When someone hurts us, disrespects us, or makes us feel negative emotions we want some type of exchange for that. Wether thats them suffering or them having hell rein down on them. When you are able to get past the denial that it was all someone else’s fault, you will be able to unlock a lot more information about yourself. You are teaching yourself & your brain that when you speak from a place of honesty, even if it is uncomfortable, that it will release guilt, sadness, anger, negative emotions, little by little. That is having empathy for ourselves.

Connecting with people who have been in similar situations is good for your nervous system. Connecting with people who bring you peace instead of confusion is important. Many of us see the red flags that someone brings to the table but completely ignore them and look at the one green flag. Red flags are going to bring you confusion down the road, no matter what. If your intention is long term, marriage, getting to know someone seriously, friendship, and they are bringing nothing but dodgy, confusing, egotistical energy into your life, what inside you needs some recognition and healing? We attract what we are ready for. A lot of us were not told to filter out the bad and keep the good. We were told take what you can get.This is not okay. It is completely okay to look at someone’s morals and see if they truly align with yours; cutting contact is completely okay if they don’t.

Do not feed into people like that or give them anything to latch onto. It is your responsibility to process and heal. Navigating down a path that ultimately is fighting fire with fire is going to lead you to be just like them. You will love the journey more when you’re able sit and be honest about yourself and actions. It’s called shadow work. We all have a shadow self: things we have been unconsciously doing for long periods of time that effect us negatively but we are too egotistical to look internally & instead we look externally for validation that we are right. It is a cycle that everyone is part of. Some people are full on narcissists but they can get help too. Nobody on this earth is too perfect for seeking some type of help for their bad habits. What are your bad habits costing you? If they are costing you your peace, the only person who can get that peace back is you.

It took me a long time to get back my peace from these parasites. I found myself trying to have empathy for them a little too much that I offered forgiveness even though I will never forgive her for abusing my dog. I wasn’t there when it happened, but I can tell exactly what she did to him. Don’t be me. Don’t forgive if you don’t want to or if you’re not ready. Don’t lie to yourself to make it better. That’s just trying to have some type of control over a situation that has costed you everything. It’s not part of healing to forgive.

Part of my healing is knowing that there is absolutely nothing she could do or say for my forgiveness because of what she did to my dog. Predators will always “loud-mouth” their love for animals, children, the broken because they are overcompensating for the private cruelty they inflict behind closed doors. She often meets people and the first thing she tells you is how much she loves animals and how kids are drawn to her. She is compensating for the people and animals that she has hurt. My healing is knowing that abusing a defenseless animal because she was alone, poor, and starving is a line that can never be uncrossed. There is no room for forgiveness because that would be self-betrayal. I am grateful that Bruno and I both survived. He was only 48 pounds when I got him back; I remember Emily saying he looked really scared and skinny. Luckily, he’s over 100 pounds now and thriving.

People like that have no internal core. They survive on the fake, meticulously curated image they try so hard to project. They do this to secure their next victim, their next meal, their next “home.” I have been around someone who changed their entire sexuality just to have a home because she did not have an authentic identity. She often spoke of what she’s “suffered” to gain sympathy from her victims, so they offer her a home, resources, and validation. Coming from someone who has a tragic backstory: it is never something I ever speak about out in public. We need to understand that trauma dumping within the first week (or even month) of knowing someone is not normal, but that is how she operates and I did not have the language or understanding before she came into my life. If I did, she would have been left at the curb. Trauma dumping often comes along with love-bombing. Research and never stop researching because these people are among us way more than you think, and to me knowledge is power.

In behavioral psychology, there is a concept known as the externalization of the internal state. Because narcissistic individuals lack an authentic identity, their minds are in a constant state of chaotic fragmentation and decay. They look pristine on Instagram or when they are love-bombing a new target, but when the audience leaves the room and they’re left alone with their own minds, the internal filth spills out into their physical environment. This photo is a literal psychological mirror of her internal world.

When an abuser loses their primary source of energy, they experience what psychologists call a narcissistic collapse. They lose the ability to maintain basic life logistics, self-care, and environmental order because all their energy is spent frantically calculating how to find their next victim. I was so deeply trauma-bonded at the time that even after escaping, my empathy was weaponized against me. I went back just to help her clean up this physical manifestations of her internal sickness. Learning to recognize a trashed, neglected environment behind a loud-mouthed public persona is a crucial safety filter. It tells you exactly who a person is when the mask comes off. Being able to unbiasedly look at someone’s words and actions is hard, especially when they are close to you. But if we don’t speak up, we will be the ones who turn into their victim when the mask slips.

I was separated into my room and woke up the next day, still four years old, but now faced with a predicament. I knew what had happened to me felt dirty, wrong, and bad. As a kid, this is our only language for traumatic events. I had no understanding that those ten minutes would dictate my life for a very long time. When something happens in childhood that should never happen, something that was very much preventable, and it is pushed under the rug, you are not only failed as a child, you are failed as an adult. You have to grow up with that wound still inside you because the adults around you ignored their duty to protect you. That affects you from childhood into adulthood, until you learn the language for what you went through, along with the coping skills, emotional processing, and healing required to carry something so intense and burdening.

I was not protected as a child when I was molested by my older brother. This happened for two reasons. Number one: my father was most likely introducing my brother to these kinds of things. Number two: my adoptive family protected secrets, extensively. I did not know these things when I was four. I am 28 now. My name is Alex Mihaela, and the version of me that kept their secrets is dead.

The silence, the secrets, and the lack of justice for my younger self and my brother’s younger self are what create lifelong instability, confusion, anger, sadness, and so much more in victims of abuse. I write because people desperately need this language in a world starved of freedom. My brother still lives his life completely under the control of our father, while I am free of that control because I did the work required to leave, stay away, and fix the lingering issues left behind by my father’s torture.

In my opinion and experience, it is a lot harder for a son to estrange himself than a daughter, purely because men tend to bury their emotions a lot deeper than women. The unsaid sits heavier in the body and psyche than what is spoken out loud. It is also easier to settle into what is familiar and uncomfortable than to do the uncomfortable, hard work required to become stable. When you don’t have a support system, it is systematically harder to escape abusive situations. My brother might have a “support system” but his support is keeping him silenced. I allow my support system to know me; he lives uncomfortably every single day for the comfort of his father, because that is exactly what abuse does. My father not only abused us but dominated the house so intensely that any form of genuine connection between my brothers and me, or between them, was automatically tarnished. There was no room for my brothers to be my brothers. My father made it so they were my competition, and he did the same to them; I was theirs.

When I experienced that traumatic event, my father did not protect me. He did not talk to me, and he did not ease any of the emotions I was having. This created a belief in my head that basically translated to: I’ve been told I’m adopted so much that I don’t feel like I am a part of this family, and now I have been hurt severely by my brother and nobody is helping me, so I will retreat into a shell of a person until someone can protect me. But the thing is, nobody came to protect me. Nobody came to save me. I grew up feeling completely alienated from a family that showed they wanted nothing to do with me since I was a young child. When I hit puberty, I started acting out like a normal teenage girl, and this was my family’s excuse to exile me. From the moment I turned 12, I was the bad child, the problem child, the black sheep, the mistake, the piece of shit, the crazy bitch, the lazy bitch. My father did everything he could to narrate and dictate my life. He imprisoned all of his adopted children, but I was the only one who recognized it as abuse, that is why I got out. My father gained access to anything he wanted from whoever he wanted, but he never got access to my thoughts, my bravery, my courage, my common sense, or my stable sense of self. That is what got me out, and that is what kept me out. It is also what has helped me tackle this trauma head-on. He does not get a single bit of control beyond what he already extracted between the ages of 1 and 24.

I saw the mask when I was young; I have a natural tendency to see the truth in things, as bad as that truth may be. Because I knew my father wore a mask, I grew up slowly pushing myself away from my adoptive family. None of them wanted to see my father for his actions; instead, they all let themselves be manipulated by a man who was (and still is) consumed by his secrets. How are you supposed to have a relationship with someone who enables the person who abused you? I would love for my family to answer that. All I saw were aunts and uncles enabling someone who crafted my entire childhood (and brothers too) into a memory of pain. I saw cousins who were silenced by the very same people who enabled abusers. Nobody could connect with each other under genuine circumstances, there was always this layer of fear when my father was around. This was the family I was brought into. It was never my job to stay and get torn to shreds by people who never cared to pick up the pieces with me. The man might be charming, charismatic, generous, funny, and wealthy, but the man behind the mask is abusive, manipulative, evil, and sadistic.

Part of me writes in hopes my family will see this and maybe have answers to why I’m not around. It wasn’t me, it was you. The man you see as charming, hurt his wife. The man you see as funny, sexually exploited his adopted children. The man you see as outgoing, used violence in his home when you weren’t there. The man you see as generous, steals his wealth and calls everyone else a thief. The man you think is a good man, is a very sadistic and insecure man. If that causes you to be uncomfortable and reject the truth, you are invalidating the very real trauma and torture he exposed me to, and you are part of the reason why this world is crumbling.

Trusting children should always be our number one priority. An entire country is falling because people put trust in the wrong person. You are completely capable of trusting the wrong person. It happens, just take accountability and stop letting your pride prevent you from making the right choices because you’re making life long decisions by standing next to someone who abuses in the dark.

When I was a kid, I’d dream of the east coast. I always wondered what it was like, if the people were different, if the grass was greener on the other side. When I lived there, it met every one of my expectations and more.

Because of the environments I was previously in, this new environment was nothing like it. People felt more human-like, I felt free to be myself in a completely different way. When you take yourself out of a toxic environment to a brand new place it lets your nervous system feel like you have enough physical space from you and what that abuse was like that it gives you enough mental and emotional space that you can finally take a breath. And that’s what I did.

I didn’t heal big parts of me over night, but the first thing that helped me, was feeling safe. Everything followed after that, with as much effort as I put in. Meaning, the work won’t do itself. Relocating ≠ waking up healed the next day. It just gives you a space to finally take a breath, if you allow it. Running from something is completely different, you will never catch that breath.

After some time, some shitty things happened, my girlfriend’s car being stolen and some expensive items being stolen off our patio. The safety stopped being there so we looked at all our options, and ended up moving to Nevada (where I was just living) for business opportunities and financial growth.

It was quite an easy move, we had loads of support and I felt like I was moving with my best friend. I felt like these big events I was having in my life weren’t abusive events anymore and that let me take another deep breath.

When we got to Vegas, it was quite terrible. The emotions from living here before under someone else’s control, being tortured mentally, emotionally, and physically by her, were being brought back up. I felt like I had been knocked back down after…growing and healing, and that is insanely hard realization. But, we have to be gentle with ourselves because that’s why they say healing is not linear. To me, it felt like I had taken 10 steps back. But let me explain to you why that move changed my life for the better.

I was forced to sit with my emotions. I had everything I wanted in life and then I was brought back to the place where everything was stripped from me at a time in my life. PTSD was coming up for me, leaving the house caused panic attacks, my life was not the same as it was living on the east coast and I was angry because of that, extremely angry. I felt like my abuser was still abusing me even though it had been years.

The thing about life is even if it sucks, you have to keep moving and figure out a way to still live. I wanted so badly to be able to force this down and not let it bother me but that is lying to myself which causes way more damage than being honest and processing what was going on.

I sat with the emotions and turned to my support and my tools. I looked into things, researched, pulled together so much data about what I was going through that it put language to things I thought I was completely alone in. This caused me to start being more honest with myself, my emotions.

Something I had come to know is that because my abusers were all narcissists, I had created this “False Self.” When I would go outside, this false-self persona attached to me because of the abuse and the environment I had to endure and warp my identify around, caused some grandiosity in me. As I was researching and being honest, I read that someone can experience trauma-induced narcissism. (I will talk about this topic in an essay very soon!) This was excruciatingly hard to understand and accept but once I did I was able to start being vulnerable in the world, and instead of having a defense mechanism created by survival, I can think of myself as ordinary now. This allows me to finally be able to live.

Everyday is a learning experience for me. I’m still actively trying to heal this part of me. Being vulnerable to people who took your vulnerability as something to destroy, makes you fearful and fear plays out in so many ways. Don’t let fear stop you from living your life. Know discernment and who to be vulnerable with.

There’s other residual issues I’m processing and healing but I’m not letting how scary or uncomfortable it is, make me stuck. You have to keep moving. If you aren’t growing, where are you going?

I’m good at looking at the bigger picture and during these moments of healing and processing, something inside me pushed me to start writing. I felt so alone during these moments of my life, and that’s the problem. We aren’t alone. None of us are alone, in fact we are more than likely going through the exact same thing as hundreds of other people at the exact same moment. I hate that the world makes us feel alone during our hardest moments.

