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 recently that “I wanted to fix you when we met”. All this time I thought it was love.

Imagine finding out your entire adult life had nothing to do with love. My entire adult life was a lie. Nothing whatsoever good came out of that relationship… nothing. 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, one by one, that they now see what I have been seeing – and it took me 34 years of his control – emotional, mental, and verbal – to finally see it, so I thank his affairs because I would still be in that situation. So no to my friend – it isn’t anything like you said it was. It was the complete opposite.

He’s been telling people: “My wife is unwell. She has a severe mental problem. I tried to help her, but I just couldn’t.”

He didn’t try to help me. He tried to control me. But then he lost the case on March 18, 2026 – a date I chose, which would have been our 37th wedding anniversary. And once he lost control, he didn’t stop – he just got sneakier. He’s spent every day since trying to undermine the judge’s decision. Let him scheme. I’m done performing my fear for him. What he doesn’t get to know is how little space he actually occupies in my head anymore. That’s mine.

This isn’t new behavior. This is who he always was. The affair, the lies about my mental health – it’s all the same thing: control. And now that he doesn’t have it, he’s worse.

So no, I’m not holding on to an ex because I want him back. I’m holding on to evidence. To a court case I won. To the truth that nearly broke me. Letting go of the legal fight doesn’t feel like freedom – it feels like erasing proof that it happened at all.

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 fighting 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 – since birth – doesn’t get fixed easily. 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 many flaws like everyone else. Of course I need room for improvement. But dang it, I think my siblings and I did pretty dang well from what we endured since childhood. I am an old lady now, and I’m hoping for the best years of my life starting now.

I’m not waiting until May.

I’m writing today.