings of $1,000 and we bought a shitty lemon car that quit working a month after buying it.

And the debt began to stockpile when she helped us fix it.

$5,000 later, she was our mob boss mom, shaking us down every chance she got—because eighteen-year-olds suck at spending money.

I had always lived with very lenient parental debt.

Do some chores, you bought a thing!

Not her.

She had a checks-and-balances spreadsheet that she referenced often.

I get it.

She wound up getting divorced and didn’t have a job at the time, so money was money.

Oh yeah.

The divorce.

I had lived there a month and was then used as a pawn by her abusive ex. He threatened to kick me out, so she called his bluff, and just like that, H and I had less than twenty-four hours to move all of our shit into one of her very uninhabitable rental houses.

We felt like squatters.

There was a hole in the roof, a busted door, an unusable bathroom.

It looked like a hoarder’s house after they had extracted all of the hoard.

Broken and dirty.

But it was home.

Our first place.

However, she and her two children followed shortly after.

So just like that, three adults, a sixteen-year-old, and a three-year-old were sharing a 500-square-foot house.

Mind you, they didn’t come UNTIL major things were renovated, so they never had to shit at the McDonald’s down the street.

This is when my depression reached a new high.

My social anxiety was through the roof, so I refused to leave our room.

I had quit my job.

Gained eighty pounds.

H was working third shift, so I would sleep during the day with him and then stay up all night, alone in our room.

I spent nine months doing nothing, and that’s probably one of my biggest regrets.

Every time I couldn’t contribute because my brain wouldn’t let me, I would make excuse after excuse about why I couldn’t hold a job.

That’s when the worst somehow got worse.

She wanted to start charging us rent.

While they lived there.

While we paid the utilities on the house.

She wanted to use my legal information to pay taxes on the house, and some other not-very-legal things that I can’t remember.

Red flag after red flag made me go:

We need to leave.

So, we had one week to find a new place to live.

Naturally, the poor stay poor.

As we applied to apartments, we were in need of a cosigner due to lack of credit.

It’s hard to establish credit when you’re poor.

It took us many more years to save for a secured credit card. We didn’t have student loans or a car loan, so we had no other way than that.

Back to the cosigner.

The only option was my parents, and of course they refused.

So I cried, and I cried.

And I felt like dying.

We did not come this far just to fail.

I did not give up trying to go to college and everything else, to not be able to be with H only a year after I had left home.

A miracle happened.

H’s grandma gave us money as a deposit for an apartment that would take us without a cosigner.

If H’s grandma ever reads this, thank you.

This was one of the things over the course of our relationship that made the biggest impact on the tides against us.

This is what saved us then.

And I will always be grateful for that.

Our Very Own Shit

So we moved.

The apartment was a one-bedroom but very small, and it sucked.

We would hear people fighting in other rooms.

The town we lived in was very trashy.

We were very poor.

We didn’t get to eat sometimes.

I never could have conceived being COMFORTABLE.

But we worked together, literally, at the same factory—saving money—and we decided on something RADICAL.

What if we moved BACK to [redacted]?

We had lived in [redacted] for two years and decided, why not?

H wanted nothing more than for me to be happy.

He told me that he felt he derailed my life from what it was supposed to be, and we fought.

If anyone tells you love is easy, they aren’t in love.

Or maybe they aren’t mentally ill.

I can only speak from my experience.

Looking back now, I can see how badly I wanted this to be the story of two people against the world.

And for a long time, that’s exactly what I believed it was.

We changed so much in the years we were together.

Some things better.

Some things still a challenge.

Some things I now understand very differently.

Eventually, what I thought was the person standing beside me against the world became someone I needed protection from.

That is a very strange thing to realize about someone you once planned your entire life around.

For a long time, I thought the thing that always pulled us through despite the money troubles, family drama, mental illness, and the change that comes from being teenagers to young adults and now adults was love.

Now I think it was more complicated than that.

Sometimes it was love.

Sometimes it was survival.

Sometimes it was fear.

Sometimes it was simply that we had spent so many years building a life that neither of us knew how to imagine what existed outside of it.

And sometimes, I think, I was just really fucking determined not to admit that something I had sacrificed so much for wasn't what I thought it was.

The Good Shit

So we moved back to [redacted].

The week before we moved, we eloped.

And that’s where the living-in-sin trope came from.

We were moving back to [redacted], to my parents’ house.

Something I would have never imagined, and something that was BARELY endured—on two separate occasions.

Still, we moved back, lived with them for a couple of months, and then found our own place in [redacted].

For the year we lived there, we worked together at another factory.

It was a fun year.

Until it wasn’t.

I had another mental breakdown, and then back to my parents we went.

This is when I decided to go on Accutane for my very bad skin, which, as I referenced earlier, was not a fun time for me, my parents, or H.

And then we decided to move to [redacted]!

Because H wanted to attempt community college and we still had our tail between our legs from [redacted].

So we moved into a townhouse, and I got another job, which I stayed at for eight months until we very suddenly moved again for H’s job.