My hope is someone, at least one person, stumbles on my Substack to see that there is language for the hard things, people do want to talk about it, and you are never alone. My goal is to keep talking about my experiences, the hard stuff and hopefully, it inspires you to look inward and live your truth. That is all I want for absolutely everyone, even the people who have caused me so much pain.

Have you ever heard the phrase “you have all the answers within you.” I know it sounds annoying because when I first heard it for the longest time I was like: “WHAT DOES THIS EVEN MEAN????” It made me so angry to see when I was scrolling but it finally clicked after a few years.

It’s trying to say: every trouble you have in life, every situation that you are in that you don’t like, is showing you something inside of yourself that needs healing. Being abused has nothing to do with the answers inside of me but:

What led me to be in a toxic environment?

What led me to staying so long?

What was I personally running from that put me where I was?

Do you see how the accountability is on me? Most people want to push that accountability completely to the ones that hurt them but you will stay angry that way. You will stay in a cycle that way.

You can apply this to anything. If you’re having family troubles, it’s teaching you how to have boundaries as much as it’s uncomfortable for you. Boundaries are a pillar of life.

If you have friend problems, it’s asking you to look inwardly at your loyalty, discernment, and morals.

If you are running from relationship to relationship and cannot be single to introspect, you feel a deep sense of unworthiness tied to childhood. Here’s my best advice for that: Love from a parent means nothing if that parent has no capability to love anything. Stop trying so hard for someone who genuinely does not care about you. Put your love toward something worth it.

Fixing these wounds is what we are called to do to live a fulfilling and happy life. When you start fixing one, you’ll know how to fix the next. If you don’t, you’re going to hurt people your entire life. Some of us fix those wounds and some of us will never be able to look inwardly to do so. Who do you want to be?

Because so much of my childhood was focused on the mere fact that I was adopted, this made me constantly wonder about my birth mom in particular and if I had any siblings. Because I wasn’t close with my adoptive dad, I didn’t care to know about my birth dad, but I had a strong pull toward my mom and any brothers or sisters.

This is why it is super important to be educated about adoption and never stop reading and learning even when you already went through the adoption process. If my parents had any clue how to truthfully raised three adopted children, things would have been completely different and that push to find my real blood line wouldn’t have been so heavy. I believe knowledge is power, and the lack of knowledge or wanting to be better is why so many people are unhappy and stuck. There is language and experiences, perspectives that align with what you’re going through, you just have to do the work to find those perspectives. I didn’t. I just ran my entire life from the truth: I wanted to know who my birth mom was and if I had any siblings. Because I didn’t have this, I grew up feeling unworthy.

I made mistake after mistake running to people who did not love me and just wanted to use me. In a way, I used them too, to fill the void where my real family was supposed to be. It is so insanely hard to sit there and look at the version of you that let yourself get to where you are, but to be better, we have to. The point is to look at those sides of us that produce not so good results in our lives and internally search for where that wound came from, and then heal that.

Some of these relationships that I got myself into tore me into pieces. I met some very unstable people because I was unstable. You will always be given what you are giving out in life. That is a law of the universe, the golden rule as some call it: do to others what you would want done to you. We aren’t taught that for no reason, that line literally dictates how our life will go. Selfish people meet selfish people. Selfless people meet selfless people. If your life is a mess, nobody can fix it except for you. Nobody is coming to save you and that is the hardest thing to learn.

Nobody is going to clean your house the days you can’t get out of bed. Nobody is going to feed you the days you don’t feel like nurturing your body. Nobody is going to give you a check for 10 million dollars so you can live off of that for the rest of your life. Nobody is going to hand you the validation you need so badly.

That is your job, and when you’re the one fueling your growth, being able to look internally instead blaming external things, being truthful even if it’s so uncomfortable, guess who is going to come out on top? You. You will become your highest self, the most aligned self, the happiest version you could be. Why? Because you’re actively telling yourself that you have worth and you’re acting with good intentions, the universe rewards that ten fold. Other people’s words won’t matter the same. You’ll be searching for connection instead of validation. You’ll find more authenticity in the world than you can imagine. Your frequency, when you are able to look internally, will go from taking, wanting, buying, to giving, healing, connecting. That is what life is about.

After I was able to admit that I made so many mistakes because all I wanted was my real family…guess what? A few months later, I posted in a Facebook Romanian Adoptee group, and less than a week later I found my birth mom alive and well, and I found out that I had a brother. I’ve been given the gift that most adoptees never get, most people never get.

Everyday, seeing my brother and my mom in my phone heals parts of me that were broken for very long that I never thought I would fix. I was given this gift, and I live everyday with that void now full of absolute unconditional love. And to think I could have been dead, and never got to experience meeting my mama and my brother.

Live. It’s worth it. You are always loved, and life with always be worth it.

I think society has been thrown a bunch of psychology words like gaslighting, manipulation, narcissistic, trauma bonding, but a lot of us don’t really know how these things could be playing out in our daily lives.

A trauma bond is an emotional attachment that can form in an abusive relationship; specially the connection the victim feels toward the perpetrator. Often times, the perpetrator thinks of themself as trauma bonded but that would be systemically incorrect because the trauma isn’t the relationship itself, it is the relationship the victim has with the intermittent reinforcement from the abuser.

Victims often find themself chasing a slice of dopamine they get when their abuser rewards them with praise, affection, love bombing. All humans crave dopamine, so let’s talk about the notion of “why did it take them so long to get out of an abusive situation.” It means the victims support system is lacking because to get someone out of a situation where they are chasing dopamine, you have to treat it as such.

The best piece of advice I can give to you if your loved one is in a situation like this isn’t to make them feel guilty for being in a relationship they cannot leave. That is terrible and you should never do that, because they are telling themself that every hour of every day. Instead, take the time to understand the science behind what is happening in their brain. They are chasing a toxic type of dopamine. Give them healthy dopamine, train their brain to understand the difference between healthy dopamine and dopamine induced by abuse. Take them to the park, take them bowling, book a vacation if you can. Anything that is impactful in a healthy way. Over time, you literally helped heal a nervous system that was in a survival mode because of empathy and science.

Look at it like a slot machine. When you win, you feel good, your brain is rushed with dopamine and all the happy hormones. When you lose, all you’re thinking about is the feeling of winning again and you’re chasing that feeling with dollar after dollar, bet after bet. It feels like a heightened anticipation. Your brain doesn’t care about anything else except receiving more and more dopamine and every time there is a win, dopamine comes flooding in 20% more than the last time. Winning isn’t guaranteed but to the gambler it isn’t about winning, it is about filling a void with dopamine.

When your partner goes between happy and angry in a toxic/abusive way, your brain floods with dopamine when they are happy. Their anger can be abusive, toxic, manipulative but you aren’t thinking about the consequences in a state like that. You aren’t thinking about the abuse because all you crave is the dopamine. They have wired your brain to wait for their praise and affection like a dog. That is why giving nothing but empathy to people in abusive situations is important. It’s important to treat every situation with truth, not how to make it comfortable for everyone else except the victim. Abusive relationships are equivalent to being addicted to drugs. The worse the drug, the worse the abuse is.

Over time, this shows up in a victim as traumatic disorders. For me, a consequence of the consistent abuse is C-PTSD. I think a lot of people, especially women, have this because of the sheer discomfort we go through in life for the comfort and validity of everyone else. That in itself can create a state of survival. I am not diagnosing, only giving language to things I personally wish I had knowledge on. Another symptom of this is being deathly afraid to go outside. Because I was harmed, and there was so many people around that could hear, I felt humiliated but also unprotected. I wish someone had called the cops or at least come and knocked, but where we were living people weren’t like that and she knew that. There are a few things that I am currently having to truly process and heal through even after a few years. For a long time, I tried to put on a brave face and continue life as I knew it before the abuse but that version of myself was corrupted and destroyed.

So I picked up the pieces that they all broke, and I’ve been looking at the things they took from me but also (and this is super important) looking at the ways they trained me to be, to survive in their torture chamber. I am realizing, I’ve been living like that person and that is why I am scared of outside, scared of people, scared of what the world has to offer me. They took every sense of my identity but also my right to exist. I felt like my purpose was to sit in a room and shut up because the world didn’t like or care about me. But that is not at all what I am destined for. Because I shined so bright, they tried to lock me in a room. Slowly, I started to embody this understanding. You don’t just wake up one day and you’re better. It takes looking at the person they made you into, the person you made yourself into to survive, and look at how you can embody that bright light again.

The brain will always adapt, to abuse, to survival, to pregnancy, to joy, to everything, and that is the really amazing thing about the brain. There is healing after being through such vile and disgusting things. There is healing after being through things you’ve never told anyone. There is always healing, and that is something that I hope everyone can hold onto.

The person I became involved with used her fists as a way of communication, like second nature. I had never experienced someone like this before: quick to volatile anger and extremely physically aggressive, which led to months of physical abuse and torture from her while I paid every single bill, including her phone bill and rent, while she sat in bed all day. No job, no car, no license, but also no morals, no values, no identity. She wore a mask very well, just like my father. She was a terrifying, spitting image of my father’s rage and abuse.

The first thing she ever physically did was throw a 20-pound weight at me. It landed on my foot, and I have a scar from it and lasting damage that makes my foot go numb when I walk too fast. After she threw it and it hurt me, she said, “You were in the way!” She took not only my safety away, but she committed an act that produced lasting damage to me. I did not throw anything back, I did not hit her. What I would always do was run to the bathroom and lock myself in there. She would eventually kick the door in so she could get to me, every single time. The door had more damage than I’m willing to show because it still causes my heart to race, my hands to shake, and my head to spin. The damage was not just to the bathroom door but to the bedroom door as well. She always wanted access to me, even if it meant using physical force to get to me.

After she threw the weight at me, and I escaped to the bathroom and she got in by aggressive force, she was hovering over me with her finger pointed at me, projecting her own internal battles. She said, “You’re going to remember me forever. You’re going to wish you never lost me and look for me in everyone you meet.” This sounded atrocious and just wrong. Maybe that’s how she felt about me, but after she said that I said, “I will never think about you.” That struck a deep chord within her because she cocked her hand back and slapped me, and did it again and again. I was too stunned to do or say anything except break down and cry and say, “You hit me! You hit me! You hit me!” She said, “I didn’t hit you that hard, man up.” She honest to god did not care that she just laid her hands on me and physically abused me. The way it was absolutely nothing to her, you could just tell she was raised by someone who effortlessly physically abused her. A sad origin story does not excuse you from accountability, but that’s for a different essay.

The physical abuse remained one-sided for over 7 months. I did not strike back; I did not physically do anything to her that she was doing to me. I was taught better than that, even though she had broken me down so badly that I was walking 7 miles a day to and from work in Las Vegas on Tropicana, not safe at all, just so I could avoid her at home. I was scared, deathly scared, that I was going to end up dead, but I had absolutely no choice but to stay in the place I was paying for, under her control, because that is what narcissists do to you.

One day, after her relentless abuse and threats to kick me out of the place I was paying for, by saying she was going to security for the fourth time in the same week, I blocked the door so she could not leave to kick me out and I pushed her down into the cabinets.

This was an out‑of‑body experience for me. I had never done anything like that before. Physically assaulting someone, even in defense, and watching her fall and hurt herself deeply affected me. I was not myself, and I realized in that moment that the anger, the abuse, the torture was all getting to me and literally changing how I acted in the world, and I was ashamed of myself. I had become capable of something I swore I would never do. That is what long-term abuse does: it doesn’t just hurt you; it changes you into someone you don’t recognize.

She got up and started punching my head over and over. To this day, she has run with the story that I hit her first, as if the months of abuse before that never happened. In her version of reality, her abuse toward me wasn’t real or valid, and I was the perpetrator. She acted like my bruises weren’t real, or the broken doors didn’t exist. That was one of the hardest parts for me to process: realizing some people can hurt you deeply and still genuinely see themselves as the victim. She rewrote events so she never had to sit with what she did. Accountability would force her to confront herself, and some people are running from themselves every second of every day.

I see through it now. I see someone who was deeply damaged long before I met her. She’s never tried to heal that damage, just mask it with alcohol, using other people’s money and resources, lying to get what she wants, changing her sexuality just for housing. She makes choices that harm people and then tries to excuse it, twist it, or just ignore it. That is going to cost anyone their peace.

