Healing by Seeing the Truth: Learning to Be Fair to Myself

Over the last few months, the tone of my writing and audio/video notes has changed. I want to acknowledge what is happening and why this is important to my evolution.

For a long time after my relationship with Cris ended, I carried the full weight of the blame. It felt like the obvious path…I was the loud and explosive one at the end. I was the one who’d been struggling with my mental health and projecting outwards. I was the one who couldn’t function properly or show up as the partner I wanted to be and have shown truly can be.

I saw my mistakes with a magnifying lens…every missed moment, every thought/feeling not expressed and every reaction that left her feeling unseen. Every day I needed to fix something else instead of having the mental capacity to fix “us”. The guilt was overwhelming, and at the time, it seemed fair that I accepted all of it.

Blaming myself gave me a structure to rebuild myself. It made my mental chaos understandable. If everything was my fault, at least there was a clear reason for my pain. I could dissect it, write about it, maybe even redeem it somehow. My early writing, audio notes and video diaries for this journal project are full of apologies disguised as reflection. Pages, and hours of recordings soaked in shame, anger at myself, and the need to make sense of what I’d broken. It was easier to see myself as the one who failed than to accept that maybe we both did.

But as therapy began to untangle the knots, something unexpected happened. I started seeing the whole picture, not just the parts of the painting that I fucked up. I allowed myself to look at her actions critically. I looked at them for information. I realized how much her behaviour and lack of action had contributed to the distance between us. The criticism, the withdrawal, the emotional walls, not even trying once to “work from home” on the boat with her new role. Those weren’t just reactions to my instability. They were reflections of her own pain and fear.

It was a difficult shift. I had spent months defending her in my mind, framing her as the one who suffered because of me. I wrote as though she were the stable one and I was the disastrous storm. But therapy forced me to ask: why does acknowledging her part feel so wrong? Why does the inner pain that I experienced have to be the only one that’s “not a real problem”, as she said multiple times?

The truth is, she often minimized and dismissed what I was going through. When I tried to express how heavy things felt, she’d tell me I was “complaining too much.” Once, when I spoke honestly about my depression, she said, “People in Colombia don’t get depression,” as if it were a luxury of privilege that we can be depressed in Canada….or even worse, implying I’m weak. Another time, when I was describing how hopeless I felt, she interjected to say, “These are real problems,” and told me her own struggles, as if mine didn’t count.

The one that hurt the most, she said “You might die tomorrow”. She was trying to say that there is always something worse, so don’t take how I’m feeling so hard. I knew she meant well, but those words hurt so much because there were nights I’d fall asleep hoping I didn’t see tomorrow.

Those words were small on the surface, but they cut deeply. The alcohol I was soaking myself in thinned my blood and those cuts were bleeding me to death. They made me question if what I was feeling and seeing was even real. I honestly question my reality so many times. I began to believe that my pain was not legitimate—that I was weak, “dramatic”, and a burden. I became scared to share. I swallowed a lot of things that hurt, telling myself I was being too sensitive. And slowly, I started disappearing from my true self. Drowning myself in alcohol to cope, further isolated myself from the world and my relationship with Cris.

It’s strange how someone’s emotional dismissal can feel like love when you’re used to being so hard on yourself. At first, I thought her minimizing was a kind of tough love, that she was trying to keep me grounded. Only later did I understand that it was invalidation. And invalidation doesn’t build connection…it breeds emotional disease that ruins relationships.

Blame, I’ve learned, isn’t about accusation; it’s about accuracy. I’m not interested in painting her as cruel or heartless. I understood even then that her reactions came from her own limitations and upbringing, from a worldview that didn’t have much room for real vulnerability. And past experiences that saw someone else vulnerability as manipulation. She handled my emotional pain by downplaying it, pushing it away, pretending it didn’t exist. But understanding the reason why she did things doesn’t erase the effect it had on me. I just makes it easier to talk about. 

The last few months, my journal entries no longer come out as personal confessions of guilt. I can look at the same moments that once filled me with shame and see them differently. I still hold empathy for her, but I finally hold it for myself too. I can say, “Yes, I struggled, and that hurt her. But her way of coping…the criticism, dismissal and denial…hurt me too.” I can understand both truths at once. That’s what my healing is beginning to look like: refusing to flatten a complex story/situation into a single act where I exploded in a nuclear level meltdown.

Through therapy, I came to see that her actions weren’t born of hatred or indifference. They were rooted in her own fears, her own need to feel in control of something when life around her felt uncertain. She needed my pain to be small so she could feel safe. I can understand that now without condoning it. Because while empathy helps explain behaviour, it doesn’t erase responsibility.

Looking back, I realize that for months my writing was about punishment…mostly self-punishment. Every sentence was another way of saying, I deserved it. But my words have shifted. I’m trying to tell the story as it really happened, not as I once believed it. My intent has never had anything to do with revenge or even being “right”. I’ve been trying to be fair. And what feels fair now is much different than what it used to feel…because my pain was attached to the failure of our shared future together.

I can look back without shame and without idealization. I try my best to re-experience moments without being resentful. I can acknowledge that we both tried and that we both failed, each in our own way. Neither of us was equipped to deal with the emotional weight we were carrying. We collided at the edges of our own wounds, trying to love while drowning in unhealed parts of ourselves.

I used to think healing meant forgiving her completely or absolving myself entirely. Now I think it’s harder than that for me. Healing means seeing clearly. It means letting both of us be human: flawed, scared, capable of love and harm at the same time.

I have always been able to see her humanity but it came with diminishing mine. Now, I can view what happened and remind myself that I am worthy…and I definitely was worthy then too (albiet in a mental storm cloud). And that, finally, feels like peace.

I don’t know when I will “finish” and close this project, but at least I know that I’ve grown to be objectively fair with how things unfolded, even without her parts of the story included. And my entries going forward will reflect that.