The almost-year we lived in [redacted] was probably one of the hardest periods of our relationship because H dropped out of school, but we still had to pay for it out of pocket.

So between me working part time, paying for my Accutane treatments (which isn’t cheap), and making H’s school payments, we were PRETTY broke.

H was also still commuting to his job in [redacted], the factory that I had left.

I feel like I left for good reason.

The factory was shutting down, and if you were lucky, you could go work at one of the sister companies.

H was lucky.

I was not.

Even before my breakdown had caused my rather embarrassing exit, I had tried to be chosen, but they waited until literally the day after I gave notice and then pulled that lifeboat back from me with the whole:

“Sorry, we’re only hiring internally right now.”

They had had my application to the sister company a whole month and a half and waited THAT long to reach out.

H was commuting two hours a day and attempting school.

I was working part time and getting used to driving myself again.

I went a few years without driving at all due to my agoraphobia and lack of self-confidence.

Plus the car accident.

Our piece-of-shit lemon got totaled before we moved back to [redacted], but that was one of the biggest blessings in disguise.

We got enough money from the accident to pay back H’s mom and get a new car.

After living with my parents for a second time, they let me have the car I drove in high school.

Originally, they wanted us to pay $2K for it, but I think my dad convinced my mom to just let us have it.

Which I’m massively thankful for.

This was that second gift that truly helped us succeed because each of us having a car opened up so many more possibilities.

After a very hard year of pretty much never being able to spend time together due to H commuting and trying school, we came upon the BIG ONE.

H quitting school was another one of those blessings in disguise.

When we found out we were moving for his job, we didn’t really have a lot saved up, until I did our taxes.

Since we had paid out of pocket for his school, we got a giant tax cut and were able to move for the first time COMFORTABLY.

Any cost we ran into, we could afford.

We then lived in [redacted] for two years, and those were two of the best years of my life at that point.

That led to us building credit, establishing new—but better—jobs (that’s right, H left the job we moved for), buying a new car, and buying a house.

I made a ton of friends at my current job and started creating again.

I had my first major surgery, and the year before, I had gone back into therapy.

Having a catalyst, a foundation, it makes all the difference in success.

Even if it’s only two years long, that’s a long time!

What I Know Now

For a long time, I thought the moral of this story was that love could get you through anything.

That if you found your person, you could build a makeshift foundation together and survive whatever life threw at you.

And there is some truth in that.

But there is also a dangerous lie hiding inside it.

Love is not supposed to require you to survive someone.

I spent years being proud that we had made it through everything together.

The money.

The moves.

The family drama.

My mental health.

His struggles.

The jobs.

The cars.

The apartments.

The house.

All of it.

And I still think there are parts of that story worth being proud of.

Just not for the reasons I originally thought.

I am proud of the girl who packed everything she owned into a car at eighteen and crossed state lines.

I’m proud of the girl who lived in a 500-square-foot house with five other people and somehow kept going.

I’m proud of the girl who cried because she thought she had ruined her entire life.

I’m proud of the girl who kept applying for apartments after every door slammed in her face.

I’m proud of the girl who went years without driving and eventually got behind the wheel again.

I’m proud of the girl who kept working.

Kept moving.

Kept trying.

Kept building.

And most importantly, I’m proud of the woman who eventually realized that surviving something does not mean you have to stay in it forever.

I’m thankful for everyone who contributed in any way, even if that led to some hard lessons or short-lived grudges.

Growing up is so hard.

I’m thankful for the people who helped me grow.

And I’m also thankful for the lessons I learned from the people who hurt me.

Because I don't believe the ending makes every good thing that came before it meaningless.

I don't have to hate every memory just because I hate what the relationship eventually became.

I don't have to pretend I was never in love.

I was.

I don't have to pretend I wasn't happy sometimes.

I was.

And I don't have to pretend the abuse didn't happen just because there were good years before it.

It did.

Both things can be true.

That is probably one of the hardest lessons I've had to learn.

I used to think my “alone” passport was a scrap of paper that could be laminated by another person.

Now I think it was mine all along.

Maybe the foundation I spent all those years looking for wasn't another person.

Maybe it was me.

I still deal with new challenges, a lot of which reopen old wounds.

However, I’ve made peace with ALL of this past.

I’m not mad at myself for the lessons I had to learn, even if they were painful or felt unfair.

And I’m not going to spend the rest of my life punishing myself because I didn't know then what I know now.

I truly believe things happen for a reason and that we’re on this planet living the life we are supposed to be living.

We of course have free will, but cosmic lessons we are supposed to learn WILL make their way in, disrupting our current course.

Sometimes the course correction is subtle.

Sometimes it’s a fucking meteor.

I want to say thank you to everyone who has ever helped me.

And I also want to say thank you to every person who has ever made me feel like DYING in the past seven years.

You can’t grow if you’re comfortable.

And apparently, I had to become extremely fucking uncomfortable before I finally learned that I was allowed to leave.