I have spent so long studying the patterns that even the people who have hurt me make sense to me now. Their behavior is less scary and more sad than anything. After a lifetime of trauma, of watching people make horrible choices for themselves and hurting others, plus the self‑help and psychology books I grew up secretly reading, I can see the pain people hold, and instead of wanting enemies I only want to understand them and their actions more. I stopped sitting with my emotions and instead I ask “Why?” There is always a driving force making someone act, and it is never what you think.

The simple truth is, she is going through something that has nothing to do with me, but unfortunately I was her victim. We have all grown up with some type of wound, and knowing hers, because I studied her and her behavior, I now know what I was dealing with. She does not want to heal and be honest with herself, so she is not my concern, and if you are still holding onto someone who makes you relate to any of these words: run.

Leaving narcissistic abuse is extremely hard because it is confusing. You get sucked in again and again because they trained you to be loyal, to obey, and to align your identity with theirs, or you will not survive. Unwinding that long‑term pattern of abuse and wiring of the brain is hard. When they say healing is not linear, they really mean it especially regarding narcissistic abuse. But if you can put in the work to logically and emotionally understand who they are behind the mask they wear, you will heal. That is a promise I make to you as a reader.

She not only stole my safety but she stole my body and used it so she could finally have control over something after a lifetime of people having control over her, and her body. That is how abuse happens: someone is wounded in a specific way and they seek to find control over their trauma and abuser, and so they recreate scenarios where they are the one in control, sexually, physically, or mentally. She created control over me in every way there is to control someone. In a narcissist’s head, they get a moment of relief having that control, but they are so far out of reality that they do not realize that they have just victimized someone. To them, they have just gotten justice. It is a very screwed‑up way of thinking, but they get screwed-up long before they are an adult, leading to instability in their adulthood.

Not only living with the trauma of the abuse, her lying about the abuse, but also her completely taking advantage of my body coercively for months until she eventually raped me, is existentially painful. She got me drunk and handed me a pile of painkillers. I remember feeling disconnected from myself before it even happened, like my body already knew something bad was coming and was trying to leave before my mind caught up. After, I went to the bathroom and there was blood. I stared at it. It is a painful memory to recall.

She followed me into the bathroom, and saw the blood. She said “you better not say this was rape.” I remember feeling this stillness in my body, like my nervous system was shutting down more than it already had. I felt raped but she was saying I was not allowed to feel raped. I was now carrying confusion, self-doubt, shame, fear, and the pressure to deny my own reality so she would not have to face what she did. That is what gaslighting does. It changes your perception of yourself. It makes you question your own body, your own memory, your own instincts.

My reality was this: I had already said no in countless ways for months. I had already explained my boundaries, my discomfort, my identity, my limits. But coercion slowly wears your nervous system down. Constant pressure, begging, manipulation, guilt, anger, and emotional punishment creates a disconnection from your body and it stops feeling like it belongs to you. That is what people do not understand about coercive control. Sometimes the “yes” is survival. Sometimes the “yes” is exhaustion. Sometimes the “yes” is someone trying to prevent another explosion.

The scariest part of the abuse was not only what she did to me. It was realizing what long-term violence was capable of turning me into. I spent my whole life telling myself I would never become like the people who hurt me. One day I looked at myself after pushing her into those cabinets and realized trauma had started changing me too.

That moment forced me to confront something terrifying: pain spreads unless someone makes the conscious decision to stop carrying it forward.

My father taught me never to hit women while simultaneously hitting women himself. Violence and contradiction lived side by side in my childhood. I grew up surrounded by people who justified harm, denied harm, minimized harm. I refuse to become one of them. That does not mean I am unaffected by all of this now. I carry ptsd, c-ptsd, I carry anger sometimes, I carry longing for the version of myself that existed before I learned what survival mode was.

But I also carry awareness, accountability, and the willingness to face myself honestly.

Abuse changes people, but becoming aware of those changes is what stops the cycle from fully consuming you. I did not survive all of this just to become another person who hurts others and calls it love.

I only speak truth in my writing. I do it because I’ve lost too much to lies. Truth is uncomfortable to hear, but it’s necessary for change, and that’s exactly what humanity needs. I’m not here to make anyone comfortable. So let me put myself front and center so you understand why.

I was born in Cluj‑Napoca, Romania, in February of 1998 and put up for adoption months later. My mother could not take care of me. This was not because she did not want me. A dictator had decided that women’s bodies were not their own, and I was born from violent circumstance to a young mother who had no means to raise me. Nicolae Ceaușescu banned birth control, contraceptives, and abortion. He demanded women birth as many children as possible, yet the state could not support them. Because of his regime, I was placed in an orphanage, like so many other children during the aftermath of his dictatorship. Women in Romania, as everywhere, were never asked what they wanted or what they could carry.

International adoption became a release valve. Between the early 1990s and 2001, thousands of children left Romania for families abroad. I was one of them. I was adopted by a family in Minneapolis, Minnesota: Gabe and Christie Kmetz. Even their names went well together, so everyone assumed this was a gift to them and to me. A happy ending.

But nobody asked why it was not.

The “why” outweighs everything else. The family I was given to was not a gift. It was a lesson, to put it extremely lightly, one that took over 25 years for me to understand. My early childhood, I truly do not remember many good moments, only glimpses and flashes. I recall my older brother, my parents, and I riding bikes down our street together. My dad taught me how to ride a bike, but I picked everything up extremely quick, so he did not get much of that proud‑dad moment. He was just happy he did not have to be outside with me for too long.

Mostly, I remember the bad, and I remember it vividly. I remember my older brother molesting me when I was 4 years old. I remember it so clearly that I still ask myself: How did he know how to do all those things? Things only a grown man would understand how to do. We know that children who sexually act out on other children often reenact what has been done to them. That question has never left me, and it leads my mind to dark places. Places where I am forced to question what really happened in a family that everyone assumed was a gift, but which was, in truth, a silent tragedy.

I write because the truth matters to me more than the average person, because I lost so much because of people being dishonest, wearing a mask, and twisting the narrative to look like a savior. I will always name things as they truly are, instead of whatever helps people sleep. I am blunt, and I am honest. Too many families are shattered by secrets. Too many families think that pushing secrets under the rug and lying to their children is the responsible thing to do, even while they try to teach you right from wrong. It is hypocritical, the times we live in. We stand by predators because they are “family,” as if that word is a shield. That is not enough. It has never been enough.

I could feel the family secrets even when I did not know what they were. So I grew up investigating, learning, questioning, rebelling. The “normal” was never normal, and I could feel it. I could feel it in my father’s anger. I learned extremely young that everyone carries some type of trauma, and I sensed that my father carried something far darker than the rest of us. You could see it in the way he effortlessly screamed at his wife over the purchase of a small trinket. In the way he pulled me upstairs by my hair. In the way he slapped my brother and then forced him to lie to extended family right before a family wedding.

Things were never as they seemed, and I felt that. I did not ignore the words being screamed at my mother. I tried to dissect and understand why my father would say such things. I tried to understand the many attempts he would make to get me to speak while he was physically, verbally, mentally, and emotionally abusing me. I remember him coming back to my room over and over, asking if I was “ready to talk.”

Talk about what, exactly?

The way that everyone in this house is scared of you? How Mom tenses up when you come into the room? How Westin never wants to be here, staying away for a day that turns into weekends, learning to bring his friends to the house. Whether that was protection or an offering, who knows. How about we talk about how your wife died and you were trying to kiss your son’s friend in the hot tub?

It was never about him. Only about what everyone else did.

As time went on, I learned that things get swept under the rug. That was the normal way of things. Things were never talked about. There was never support, no safe space to talk through what very much needed to be talked through. That is how the fire is fueled: by silence.

This is why I live now the way I do, so headstrong about finding the truth and living my truth. Some might ask, how can you be so open about the things you have gone through? Because silence has kept us all in a bubble. I want to pop the bubble. Popping it might help at least one person understand, and put language to something they have gone through.

Here is the thing, though. My father is not the messy, chaotic, loud, obnoxious man you might be picturing. He was put together. Stable outwardly. Charming. Easygoing. These are not qualities you associate with a narcissist or a predator, and that is exactly why so many people get away with it. Narcissistic personality traits often include a highly polished public self that hides a private world of rage, manipulation, and entitlement. You can wear a mask your whole life, and as long as you have even one person believing your false sense of reality, you feel justified in believing it yourself.

That is why we must ask questions. That is why we must seek truth instead of assuming we know somebody. That assumption is ignorance, and the victims of people who get away with terrible things are very much real. I am one of them, as much as my brothers and my mother are. My family will never understand that, because they believe the mask my father wears, and he wears it very well.

I was talking to my partner about this, and I told her that I knew she would get along with my dad, and that she would hate herself for it. She agreed. You cannot help but “love” him.

My dad is the last person you would think would touch a child. But the bed‑wetting until my brother was into his teenage years was there. Chronic bed‑wetting in older children is a common trauma response, a body’s silent alarm. The dark, mysterious “emo” kid, it was written all over him. My brother liked to kill ants with a magnifying glass and watch them burn. He showed me once. I thought it was alarming, not “cool.” He would rather sleep in an unfinished basement than in a room with a bed. Maybe distance made him feel safer. Hyper vigilance and avoidance: classic adaptations to an unsafe environment. These were things I picked up on, and so many more. They led me to the truth. They taught me to look between the lines, to analyze the patterns. That is my specialty, created by 25 years of survival mode. The same survival skills that kept me alive in that house are the ones I now use to see others clearly, in ways they can’t see themself.

Before the age of 18, I had everyone figured out, even without knowing the “family secrets.” That is why I left. I could not live in the false reality I was forced to inhabit. I could not grow, and I could not be stable, in a place that demanded I trade my morals just to survive.

But leaving is not the same as escaping. Over the years that followed, I learned to run from my problems. State to state, I got myself into situations that were truly just a replica of what I was trying to flee: my father. I met a lot of people who had his anger, his mask, his facade. It was a cycle. In psychology, this is called repetition compulsion. We unconsciously seek out familiar dynamics, even when they are painful, because the known feels safer than the unknown. You tend to gravitate toward what you were taught, because that is all you know.

I lived in Florida for a while. That humid, heavy air. It was one of the best experiences I have ever had. I learned so much about myself: what I will tolerate, what my work ethic actually looks like, what it means to be an adult. I moved back because the girl I was living with cheated on me. I knew my worth enough to call my dad and ask for help getting home. He said to leave everything but myself. He got me a plane ticket. It was one of the rare moments I got to experience what felt like the love of a father.

After I got home, he waited to release the anger. Cameras went up inside and outside of the house. Things got way more strict. Every door was installed with a code on it. He was retiring, and he was upset. But as I write this, I think maybe after a lifetime of sins, paranoia was catching up to him. I remember he said “I put hidden cameras in the house but they didn’t work so you guys got lucky,” like it was a favor to me, like a joke. Looking back, it is quite literally insane that he admitted that. Did he put them in the bathrooms? Our bedrooms? At this point, who knows, but I do know nothing stays hidden forever. The target for his anger became my younger brother, myself, and my mom. Our older brother was already gone. He barely talked to any of us, only our dad when he needed something. My dad would always give in, as much as he spoke ill of him behind his back. I watched my dad try his best to be a father to our older brother, but when it came to Josh and me, we got nothing from him except an angry, broken man and everything that comes with that.

So I had to leave again. And I did.

During one of those returns home, he bought me a car. His favorite brother was in town visiting, and he wanted to look like a generous dad who had money. He loved flashing his wealth. He loved the performance of generosity. But the car was never a gift. It was a leash. Over time, the strictness ratcheted up until we had to ask permission just to eat. He bought me the cheapest toilet paper because he said I was “using too much.” He said I could use 4 squares for peeing and 6 squares for shitting. I’m not joking. And he would tell people this, and they would find it funny.

I would only go home to shower and grab clothes for work. Eventually I moved to Nevada for a job opportunity, and he hated it. He did not want me to have freedom. He wanted complete control over his kids at all times. Control is the oxygen of a narcissist. Without it, the mask slips, and the rage underneath becomes unmanageable.

When I later came back, he wanted me out so quickly he spent $5,000 dollars on an apartment for me three days after I got back. He took the car. I had nothing, but he left a fifty‑dollar bill in the kitchen drawer before he dropped me off. I had searched for freedom and he had manipulated me back into his house, only to push me out again and leave me with nothing, so he could be in control. He was not thinking about anything except making me feel even more isolated.

Eventually, I got out and stayed out but I found myself in 2 more utterly abusive situations before I found my bearings. One of the relationships was extremely mentally and emotionally abusive, and the other one was verbally and physically abusive. Opposite ends of each other on the spectrum of domestic violence but I truly take what I can from every situation as a learning opportunity.

