I Wanted So Much to Believe

One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to admit is that I wasn’t holding onto love.

I was holding onto hope.

Hope that things would get better.

Hope that the warning signs meant less than they felt.

Hope that if I loved hard enough, trusted enough, forgave enough, everything would eventually become what I believed it could be.

Looking back, I can see how much of my life was shaped by that hope.

I met him during one of the most fragile times of my life.

After surviving years of abuse, I wanted so badly to believe that I had finally found something different.

And at first, it felt like I had.

We traveled.

We laughed.

We built dreams.

For the first time in a very long time, I allowed myself to imagine a future that felt safe.

I didn’t know then that healing and hope are not always the same thing.

Sometimes hope helps us move forward.

Sometimes hope helps us explain away what hurts.

The truth is, there were things I saw.

Things I felt.

Moments that left me confused.

Moments that left me alone.

Moments that asked me to abandon what I knew so I could keep believing what I wanted.

But when you’ve spent years surviving, believing can feel safer than seeing.

So I kept hoping.

I kept believing.

I kept telling myself that love would be enough.

Until life handed me a grief so profound that it shattered every illusion I was still carrying.

One week after our wedding, our daughter was born still.

There are some losses that divide your life into before and after.

That was one of them.

The pain was unlike anything I had ever known.

But strangely, inside that devastation, something else happened.

The things I had spent so much energy avoiding became impossible to ignore.

The truths I wasn’t ready to face demanded to be seen.

Not because I became stronger.

Because I became honest.

And honesty changed everything.

For a long time, I judged myself for the things I missed.

The signs I explained away.

The moments I stayed.

The realities I wasn’t ready to accept.

Now I understand something different.

I wasn’t weak.

I wasn’t foolish.

I wasn’t choosing pain.

I was choosing hope with the information and understanding I had at the time.

And I think many of us have done the same.

We stay because we believe.

We trust because we believe.

We keep trying because we believe.

Not because something is wrong with us.

Because hope is one of the most human things we carry.

The lesson wasn’t that I should have known better.

The lesson was learning when hope asks us to abandon ourselves.

Today, when I look back, I don’t see the woman who got it wrong.

I see the woman who survived.

I see the woman who kept going.

I see the woman who eventually found the courage to face the truth and still love herself afterward.

And I think that’s what healing really is.

Not changing the past.

Not rewriting the story.

But learning to hold the person you used to be with compassion instead of judgment.

Because sometimes the thing that needs forgiveness most is not what happened to us.

It’s the way we’ve blamed ourselves for surviving it.

— Tawnia Lives