Not waiting until May...

I have a friend who barely knows me, but somehow feels qualified to diagnose the state of my heart. He says I’m still in love with my ex. Still emotionally attached. His solution? Cut all ties. Even the court case I just won? Cut that too. I know my friend means well, but he doesn’t know me well enough to understand what I went through. Honestly, I am just learning how to deal with it myself too! LOL I wish healing were that simple. That clean. But here’s what he doesn’t see.

Hello, my name is Debbie Lim and I live in constant flight mode. My body forgot how to land. I live with severe anxiety, depression, PTSD, and panic disorder. That’s not drama, that’s diagnosis. And none of this came out of nowhere. I didn’t wake up like this one day. I was shaped by what I survived.

My own father didn’t want me or my twin because he believed there was another father. He was a mean father that never came around until later in life, with many excuses. Then my mom remarried a drunk, but let him do things to us and stood there and watched him. The four of us kids lived in severe filth, child abuse, and torture. I never heard my parents or any grown-up tell me that they loved me or even cared about me from the minute I was born.

We did have our maternal grandparents and they showed us kindness when they were allowed to see us. Most of the time we were locked in a small room and the four of us had to share a bucket to use as a bathroom. So now you know a small example of the extent of the abuse and torture.

Sometimes I feel this: “I am so tired. I don’t know how much more I can take… I feel so alone.”

When someone has lived through the kind of trauma I survived – childhood abuse, neglect, betrayal, emotional manipulation, years of instability – it makes complete sense that my body feels worn down. That doesn’t mean I am at the end of my rope. It means I’ve been carrying too much for too long, mostly without anyone truly seeing me.

A child who grows up unwanted learns fear before they learn safety. A child who grows up in chaos learns to stay alert, to scan for danger, to survive instead of live. That’s where my constant flight mode comes from. My body learned early that the world wasn’t safe. I didn’t choose that. It was done to me.

So when my ex came along, he didn’t create my wounds… he exploited them. He found someone who never heard “I love you” as a child, someone who learned to tolerate mistreatment, someone who confused control with care. And he used every single one of those cracks. He even told me a few times, “I wanted to fix you when we met.” All this time I thought it was love.

Imagine finding out your entire adult life was built on an illusion. I stayed because that was all that I knew. I worked so hard to keep everything together when I was mentally breaking apart every single day and never understood why.

As I step back, I hear from others who now see what I endured through decades of emotional and mental control. The truth finally came to light, and while the betrayal was painful, it was the one thing that woke me up. I would still be trapped in that dynamic if the illusion hadn’t shattered.

So, no to my friend… it isn’t anything like you said it was. It was the complete opposite.

The narrative that I was simply “unwell” or the broken one was just another attempt to rewrite history.

Standing up for myself in court wasn’t about holding onto a person; it was about securing accountability.

When someone loses control, they often try to undermine your reality or play games behind the scenes. Let them.

I am done performing fear. What no one gets to take from me is my own peace of mind.

So no, I’m not holding on to an ex because I want him back. I’m holding on to my dignity. To the legal standing I fought for. To the truth that nearly broke me. Walking away from legal protection isn’t freedom, it’s letting someone erase the reality of what happened.

I was going to wait until May to write about mental health. (May is the month for awareness.) But my mental health doesn’t wait for a calendar. It’s here every morning when I wake up already running. It’s here in the silence after another unsolicited opinion from someone who has never lived one day inside my head.

So I’m starting now. Not with a label. Just with this: You don’t have to be in love with someone to still be untangling yourself from their shadow. You don’t have to explain your whole history to deserve compassion.

I am still in recovery mode. Something that took my entire life to form doesn’t get fixed overnight. I am a work in progress. But let me also say this: I have always been open about my life. I will continue to be open about who I am. No one can take that away from me. Of course I have flaws like everyone else. Of course I need room for improvement. But dang it, I think my siblings and I did pretty dang well considering what we endured since childhood. I am in this next chapter of my life now, and I’m claiming the best years starting today.

I’m not waiting until May. I’m writing today.