In the moment, I was scared, isolated, in insurmountable amount of pain, but the minute I left those people in the dust, is when my life started to change. I was so used to abuse, toxicity, and instability by the hands of other people. This pushed me to stop counting on anyone for anything and focus completely on myself, which I should have in the very beginning but my dad taught me to be reliant on him and others. All I ever wanted and was looking for was love.

I worked in a laundromat for over a year, and it taught me how to be humble. It taught me that I can be abused but still have to show up to work the next day and put a smile on my face and help my customers. It taught me that my problems are not the only problems in the world, and it taught me loads of empathy for people. As much as I “hated” that job, it gave me a type of discipline that you cannot teach somebody. I would wake up at 6am, go to work, come home at 4pm, and stay away from drama. Doing this for over a year, and nothing else, really does help you understand that how your life is, is ultimately up to you. I was able to get out of three extremely isolating and abusive situations, and I didn’t stop there.

I built something new. I lived in Nevada for a while working at the laundromat before moving to the East Coast with my partner. That move was another life‑altering experience in the best possible way. My partner and I had been long distance, she was from Jersey and I was from Oregon living in Nevada. I saw her as a safe haven, a calm harbor. She taught me how to have a calm life. It was many flights, and hotels, and goodbyes because of the long-distance, but her and I never gave up on each other. We got a opportunity to move in together in April of 2025 and we haven’t been separated since. But because I removed myself from everything I had ever known, I built the foundation of myself there. I calmed my nervous system enough to finally breathe a full breath, something I had not been able to do in years. This is what happens when the nervous system exits survival mode and enters a state of safety. You can finally rest, digest, heal. I experienced a place I had always wanted to experience. It was everything. Sometimes that is exactly what your nervous system needs: a complete reset, far away from every trigger you have ever known.

I realized shortly after distancing myself from every abuser I had ever let hurt me, how strong I actually am. At some point, somewhere between Nevada and New Jersey I stopped asking, “Why did this happen to me?” and started asking, “What am I supposed to do with it?” That question changed everything.

We moved back to Nevada for business opportunities but the difference is that I am in a relationship where I do not have to worry about whether she is cheating. I do not have to scan for danger when she is near me or look for hidden meanings in her silence. Being loved by someone who does not require you to perform, after a lifetime of acting, is its own kind of healing. We are building our futures together, side by side, on a foundation that is real. She did not require me to change anything about myself in order for her to love me, and that is when I realized and felt what unconditional love is.

When you leave what you have always known and allow yourself to rebuild the way you are supposed to be, instead of letting the influence of others determine who you are, you are given a kind of mental freedom that nothing else can touch. I do not worry about anything other than the truth anymore. Nothing else matters. Being truthful, after losing so much simply because my father tells people I am a liar, after knowing the literal skeletons he keeps in his closet, is not just a choice. It is the only thing that makes sense. It is hypocritical, and it is sad that anyone believes him, but we cannot control what people choose to believe, we can only control what we put into the world, and after a childhood upbringing that was surrounded by secrets, lies, masks, and abuse; truth is the only thing I am willing to put my effort into.

My mom died in 2023. She never got to tell her lived truth. That is another reason I speak up. I was the one paying attention behind closed doors where nobody else could see the truth of my father, who he was behind his mask. I saw it. My mom saw it. My brothers saw it. So why do my brothers stay silent? Because they actively receive things from him. Material things. Money. He recently purchased a condo for the both of them to live in together. He bribes them, in exchange for their loyalty and silence. Why sons stay within reach of their abusive father, is for another essay. Both of my brothers struggle silently, and I hope one day they can have the same freedom that I do regarding our father.

My younger brother has not held a job longer than a few months while living with my dad. When he lived with me, he held a job for over a year and some months. He went back home when our mom died, and that is when my father finally had access to him, when he could show him what he was missing. I have not spoken to my brother since. Not because we don’t want to, but because my dad has brainwashed him into believing that I am bad. My dad got him much needed therapy for a few months, just to stop letting him go. When my dad senses people having freedom when he wants control over them, it terrorizes him inside. My brother having access to mental health services meant he might finally speak up and expose our father, which is exactly what my dad doesn’t want to happen. My dads nightmares are exposure, and nothing else. It isn’t losing anyone, it isn’t his kids getting kidnapped, his wife dying, or anything along those lines. His biggest enemy is fear of people knowing what’s under his mask.

I’ve been told I’m in the wrong for leaving. But nobody asks what staying did to my mental health. Nobody asks what it did to my soul. Gabe loves to maintain the lie that I didn’t care about my mother. The truth is, I was the only one who consistently stood up to him. I was a child, and I faced his anger so my mom wouldn’t have to take the brunt of it. He would say, “I can talk to my wife however I want to. That’s none of your business.” I learned to center the attention on myself so she wouldn’t be abused in front of us. But I couldn’t control what he did to her when I wasn’t there.

Here’s what nobody talks about: our mother’s were trained to be silent. My mother was raised in a time when women were taught not to question their husbands. Her own mother modeled that silence, and she passed it down like an heirloom. In psychology, this is called intergenerational silence; when unspoken trauma and submission are handed from one generation to the next, not through words, but through what’s never said. My mother was never going to tell the truth about what happened behind closed doors, because she blamed herself for it. That’s what abuse does. It makes victims feel complicit in their own suffering. She had already been through two divorces, I think settling is an understatement when it came to my father.

I protected her as much as I could, enough to become the family scapegoat for life. If anything, I’m stronger than anyone for being able to leave. But nobody asks how much it hurts being given a family as a baby, after losing your first one, just for them to abuse you, isolate you, and never care to know you because you remind a broken man of everything he will never be: free.

I literally felt like I could not go to my mother’s funeral. The utter disrespectful lies and narrative my father had been putting on my name for over two decades made it impossible. I felt a sense of exile, and it was real. The mistakes I made as a kid did not deserve a lifetime of exile from my family. If I had gone I would have been grieving my mother but also getting stared at by my own family members like I was some sort of alien from a different planet. That kind of punishment does not come from a place of justice. It comes from a place where I was too close to the truth, and he could not handle exposure. A narcissist builds an entire reality around a false self, a polished image that must be protected at all costs. When someone threatens to reveal what is behind that image, the narcissist does not reflect or repair. They destroy the threat. They smear, they exile, they rewrite the story so the whistleblower becomes the villain. I had constantly tried to expose my father before I finally gave up and focused on healing rather than finding validation from people who would rather live in his fantasy land with him. That is why I “left.” I did not fit into the family because I am a truth teller and they are secret keepers.

I guess you could say I am kind of a nomad but instead of looking for work, I was looking for experiences, connections, life itself. I felt like I had been locked in a prison from age 2 to 18 and then a probation period from 18-24, for crimes that were not mine. When I finally got out, I was free. Every time I went back to see if my father had changed, if he was ready for therapy, if he was ready to face his demons, he was not. The feeling of living under his roof was one of the most isolating and terrifying things I have ever known. You never know when he was going to strike, but you knew that it was coming, and you knew it was going to push you deeper into the void. I got out of that, and I will never return to it. I will forever use my voice to help others get out of that hole that someone else dug for them. I want to be the voice for the silenced.

That is the legacy I am breaking by writing the truth. I want everyone reading this to know: if you are in a situation where you feel someone twisting your values and you have to abide by their twisted narrative, that place is not for you. Leaving is hard. You might leave and come back, and leave again, and come back again. That does not mean you are weak. It means the patterns are deep. But leaving is also bravery, and courage, and it builds new circuits in your brain that literally rewire how you feel about yourself. Neuroplasticity works both ways. Toxic environments wire you for shame and fear. Choosing yourself wires you for self‑respect and meaning.

So I’ll ask you the same question I had to ask myself: would you rather be rewired by someone with an evil nature, into something negative and harmful, a life of instability and facade? Or would you rather be rewired by yourself, with your own morals, a life of freedom, stability, and peace?

I chose to put the hard work into rewiring myself. That’s why I’m still here. That’s why I write. And that’s why I will spend the rest of my life popping the bubble for anyone who’s still trapped inside it.

I was adopted, and that alone carried weight, but I was adopted into a family that had more pain than I ever came with. My dad was deeply controlling, and my mom did not protect us. My older brother took advantage of me, and in a different way, everyone took advantage of my younger brother.

That left me. I was the scapegoat, the black sheep. I was pushed out. That was my role. I wasn’t the servant child, the golden child, nor the could-do-no-wrong child. I didn’t accept my role the way my brothers did. I chose to see it, say it, and not accept the pain as mine to carry.

I remember telling my dad that my younger brother Josh was having panic attacks. Josh trusted me before anyone else. He trusted me with his pain, but also with his true self. It pains me to know that he’s somewhere struggling, trying to answer for someone else’s sins. My dad simply did not care to hear about anything to do with mental health. He did not believe in it.

I don’t care when you were born or if you had access to mental health services when you grew up. Times have completely changed. That excuse isn’t valid anymore, and nobody should be accepting that type of invalidation. We are all humans, and all of us have some type of pain we carry that turns into anxiety, panic, depression, psychosis, anger, rage. Nobody gets out unscathed.

The point isn’t to sit with this knowledge, it’s to see people for their pain. Mental health is a tool for us that we created to process pain and relieve ourselves of the chains it has on us. To deny the help of services like these simply because you do “not believe in it,” or you “weren’t raised with it,” is over.

Eventually, my father understood from the constant nagging to take him to get seen, but also because my brother had a breakdown in front of him. That’s what it took. Seeing my brother broken, on the floor, hyperventilating, not being able to distinguish reality from what was going on in his mind. He was given medication and a diagnosis the same day my father took him for help. That was it though, just…here…figure it out, kid.

A teenager expected to manage panic attacks alone with a bottle of medication. Yet when I formed an addiction to Percocet after getting my wisdom teeth taken out (this is the #1 way teenagers get hooked onto pills: wisdom teeth removal and an opioid prescribed), it was a huge deal. I mean, it was. But compare these two things. My dad freely giving his son benzo pills without direction. But when I’m a victim of the wisdom teeth removal pill-popping pipeline, I’m the issue.

I was able to see the hypocrisy when I was just a child. I saw the walking contradiction that is my father before I knew how to multiply. Mental health didn’t exist in our family unless it was mine, because he wanted so badly to be able to label me a psychopath, unstable, crazy. Talk about projection!

I was around 10 years old, sitting on the couch and elevating my leg because I was recovering from a sports injury. My favorite movie was on. I was able to sit on the couch without being yelled at because I was injured. I remember getting up after icing my ankle (I had a hairline fracture), and I couldn’t make it to the kitchen, so I set my ice pack on a wood accent table with a glass protector on top. I didn’t think anything of it because I was a young child. Eventually, the ice from the ice pack melted down, and the water got into the crack of the glass protector and the wood table. It warped it. My dad saw this and went completely haywire. He said,

“Do you know how expensive that is? You just ruined a $12,000 table! You are so fucking reckless. You’re a fucking idiot. You’re gonna pay me back for that.”

This was a supposedly $12,000 table, but they lived in a $300,000 house in NE Portland, not some crazy mansion where you would expect an accent table that costs $12,000 to be sitting. The items in the house meant more to him than the people in it, and I always saw that. My dad held his material items extremely close, but not in a humble way.

I was expected to always know things before they happened. He taught me to anticipate mistakes before I even understood consequence. What does that look like in my life today? Being upset when something goes wrong that I didn’t see. Not catching something if it falls and letting it hit the floor. Yes, you read that right. When something falls accidentally, if I catch it, I get excited like I just defeated the biggest monster in the world. If it hits the floor, I literally take a second to rage. Internally, I say, “How could you let it fall?” Such a small thing that has a big emotional reaction.

How does pain that wasn’t yours to carry show up in your life? Do you allow yourself patience, or are you always moving too quickly, getting to the next thing without living? The kind of environment that you grow up in determines how you will treat yourself when you are older. It wires you, your brainwaves, your habits, your self-talk. You can become hyper-aware of everything from tone, to every movement, or even every possible outcome. You’re not able to relax because relaxing means missing something, and missing something meant punishment. This can also show up as perfectionism, OCD, looping thoughts, panic, anxiety, depression, and so much more.

My dad treated each of us like a servant for different uses. When he didn’t want to get up, he would stomp on the ground, which shook the house, and that was a signal for Josh, or anyone, to come upstairs. If he was angry and felt out of control, that’s when he used me like a punching bag. Verbally, physically, mentally, emotionally, every “-ally” you can think of. When he needed to feel like a good parent, that’s when he used Westin, his yes-man. Westin grew up in fear in ways Josh nor I will ever understand because he was alone with him as a child. It’s harder to do something when there are more people around.

As for our mom, there are things that I will never speak about because it’s not mine to speak about. All I will say is when he wanted to physically scream, our mom was the servant in that regard because she took it. She always took it and never fought back. My mom did not have a mean bone in her body. He trained her for silence.

I remember being the scapegoat so bad that when my older brother was doing things that harmed himself and others, it was brushed under the rug. But I was getting blamed for calling the cops. Nothing ever made sense until you look at it from the point of view of someone who is not in the same reality as the rest of us. The goalposts always moved.

As much as I was a victim, I did not remain one internally. I kept taking every disastrous moment as something to learn. My tolerance for disrespect got so high that I just took abuse as “something to learn.” That’s why boundaries are the most important thing you can do for yourself and healing. Your boundaries are the only thing someone else cannot control. As soon as I learned boundaries is when my life got peaceful. The people around me who were causing pain to me were not respecting boundaries.

Here’s the missing thing to this though. You have to stop trying to make sense of people who never operate from a place of truth and good intentions. Do not let your pain make you into who hurt you. Stop trying to recreate what hurt you just so you can be the one in control this time. That’s not justice, that is your pain trying to rewrite the story.

Sometimes you’re not even aware you’re doing it, but you recreate the same dynamics. This time you’re the one with power and the one who doesn’t get hurt. Two of my ex-girlfriends and my older adopted brother did that to me, and it took me a long time to realize that it wasn’t personal. Let me explain. People who hurt you don’t do it because they hate you. They do it because they hate who hurt them. I was able to forgive because I understood that they were hurt sometime in their life, deeply.

I was a product of a violent beginning. I lost my roots, my mom, my family. I was taken advantage of, beat down, humiliated, physically, emotionally, mentally. I was close to homelessness at a time in my life. I was addicted to pain medication after getting my wisdom teeth taken out. I was pushed out of my adopted family and later lost my mom to a brain tumor at the age of 25. I have lived from Florida to California and everywhere in between.

Somehow, I still built something. I found my birth mom. I found out I have a brother, one who has never hurt me, that I can start fresh with. That is a gift in itself. I have found my bloodline and my roots. I got my dog back from an abusive ex. I have healed him back to recovery from neglect. I have built a beautiful relationship that is healthy and passionate. I have stability that I’ve worked years for.

None of this happened by accident. It happened because of two things: empathy and boundaries. I got out of the victim mentality by choosing to understand the people who hurt me. People in pain hurt other people, and I decided long ago I don’t want to be anything like that. That’s where boundaries come in. You have to be willing to walk away from anyone who stands in the way of your peace. Even if it’s hard, even if it’s family, and even if it’s the version of you that’s used to tolerating it.

The two ex-girlfriends I mentioned still digitally stalk me and my partner to this day. Neither of them have a home or any stability. One of them struggles deeply with psychosis but still does drugs to induce it. The last time I saw my older brother, he was in psychosis after taking DMT. In the middle of it, he was able to say, “What I did wasn’t right.” That stuck with me.

As the reader, I want you to understand this: When you align yourself with truth, empathy, and boundaries, things start to fall into place. Stop participating in what’s hurting you. People who hurt you will stay stuck in their own version of hell if they don’t face themselves, and their pain. You don’t need to watch it happen, and you don’t need to wish anything bad on them.

You need to process what you went through, and find empathy where you can. And then remove anyone who continues to harm you or cross your boundaries.

Completely.

Peace is not something you find, it’s something you protect.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been deep in it. Astrology, psychology, everything in between, trying to understand patterns, not just in people but in time itself.

I had already learned that every generation carries something. Light and darkness. Strength and failure. Nothing is neutral. But I wanted to understand what that actually means.

Each generation has a signature. Think of it like this, they were brought here for something, a role, a kind of mission. Some of them fulfilled it, some of them didn’t. And when they didn’t, it didn’t just disappear.

It gets buried. And whatever is buried doesn’t stay gone, it gets passed down, not as truth but as weight, as behavior, as silence, as things no one explains but everyone feels.

So I started looking deeper. What each generation was here to do. What they carried. What they avoided. What they buried. And what happens when that doesn’t stay buried.

I was adopted, and I grew up around secrets, not just about my roots but inside my adopted family too, and it was something you could feel even when nobody said anything. The air was always extremely heavy around certain people.

I was told, “We don’t know anything about your birth mom or your family,” and even as a kid that never really sat right with me. I’ve always been the type to want to get to the bottom of things, and if something doesn’t make sense, I can’t just leave it alone. I need to understand it. I need to understand the “why.” And I usually always figure it out.

My way of thinking doesn’t really work in spaces that depend on silence, and I don’t think I was pushed out in some obvious way, but when you keep asking questions in an environment like that, you slowly become the problem. One thing I’ve had to realize about myself is that when you naturally want to see the truth, your life gets quieter, because not everyone wants to go there with you. Wanting to be right is never about ego for me. Being right means getting to the truth, looking at patterns, looking at behavior, including my own. That way of thinking can isolate you. It’s not the easiest way to live, but it’s the honest way, and I’m not interested in anything else.

I was born in 1998. The shovel was in my hand before I knew there was anything buried, and the flashlight was already on, I just didn’t understand what I was looking at yet. No one sits you down and explains this kind of thing. You just start noticing.

The Silent Generation learned how to survive by keeping quiet, and after everything they lived through, silence looked like loyalty. You didn’t question the family, you protected it, even when there were things inside it that should have never been protected. Trauma stayed in the house, doors stayed closed, and what happened behind them was no one else’s business.

The Baby Boomers wanted freedom, but not exposure. They pushed against rules and repression, but only to a point, because there were still parts of themselves they couldn’t look at. Weakness. Sexuality. Shame. Complicity. So they built lives that looked open, but still had rooms no one was allowed to enter.

Generation X saw more than they admit. They had the language for it, therapy, law, psychology. They understood what was wrong and could name it, but knowing something and confronting it are not the same thing. A lot of truth was recognized, and then quietly set back down.

Millennials tried to fix everything. They pushed for awareness, rebuilt systems, used technology to expose cracks, but they were handed instability and told to stabilize it. Burnout became normal, and exhaustion got labeled as apathy because it was easier than admitting how much they were carrying.

And then there’s us.

We didn’t invent the truth, we inherited it, and it came to us without filters. Information is everywhere now, nothing really stays hidden, and patterns show themselves way faster than they used to. What used to take years to uncover, we’re seeing in real time. So we dig, not because we want to, but because once you see something, you can’t unsee it. They built on sand, whether they realized it or not. But now the tide is coming in.

They look at us and think something is wrong.

Too sensitive.

Too aware.

Too emotional.

Too unwilling to go along with things the way they’ve always been.

But what they are actually seeing is what it looks like when someone stops pretending.

Mental health isn’t something we’re hiding.

Neurodivergence isn’t something we’re trying to fix.

Sexuality isn’t something we feel the need to explain.

We’re not trying to fit into their definitions, we’re stepping outside of them. Of course that makes people uncomfortable, especially the ones who never gave themselves that option. If someone feels threatened by another person having freedom, that’s not about the person they’re looking at, it’s about something in them they haven’t dealt with.

Fear doesn’t come out of nowhere. It comes from recognition, and a lot of what gets labeled as concern or criticism is really just unprocessed shame looking for somewhere to land. We’re not taking that on anymore because we didn’t break anything. We stepped into a world that already had cracks running through it. Housing got harder to keep. Education turned into long term debt.   Stability became something you chase, instead of something you’re given. Previous generations lived inside systems that worked for them, whether they saw it clearly or not, and over time those systems wore down through decisions, through neglect, through looking the other way, through corruption.

Somehow we’re told we’re the problem for not thriving inside what’s left. We’re not confused. We can see what we’re standing in. There’s a difference between not knowing and knowing too early. We know too early. We pick up on patterns in people before we even have the language for it, we understand dynamics we shouldn’t have had to understand yet, and once you see it, it doesn’t really turn off. And that’s exhausting.

Burnout isn’t laziness. It’s what happens when your brain doesn’t get a break from seeing things clearly, or from living is such corrupted systems for way too long. We’re not here to fix those generations. We’re not here to teach basic empathy to people who are fully capable of learning it but choose not to. We’re not here to shrink ourselves to make older systems feel comfortable. We’re not here to carry what they didn’t want to face. We’re here to build something that doesn’t require that kind of silence to function.

They buried it but we found it.

The light doesn’t just show you what’s broken; it shows you what’s yours to build.

You are not the problem.

You are the one who finally turned on the light.

My essays are not for the abusers. They are for the abused. My words are not for people protecting the cycle that harms them, or defending people who harm others. They are for the people who want out, got out, or stayed out.

Leaving and healing are two different battles. Getting out is physical. Healing is behavioral, psychological, and spiritual.

What comes after leaving can be brutal, because you can physically leave and still carry the whole environment inside of you. Trauma does that. It stays in your body. It shows up in the way you sleep, the way you react, and the way your mind keeps scanning for danger long after the danger is gone. You can be out and still not feel free because your nervous system has not caught up yet. That is why peace can feel weird at first. Quiet can feel suspicious. Silence can feel dangerous. When you have lived in survival mode long enough, your body gets used to bracing, scanning, and waiting. A lot of people go back not because they want abuse, but because chaos is familiar and calm still feels unreal. When you are trapped in survival mode, your brain is not reacting from peace, clarity, or safety. It is reacting from defense. That can make you hypervigilant, reactive, shut down, anxious, angry, or disconnected. It can make you do unhealthy things because your system is trying to keep you alive, not calm.

That does not erase accountability, but it gives context. Context matters. You still have to face what you did, speak for it, and repair what is yours to repair. But do not chain yourself forever to the version of you that was just trying to survive.

There is a harder truth in all of this. Sometimes people who were hurt carry patterns that can hurt others too. Not always on purpose. Not because they are evil. But because survival teaches behavior that does not always translate into healthy environments. That is why awareness matters so much. There is also a difference between real self-awareness and performative self-awareness. Real self-awareness is highly uncomfortable. It asks you to be honest, take accountability, and actually change. Performative self-awareness sounds good, but nothing shifts. It is when someone can explain exactly why they act the way they do, talk about their trauma, admit their faults, and still keep doing the same damage. That is not growth. That is awareness without accountability.

One of the hardest parts of leaving is not having language for what you went through. You know something happened. You know you are different after it. But without language, you start doubting yourself, minimizing it, or walking back into it. That is why education matters. When you understand trauma, you stop thinking you are crazy. You start seeing patterns. Once you can name something, it has less control over you. A lot of the time, you want answers from the person who hurt you. You want them to explain how they could do what they did. But you do not actually need them to explain themselves for you to heal.

Sometimes the answer is in understanding what they were carrying. Pain they never faced. Patterns they never broke. Damage they pushed onto other people. That does not excuse what they did. It explains it. Sometimes that is enough to stop looking for closure in the mouth of the person who created the wound.

We need to put ourselves in other people’s shoes more. Empathy is not just feeling sorry for someone. It is being sensitive to other people and their experiences. It is the ability to step outside of yourself long enough to realize that another person has a full inner world too. Their own pain. Their own history. Their own fears. Their own reasons for becoming who they are. That does not mean you absorb what they do to you. It means you stop looking at people like they exist only in relation to your pain. Sometimes that shift in perspective is what makes forgiveness possible. You stop being so angry when you realize that person could not handle your love or your honesty, not because you were too much, but because they lacked the empathy to receive it. They were so consumed by themselves, their pain, and their trauma that they stopped being human with other people.

Pain does not become dangerous just because it exists. It becomes dangerous when it is denied, protected, or acted out on other people. There comes a point where you see that clearly. Then the choice becomes yours. You either keep enabling it, or you disengage. That choice tells you a lot about the boundaries you have for yourself. You cannot give access to yourself to people who use that access to destroy you. That is not love. That is destruction pretending to be closeness. Most people want their pain front and center after they have been hurt. That makes sense. Pain demands attention. But if it stays there forever, it can become your identity.

I remember leaving for good. Cutting ties with every single person in my life who brought toxicity with them. When it was over, I had almost nobody left. People do not talk about that part enough. Sometimes healing does not just remove what was hurting you. Sometimes it empties your life out first.

So I restarted. That is what you do. You rebuild with intention.

Part of that means learning the difference between people who are simply available and people who are actually good for you. Just because someone is around does not mean they belong in your life. Friends should add something real. They should help you, teach you, learn from you, and enjoy your company. They should not hold you down, embarrass you, abuse you, or laugh at your pain. One of the most important things is having a goal in mind. Not something huge. Not some perfect healed version of yourself. Something real.

For me, that was getting my anxiety under control. Anxiety came later in my life, and once it did, it affected everything. I knew if I could get help for that one thing, I could focus better on what I needed, what my mind needed, and what my body needed. That gave me somewhere to start. I did not grow up with anxiety. It came later, when I was deep in the abuse. That is when the social anxiety started, the obsessive thoughts, the racing mind. I had never struggled that way before, and that is how I knew something in me had been changed by what I was living through. I also knew I needed to fix it. Lexapro helped stabilize those anxious thoughts to the point where most of those symptoms are no longer part of my everyday life. Once my mind got quieter, I could finally focus on what I actually needed instead of constantly fighting my own brain.

Healing feels too big when you look at all of it at once. You do not need to become flawless overnight. You need one real place to begin.

The people around you matter too. They have to understand boundaries. If they do not, everything starts to fall apart. A lot of people do not understand boundaries because they were never taught them in a real way. They were told to speak up, then ignored. Told their feelings mattered, then dismissed. Told to be honest, then punished when that honesty made adults uncomfortable.

We tell children to say no if something feels wrong, then override them anyway. We tell them their body is their own, then force closeness when it is convenient for other people. We put cameras in the house. We take away their phones. We go through their belongings like they have no private self at all. Then people act surprised when those same children grow up confused about where they end and another person begins. That confusion follows people into adulthood. It turns into guilt when they try to protect themselves, tolerance for disrespect because disrespect feels familiar, or entitlement where someone thinks love means access, control, and the right to cross every line.

Boundaries are not what ruin relationships. The inability to respect them is. I have left more abusive situations than the average person. In some twisted way, I got good at it. Good at reading people. Good at spotting danger. Good at noticing the shift before the shift. That is not a skill anybody should have to master, but survival sharpens you in places you never asked to be sharpened. I am extremely observant. I notice everything. I remember details down to the smallest shifts in energy, tone, and behavior. But for a long time, the only parts of my life I could fully remember were the hard parts. The abusive parts. Trauma can do that. It can make painful memories stay loud while softer memories get pushed into the background.

What has been strange and beautiful about healing is that more of me has started to come back. My childhood. Happy memories. The way I used to be. The parts of me that existed before survival took over so much space. Recovery did not just calm me down. It gave me pieces of myself back.

I lost my early twenties to someone who said they loved me and wanted the best for me, but proved otherwise through their actions. That taught me something I will never unlearn. Words and actions are not the same thing. If somebody’s actions do not match what they say, then the future you keep hoping for is not real.

One of the greatest gifts I gave myself was choosing a soft and gentle life. I had spent so long living fast inside toxic battles that softness felt unfamiliar at first.

I did not have anyone truly helping or guiding me for most of my life until I met Emily. She saw me as a human being, not as something she could gain from, control, or change. Because she grew up in a gentle environment, she showed me what that looked like and how to build it for myself, both externally and internally. She showed me that softness is not weakness. It is stability. It is care. It is safety. If you are not learning from your partner, if the relationship is not helping you grow into a healthier version of yourself, then what are you really building?

If you do not have that, then part of the work becomes teaching yourself how to sit alone, sit in silence, and sit in peace without constantly reaching for something external. Your internal world has to become somewhere you can return to, not somewhere you are always trying to escape.

I had to learn forgiveness too.

For a long time, I carried anger toward a situation I did not understand. Deep down, I knew there was more to it, even if I could not explain it. I had felt my whole life that I was a product of something violent. I knew it before I ever had proof.

I had two versions of my birth mom in my head. One where she did not want me, and one where she could not keep me. I held anger toward the first version for years.

Then I read the documents. I saw that I was a product of rape.

The moment I read those words, the anger left me.

I do not center myself in that part of the story. I was a baby. I did not know anything. My mother is the one who held that trauma. She is the one who went through it. Just because I am a product of that violence does not mean I have to make myself its victim. My compassion went to her. In the end, did I want answers? Not really. What I wanted was simple. I wanted to know if she was safe. If she was okay. And if I had any siblings.

A month later, I found her. My questions were answered. That part of me that had been wounded for 28 years finally healed. Forgiveness is important, but it is personal. Nobody chooses for you who to forgive or when. That comes with time. Learning how to forgive is what matters. Forgiveness is not excusing what happened. It is releasing the hold it has on you so it stops controlling how you feel and how you move forward. For me, forgiveness was part of getting my freedom back.

Silence means something different to me now. It used to mean something was wrong. Now it means peace. It means safety. It means two people existing without fear. I worked for that. I stabilized my mental health. I got help. I learned how to understand my thoughts instead of being controlled by them. That gave me a kind of freedom I never had before.

I do not confuse chaos with love anymore. I do not give access to people who use it to break me down. I do not stay in things that require me to disappear to survive them. Getting out is one thing. Staying out is another.

You do not heal by escaping chaos once. You heal by building something real enough that you stop reaching for what used to hurt you. That is the work. That is what I did to leave, and stay out.

Normally when you’re born, your parents give you a name. Eventually you grow into it; your face, your voice, your personality slowly begin to match your name until it becomes natural. People meet you and say, “you look exactly like your name.”

My mom named me and before I turned three I was taken from her, placed into a hospital, transferred to an orphanage, adopted, and moved from Romanian to America. I was already a vulnerable kid, but my adopted parents never treated me like such. Somewhere in all of that, separation and handoff, I lost way more than a home. I lost the roots of who I was. I lost my family and the people who looked like me. I lost the possibility of growing up with unconditional love around me. And I lost the name that was mine.

My adopted family didn’t completely erase it. They tucked it into my middle name. I didn’t hear it growing up, nobody called me by that name. And because it wasn’t spoken into my life it stopped feeling like a part of me, even though it was the most real thing about me.

My last name, my bloodline, my origins, were reduced to papers locked inside of a safe nobody but my parents had access to. For years my identity was controlled by other people. I didn’t have a language for the pain. Who would at 4? I was just the kid who missed her birth mom, her birth family, any possibility of siblings. This was a huge theme in my life for decades. How do you explain this stuff as a kid? Especially when the people raising you are harming you. To me, I should have kept my name. I should have had something from the past that nobody could take. Instead it became this strange examination by my father

“We named her this, but she was named that because she’s adopted.”

Every chance at explaining I was adopted, my father took. I won’t speak for my adopted brothers, but this feels isolating and alienating. He loved to look like the savior. He preached to us about being private, yet he shared our most vulnerable and hardest moments with others and reshaped them accordingly.

He said he would take us back to our home countries to visit. He traveled often because his job required it. It was about 90% travel, and we hardly saw him until around 2016 or 2017 when he retired. He had been to most countries and every single state in America. If he wanted to connect us to our roots, he could have. Money time, and access were always there, but the promises were empty.

One time my younger brother and I were in the basement in what we called the “workout room.” It was never used so it was the only place that felt private. We were talking about how much we missed our birth mom and our birth families. It was one of the very few times we allowed ourselves to say it out loud to each other The moment felt real, and I told him not to let anyone make him feel like his memories weren’t true. I hope he remembers that. Next thing we know, our father came barging in, tense and accusatory, like he always does.

“What are you doing?” He shouted.

We froze. We knew if we told him what we were talking about, he would twist it. And he did. He laughed in a way that makes you feel small. That was the first time someone directly told us that what we remembered about our roots wasn’t real. He wanted to cut any mental or emotional tie we had to them.

It was hard not to let myself be manipulated by him in this was but something inside me never doubted that they are looking for me just as much as I am looking for them. That voice never left. Mihaela never left.

Anya Kmetz was the name my adopted parents gave me to narrate my life. Mihaela Varga was my birth name, gave to me with love. Alex Mihaela is the name I gave myself after years of living inside other people’s stories.

I went down a few wrong roads. I can honestly say it was because I was angry, angry that everyone around me had a mom and I didn’t. My adopted mom died. I had no mother figure in a world where I needed one more than anything. That kind of absence does something to you. It makes you reckless. It makes you defensive. It makes you look for something in places that will never give it to you. I’m not pretending I handled it well. I didn’t. But Alex is the proof of the road less traveled.

Most people keep the name they were given and never think twice about it. Some assume I changed mine because of gender identity issues. I’ve struggled with my gender. I’ve struggled with my sexuality. I’ve wrestled with all of it. But that isn’t why I am Alex.

Alex is my statement to the world. It is the decision to be proud of who I am and the refusal to shrink myself to fit inside something that was never built for me. I don’t live by rules handed down by society. And I certainly don’t fit neatly into anyone’s box, nor do I have a need to. Alex protected Anya. And I will always protect the kids like me. Alex literally means “to protect,” or “defend.”

Choosing doesn’t mean rejecting who I was. It means understanding her and moving forward anyway. Your name holds everything. It carries who you were and who you decide to become. At the end of your life, when someone says your name, make sure it is one you stand behind.

My question to you is: What does your name mean? What history does it hold? Often times, we find a lot about ourselves by starting simple.

I said no the first time. That should have meant something to her, but it didn’t. It never did. It always made her chase harder.

She came back years later trying to gain access to my life. At that point, I was exhausted, vulnerable, and exposed to things I didn’t know how to handle. I was looking for any life other than the one I had. I wanted a home, love, and stability. Angelina stepped into that space acting like she could give those things to me. At that point in my life, I was exactly the kind of person that would work on.

She was only supposed to stay a few days for my birthday weekend. She ripped up her plane ticket and stayed for years.

I was honest from the start. I told her I was not ready, and I still had feelings for an ex-girlfriend of mine. I needed her to respect that, but she didn’t. At any other time in my life, I would not have believed it. But Angelina sells you a fantasy, something she concocted in her head to sound good. She’ll treat me well, we’ll build something in the pain. She was gentle at first. Extremely gentle. Like she was hoping I would fall for her tactics or she’d have to go home to the place where she didn’t want to be, the place she was trying to escape from.

She carried herself like someone who had been through so much that it made her deeper than everyone else. More mature. More evolved. She liked that story she told about herself. Some of what happened to her was real, but none of it made her mature. If anything, it stunted her, destroyed any human empathy inside of her. She confused being wounded with being evolved, and I believed her because I was used to that kind of energy.

She says the first few months of our relationship were adventurous. That is not how I remember them. I remember being dissociated from my own life. She knew I was struggling. I remember her begging me to sleep in her 2009 Honda Civic because my parents would not let her stay in their house. Looking back, they definitely caught the weirdness before I did. She was supposed to come for my birthday weekend and then leave.

Angelina had a psychosis episode before we met. That was one of the reasons we spoke, because I truly felt bad for her. I knew what she was struggling with because my brother had similar problems. It distorted her reality, and honestly, I think it distorted it for a very long time. She still hasn’t managed to stabilize herself from it. Her version of adventure came from psychosis, from living inside a disconnected reality. That was her version of adventure. To me, it felt like chaos, fear, isolation, violation.

I remember being existentially hopeless.

I had her, not that it meant anything to me, and I had three beautiful animals. They meant the most to me. But most of my life felt like cleaning up after her messes, literally and figuratively. Anything I tried to complete, from a mundane task to trying to piece my life together and add any stability into it, could not be done. I felt like doing absolutely nothing. There was absolutely nothing to live for. She drained every ounce of emotion out of me. Things that should’ve been simple felt impossible. That was not laziness. My nervous system had been stuck on survival for so long that life started feeling too heavy. Just living. Waking up. To do what all over again? I felt like I was in a version of hell. Her hell. That she brought me into.

I tried to help her. I taught her about spirituality because it had helped me at some point in my life. Shadow work. Journaling. Looking inward. Actually being honest with yourself. Anything to get her out of her delusions about life.

That was one of the biggest mistakes I made in that relationship.

I thought I was giving her tools to heal. But really, I was giving her language to excuse her vile behavior. She still uses it that way to this day. The same things that once meant reflection and honesty to me became her way of blaming absolutely everyone else, wishing karma on people, acting like the universe is on her side while she refuses to face what she has done. Bullying, stalking, theft, threats.

That was the difference.

My intentions were good.

Hers were not.

When she had psychotic episodes, I sat with her through them, anxious, fearing for my safety and hers, trying to keep things grounded while she was in a completely different reality than mine. When it was over, she would barely remember. Only glimpses. I’d have to go over everything with her and tell her what happened.

People talk about the person in crisis. They do not talk enough about the people around them. The ones who stay. The ones who sit with them. The ones who try to help while everyone else stands back, unsure of what to do, because the truth is most people do not know how to help someone who is that far out of reality. That part usually gets left to trained professionals. I had to function inside of it anyway, and I was the one left dealing with the aftermath.

I remember pulling over in Las Vegas, right on the strip, and calling 911. She was completely gone. I remember seeing the blue balloon and the Eiffel Tower. That will forever stick in my head. While I was trying to handle it, she dug her nails into me so deep it left a scar. She stopped her breathing so many times I lost count. I gave her CPR on the side of the road while she gave me a scar to remember that day forever.

She does not remember that.

I do.

After a few times of her psychosis and me telling her what happened, she started testing me. She told me she would stop her breathing to see if I was loyal, if I’d save her, if I was her “god,” as she said. In the moment of every psychosis she had, I would panic, and unbelievably heavy panic would sit in my chest. Of course I would help her and react because what else was I supposed to do? I cared about her. She was unstable, active in psychosis, and from where I was standing, I thought I was watching someone disappear in front of me.

So I reacted. I pushed on her chest. I gave mouth to mouth. I did what I thought I had to do.

By her own words, I found out she did that on purpose sometimes to see if I would save her. To see if I loved her enough. I did not see it the way she saw it. I saw someone unstable who needed help. She saw some kind of test.

That is what broke me.

Everything always came down to loyalty. Love. Proof. She kept creating moments where I had to show her I would stay.

I did.

Because that is who I am. If I see someone in need, I react. I help. I do not turn away from people just because they are hard to hold. That part of me is real. It is also part of what made all of this so damaging. The very thing that is good in me became one more thing Angelina could use.

Something happens to you when you live around psychosis that someone isn’t getting stabilized by mental health professionals for long enough. You do not just witness it. You absorb it. After a while, your body starts living completely on edge, on eggshells, like something bad is going to happen. It taught me to stay on alert. To expect chaos. To confuse love with endurance.

I’m extremely good at being conscious of my surroundings because of the abuse from my father, but also a big part of it was Angelina. She instilled so much fear in me that at any moment my reality could dramatically shift because of her. That is how a trauma bond forms. Fear. Relief. Chaos.

Isolation made it so much worse. She had me so cut off from everything and everyone that her reality became mine. For a long time, it felt like her reality was the only one I had. It was an extremely scary, egotistical, hateful reality. Somewhere in all of that, I started becoming someone I did not recognize. She did not just mess with my life. She messed with how I saw myself.

She did it to my identity too. I present masculine, and I’m extremely proud of myself for how far I’ve come. She tried to force me into femininity as if she could remake me. Trying to reshape my look like it was hers to control. She bought feminine things and presented them like they were gifts. They were not, t was intense and invasive.

Later she said she had a yearning to be like a mother to me, that explained everything. She did not want to be beside me. She wanted to be above me.

To really paint a picture for you, my door was completely broken. Hers was untouched. That is how she treated boundaries. She could not handle anything that stood between her and access to me. Home to her meant tension, where she could let out her rage, listen behind a closed door.

I was carrying the weight of everything. Her chaos. Her messes. The animals. The house. The emotional labor of being around someone unstable, isolating, unfaithful, and abusive. And then she turned around and acted like my life not moving forward was some personal failure. She liked to say that her family thought I was a loser, or that her friend said, “We aren’t good for each other,” because I wasn’t affectionate in public with her. It was intimidation. It felt like I was being ganged up on by complete strangers. I later found out none of that was true. Everything was for control. Everything that came out of her mouth, every favor she asked, every opinion she stated, was all for control over me. Yet, she still wanted flowers, gifts, romantic little performances. She wanted the image, just like my father.

We had moved to California so I could bring her close to family since I knew things were ending for us, and I wanted to experience living in California as a goal of mine. It was a two birds, one stone type of situation for me. What happened in that apartment shaped me forever.

I want to say this carefully because real suicide attempts are real, devastating, and I do not take that lightly. What happened next did not feel real to me. It felt staged. She made a scene, and I reacted because of course I did. Then somehow I was the one driving her to the hospital, talking to the receptionist, getting her checked in in a lobby full of people in some type of pain, trying to hold everything together while I was already falling apart.

I stood there silently crying while they tore off her clothes on the hospital bed since she was admitted for a suicide attempt. I kept thinking, I cannot do this. I cannot let her do this to me. So I left the hospital, and for a long time I felt wrong for leaving. Distance taught me what that actually was; I had been trained to stay. My father taught me one version of abuse, and Angelina taught me another.

I had strong boundaries around my body. She knew them. She knew what I was comfortable with and what I was not. She knew there were ways I did not want to be touched. She knew there were things I was not okay with. She kept pushing anyway for weeks. That turned into months. That turned into a year.

That is the part that matters.

It was never confusion. It was constant pressure. Repetition. Guilt. Her wanting to wear me down until my no stopped mattering. At that point in my life, she knew I had cheated on her. What I didn’t know yet was that she had already been cheating on me. All I knew was that I had messed up badly, and she was using that to keep me in line.

Eventually, she crossed those boundaries. She touched me in ways I didn’t want to be touched. She did things to my body she already knew I was not comfortable with. She violated me while recording it. I was scared for my life, but I was also deeply confused. I had always thought if that ever happened to me, it would be a man, not a woman.

That changed the way I saw her forever.

No to her did not register as a boundary. It registered as something to push against.

That is what stayed with me so deeply. Not just what she did, but what it revealed.

She later apologized for it. I don’t know if she meant that apology, and I don’t care. What mattered was that even she knew it was a violation. I think she is just sorry that she lost access to me and my life, which is entitlement, not remorse. She does not hold the truth. She holds whatever version keeps her protected. I remember telling her once, “I hold all of your secrets.” Because I did but I am exhausted of carrying them.

What scares me most now is the invasion of privacy. The way she can twist anything until she still comes out looking innocent. She continues to talk about me to this day, stalk me, digitally harass me, but she also keeps mementos of me in her room. I don’t think she has a solid identity of her own, and honestly I don’t think she is going to find it.

If she can’t find it in the Army, where is she going to find it? The Army has only enhanced her abilities to stealthily maintain her image and manipulation tactics. She admitted to people that she wants to be the “manipulator” for the Army. Basically she said she would manipulate the “other side” by speaking to them and getting into their heads. We all looked at each other like, did that just come out of this girl’s mouth? Angelina has a tendency to expose herself. I truly have no idea why. That is the only thing I have not figured out. Why she gives herself up.

What I do know is that she pulls you in with lies, and then she spits you out with rage. She does not see you as a person; sees what you can give her.

I’m someone who likes to understand why I went through something. Why a person did what they did. What drove them to make the choices they made. That is part of why these essays matter so much to me. They force me to sit down with what happened and really look at it. Not just the pain of it, but the why of it. The pattern of it. Writing helps me understand the trauma instead of just carrying it. It helps me take pain I have held in my body for a long time and turn it into something I can actually see, study, and release.

I’ve been in a good place for over a year now, and even saying that still feels strange. My nervous system feels like it is healing for the first time ever. Chaos was normal to me for so long, so that means a lot. Being loved by someone who does not hurt me changed something in me. Finding my birth family settled something even deeper. It gave me a kind of peace I had been missing for most of my life. That is a big reason I can write these essays now. They help heal me. Literally. They help me understand what happened, what it did to me, and what I am finally moving out of. Writing gives me peace.

Healing from it, for me, meant distance. Real distance. No talking. No circling back. No letting confusion stay alive. It meant getting far enough away that my nervous system could finally start calming down.

Healing also meant being treated right. Being around people who know boundaries. People who do not twist every story. People who do not punish me for being my own person.

That healed something in me too.

I don’t think I will ever meet someone like her again and I hope I never do. But now I know what to look out for now. I know what it feels like when someone is trying to get in too fast, or when chaos gets confused with depth. I know what it feels like when control starts calling itself love. I did not build myself by following examples or role models, I built myself by learning exactly what I never want to become. Her. My father. The same cycle. Different faces.

I see the cycle clearly, and I am the one who ended it.

I take a lot of pride in my writing, my grammar, and the way I lay things out for you as a reader. Let me know if this style of layout is easier to read. :)

When I had my first conversation with my birth mom, she told me I had a brother. She let me know his name and not much else. As soon as the phone call ended, I searched his name on Facebook, assuming he’d be on there too. I looked through so many names. Night after night, I kept going back, searching again, scrolling, hoping.

But I kept going back to the same profile.

The curve of this particular man’s forehead meeting his nose was way too familiar to ignore. Most of his face was covered by a beard, but I could still see his smile and the way his lips turned upward at the corners, like mine. My cheeks were always complimented by my aunt when I was a kid, so I noticed mine in his.

I would look all day. From the moment I woke up, I’d get my Red Bull, sit down, and scroll through the same name on Facebook for hours. It would always lead me back to the same profile.

He only had that one picture up, so I couldn’t reference anything else. But I kept going back anyway.

But I didn’t add him as a friend because part of me thought I was completely imagining this. Maybe the faces were all blending together after countless hours of scrolling through profiles and looking at photos. Maybe I just wanted it to be him because of the way he was holding his wife in the photo. He looked like the most genuine person out of all the photos I saw, so part of me wanted it to be him.

I don’t know. I didn’t want to believe something that I had no proof of yet. So I stopped myself. I waited. And waited. Then, a few days later, I woke up to a message from Daniel. For anyone new here, Daniel is someone in Romania who has been helping me search. A stranger, technically. But one who’s shown me more kindness than I could have expected. I talk a little more about Daniel in essay 1, if you want more background on him.

I’d just gotten out of bed, trying not to wake my girlfriend because it was early. Romania is nine hours ahead, so I already had a message waiting from Daniel. My dog Bruno followed me like he always does. We sat on the couch, and I kept one hand on him, petting him for comfort because I was anxious. Daniel said he had new information.

I opened the message.

“I found your brother. This one was a little harder.”

Which is funny, because for him it was a little harder. But for me, I’d been searching my entire life for these answers that he found in a few days.

He replied with a link.

“This is his account.”

I pressed it.

My mouth went wide and then my eyebrows went up. I started rubbing my face like I do when I’m met with many emotions at once. I started laughing to myself in that I knew it kind of way.

In the way the universe has been guiding me to trust my gut and follow my intuition, this felt like another moment proving that. It was the same profile I’d been going back to.

It was him.

And for a second, I froze. I just stared at the screen.

Up until then, everything had been a search, a hope, a guess. Pressing “Add Friend” meant it was no longer my imagination, or a guess. It was truth. This was my brother. What do you even do in a moment like that? When you finally find an answer after searching for your entire life?

I pressed “Add Friend.”

He accepted almost immediately.

I was nervous, but I felt safe enough to stay in the moment. I’d always wondered if I had siblings. A brother. A sister. Anyone. Was anyone out there looking for me the way I was looking for them? My whole life felt like it was adding up to these moments. Finding my mom, and now finding a sibling. A brother. One where I can feel comfortable, at ease.

“Brother” has never been a simple word to me. My history with my adopted older brother shaped that in painful ways, and it stayed with me. That matters more than people may realize. When I tried to bring that truth back up years later, my parents rejected my experience. The rest belongs to a later story. This part is about why I’m so grateful to know I have another chance at having a brother. A sibling. Someone of my blood who hasn’t hurt me.

So I wrapped my arms around Bruno, took a deep breath, and waited for us all to get on a call together.

I was so excited.

I knew he spoke some English, and that made me feel more at ease. Our mom wasn’t able to get much of an education because life was hard on her early on, so I knew communicating with him might be easier.

We joined the call.

Daniel. Diane, our translator. Me. And my brother.

We both smiled so wide.

It was like… wow.

I feel like I’m looking at my twin.

And just like that, all the walls went down.

My nerves disappeared. I felt at ease.

Like, this is my blood. This is my brother.

We started talking.

I said, “Hi,” with the biggest smile, almost tearing up, because I couldn’t believe I’d found someone who looked like me.

Something I’d been searching for my entire life.

Something I thought I’d never get the chance to experience, the chance that most people get every day without even thinking about it.

And it was right there.

Two of us came from the same place, losing our mom, going into foster care, but our paths turned out differently.

My brother was born in 2001, when the borders for international adoption were already closed. So children in foster care could only be adopted within Romania.

Honestly, thank God.

Because maybe I would have never found him if he’d been adopted into an American family. I know how hard it was for me to find any of them.

We talked for what seemed like hours. It was one of the most wholesome experiences I’ve ever had in my life.

I learned about him. I learned more about our mom. I met his daughter and his wife.

He has a beautiful family and I’m so relieved to have found out that he had a loving childhood and was raised by a wonderful mother that he met in foster care. He said she was one of the assistants and she grew close to him because he was quiet. That sounds so much like me as a child.

The connection between us has been so easy to build. He’s so easy to talk to, which is something people have told me about myself. We keep finding similarities between us. Music, hobbies, what we like to watch, what we like to eat, and every day I’m learning new things about him and his family and his life.

I still can’t believe I found this.

There is still a part of this that is hard.

It’s hard that I can’t have this same kind of connection with my mom. Communication between us is difficult, and life has been very hard on her. I wish her quality of life was better than it is. And I just want to help her. I’m grown now. Who doesn’t want to take care of their mother? For me, it feels even deeper than that. She brought me into this world, and now I just want to give something back to her, even if it’s small.

But the relationship I’m building with my brother heals something in me. The part where it hurts that I can’t connect with my mom the same way. Because talking to my brother feels easy, and natural. It’s talking to someone just like you.

And somehow, that makes up for so much of what was missing. There is always good in the bad. It doesn’t make the bad disappear, but sometimes it helps heal the parts of you that were hurt by it.

We are two adults now, but all I want to do is make up for lost time. Time that was stolen from me and my birth family by my adopted father. The abuse did not end when I walked out the door. His choices, his lies, his deception, everything he tried to pin on me as a child, still affect me to this day. That’s the thing about adoption and the trauma of it, it doesn’t end.

When you’re displaced and put into an abusive family, it changes your sense of safety, how much information you get, and what you can tell is being kept from you. In my case, it was secrets, and a stack of documents that held what I needed to find my biological family. My adopted father kept that from me.

The more I hear stories from other adoptees like mine, the more I come to this conclusion. There are people who adopt out of genuine love and care for a child. They are prepared to handle the child as they are, with whatever struggles they might come with. And then there are people who are drawn to adoption because it paints them as a rescuer, because they so badly need the validation of others, because their image matters more than the child. Those people are not fit for raising an adopted child if they cannot understand the basic truth that an adopted child will need more help, more patience, and more love than a biological child.

My mother understood what it took. She was a nurse in the ECMO unit at a major hospital in Portland. She saved the lives of many babies over the course of her career, but she also saved mine. My father made me feel as though taking my life would be easier. Like I said, there’s always good in the bad.

My documents remained locked in a safe only he had access to. Until 28 years later, when he started dating a new woman and wanted complete distance from his old life, he loosened his grip on my papers, my identity.

I had more than a citizenship paper in the stack he finally gave me. I had a document in Romanian that laid everything out. How I was born. Who my parents were. Who my grandmother and grandfather were. Nothing about my brother yet, because he was not born. It was more than a document. It was part of my identity. It was what I needed. And part of me still wants to deny that he knew what it said, because I don’t even want to think about what it would mean if he did.

I plan to visit Romania in the next couple of years to see my brother and my mother. Nothing is set in stone yet, because I’m still building a relationship with them, but one of my biggest goals, alongside writing and publishing a book and getting married, is to go back to Romania, where all of this started. To find more answers. To see my people, who look like me. The features I carry are common there, and sometimes I move through life very aware that I don’t look like the people around me. But in Romania, I know I’ll feel a peace I’ve never felt before.

I wrote this to understand my own life.

For a long time, this lived in my mind without structure or language. Writing it gave it shape. If you see yourself anywhere in this, you are not alone.

People like to think that the worst thing that can happen to a child is abandonment.

But sometimes, the worst thing is being kept.

Sometimes the worst thing is growing up in a house that looks whole from the outside. Full tables, familiar routines, conversations that pass for connection. Everything appears normal, but something essential is missing underneath it.

That was the kind of house I grew up in.

My father did not know how to love.

I do not mean that metaphorically. I mean it plainly. He did not know how to love a child with curiosity, patience, or protection.

He knew control. He knew intimidation. He knew humiliation.

He knew how to dominate a room and make everyone adjust themselves around his moods. He knew how to turn fear into authority and call it parenting.

He was an unhealed man raising a child.

And when an unhealed man becomes a father, especially to a child he chose through adoption, something deeper is at stake. That child does not just need structure. She needs grounding. She needs identity. She needs to be met with care that is stable and real.

Instead, I was raised inside his wounds.

What complicates this is that not everyone in the story was cruel.

My mother was loving in many ways. She was the kind of woman who could care for fragile lives, endure, and keep going.

But love inside survival becomes something else.

Even good women can spend years adapting to broken men, and without meaning to, they pass that adaptation down.

Be the bigger person.

That is what I was taught.

It sounds mature. It sounds wise.

But what it meant in my life was this. Absorb it. Manage it. Do not make it worse. Do not say too much.

So I did.

I learned to read everything.

Tone. Footsteps. Energy.

I learned to adjust before something happened. I learned to take responsibility for what was never mine.

I became hypervigilant in a place that was never safe, trying to manage an environment I did not create.

Over time, I became what systems like that require someone to become.

The difficult one. The emotional one. The one who carries what nobody else will say out loud.

Families like this always need someone to hold the truth.

That person was me.

There is something else I was told often.

That they had to walk on eggshells around me.

I was a teenage girl. Going through puberty. Getting my period. Living with PCOS, which made everything more intense. The mood shifts. The pain. The exhaustion.

He knew that.

I was diagnosed at a young age.

It would have taken seconds. A simple search. A basic effort to understand what his daughter was experiencing in her own body.

He never did.

None of it was recognized.

My father did not believe in any of it.

To him, it was not physical. Not hormonal. Not real.

It was an excuse.

He said I was acting like a bitch. That I was the problem.

His fourteen year old adopted daughter is explaining what is happening in her body, and he reduces it to her being a bitch.

That distinction really matters.

Because this was not a lack of access to information. It was a lack of willingness to understand.

When your body is going through something real and the adult in your life denies it, something fractures.

You begin to question your own experience. You disconnect from what you feel. You learn that your reactions are something to be criticized instead of understood.

What they called walking on eggshells was often me responding to an environment that was already unstable.

But that context was never acknowledged.

Because it is easier to label the child than to examine the environment.

I did not need perfection. I did not need gifts or appearances.

I needed love. I needed to be known.

I needed a father who wanted to understand his daughter instead of projecting his damage onto her.

Instead, I became a place for it to land.

And my mother was not strong enough to stop what he created once it filled the room.

And it was not just what happened.

It was what was never acknowledged.

The silence. The lack of repair. The expectation that everything would continue as if nothing had occurred. That is where the damage settles.

There are moments that do not leave you. They do not stay in the past. They live in the body.

One of them happened on a holiday.

The house was full in the way it always was. People talking, moving between rooms, everything appearing normal.

I was sent downstairs to the wine fridge.

The basement was separate. It was unfinished, like so many of the places we lived in. The game room and bar room door was shut. Everyone else was upstairs, in the dining room.

Halfway down the stairs, I heard it.

Footsteps behind me. Heavy. Fast. Familiar.

I reached the bottom of the stairs and turned.

He was one step above me.

We both scanned the space. Fast. Instinctive.

In less than a second, everything was understood.

No one was there. No one could see. No one would interrupt.

He knew it. I knew it.

Then his hand was on my throat.

Tight. Immediate.

I remember the smell of alcohol more than anything. Close. Sharp. Unavoidable.

Upstairs, everything continued.

Downstairs, something else was happening entirely.

Abuse does not always happen in chaos.

Sometimes it happens in silence. In spaces where no one is looking. By someone who knows exactly when no one will.

What that does to a child is not just fear.

It rewrites safety.

It teaches her that normal moments can turn without warning. That harm can exist inside celebration. That danger is not always loud.

It teaches her to scan. To anticipate. To understand environments in ways children were never meant to.

And when nothing is acknowledged, she learns something even more dangerous.

That what happened to her is not important enough to be named.

So she carries it.

Years later, something happened that I still think about.

We were sitting in a sushi restaurant. My younger brother next to me. My father across from us, seated directly in the center like everything revolved around him.

He had been drinking sake.

He was talking loudly, asking questions about our lives. The kind of questions that should have been asked years earlier. The kind that sound like care but feel disconnected when they come too late.

I had already checked out.

When my anxiety rises, I do not engage.

I scan.

That is what my body learned to do.

Then a woman approached the table.

A stranger.

She looked directly at me and placed a folded note in my hand.

“This is for you. Have a good day.”

She walked away.

I opened it.

The note said, “Do not listen to this man. He is a bad man. I do not know this man’s relation to you. But get away from this man.”

My body went still.

Not fear.

Recognition.

It felt like something I had carried my entire life had just been spoken out loud by someone who had no reason to say it.

Sometimes truth is so visible that even a stranger can see it.

Sometimes what you lived through is not invisible.

It is just unspoken.

I was not an easy child.

I acted out. I created conflict. I stole.

But no one ever asked why.

I was not stealing for excitement.

I was trying to meet my needs in a place where asking came with control or rejection.

I adapted.

Because I had to.

I left at eighteen.

Not because I was ready, but because I needed distance.

And distance without support is not freedom.

It is exposure.

I had to rebuild everything.

Alone.

For a long time, I thought something was wrong with me.

But the question was never what is wrong with me.

The question was always what happened to me.

And then I found my biological family.

They welcomed me with warmth.

With love that made space for me.

And that changes something.

Because once you experience real love, you cannot confuse survival with care anymore.

And this matters beyond one family.

Because unhealed men do not only exist inside homes.

They exist in power.

They shape systems. They influence decisions. They affect entire populations.

If a man has never learned how to regulate himself, how to face his own pain without projecting it outward, then power does not make him better.

It makes him more dangerous.

Because unhealed patterns do not disappear when someone gains authority.

They expand.

Control becomes policy. Anger becomes decisions made in rage. Insecurity becomes domination. Avoidance becomes silence where truth is needed most.

And we are watching that happen in real time all around us in America.

I am not writing this for pity.

I am writing this because silence protects the wrong people.

I am writing this because people who were not protected deserve language.

The child in this story was never too much.

She was underprotected. She was misread. She was carrying more than she should have ever had to.

And still, she kept searching for herself.

I write this because it helps me heal.

For years, this lived inside my mind. Unspoken. Unorganized. Unnamed.

Putting it into words changes that.

It gives shape to something that used to feel overwhelming.

It helps me understand myself more clearly.

It helps me find pieces of my identity that were lost, especially as an adoptee, where understanding yourself already comes with gaps.

It also allows the people close to me to see me more fully and understand parts of my childhood that were never explained out loud.

It helps make sense of things that may have seemed confusing from the outside.

And maybe most importantly, it opens a door for others.

If you see yourself anywhere in this, you are not alone.

And maybe, in some way, this gives you language for your own story too.

I know that part of me now, and I am finally listening to her.

And there is something else I understand now too.

This unhealed man did not just hurt me.

He hurt our family.

He denied a relationship with me because of his own unresolved bitterness.

And he shaped how others saw me by telling a version of me that was not true.

That part matters.

Because it did not just isolate me.

It took something from them too.

The chance to know me for who I actually am.

There is more to this story.

In the next piece, I will share how I found my biological brother and the beautiful connection we have begun to build together.

There is a question that many adoptees carry their entire lives.

Where do I come from?

Today, for the first time, I saw the answer.

Today, I found my birth mother.

Facebook groups are very popular in the country I was adopted from. There are groups for everything, including adoptees like me who are searching for their birth families.

A week ago, I made a post asking if anyone had any information that could help.

A man named Daniel messaged me.

Daniel spends his free time helping adoptees in this group find their biological relatives. He is not paid for it. He simply searches the internet, contacts agencies, and speaks with people until he finds answers.

Daniel is Romanian and deeply connected to the community there, especially in Cluj. He has family throughout the area and knows many people locally. Because of those connections, he is often able to find information that would be nearly impossible for someone like me to access from the outside.

That is why he helps adoptees like us.

He understands the distance between the life we were given and the life we came from.

Sometimes all it takes is one person on the other side who knows where to look.

People like him become bridges between two worlds.

People like him are the reason stories like mine can happen.

And in my case, Daniel was the person who finally carried the answer back to me.

He told me my birth mother had been found after only a few days of searching.

My body froze.

My pupils went wide. It felt as if every part of me stopped moving at once. For a moment, I could not think or speak. My entire being filled with something I had never experienced all at once before.

Joy.

Confusion.

Love.

Compassion.

Stillness.

Happiness.

The kind of happiness that not everyone gets to experience.

I had been searching for more than twenty years.

This morning, which was night for him, he asked if I would be available for a call. It would be him, a translator, my mother, and me.

I said yes immediately.

I had been waiting my entire life for that moment. Everything seemed to lead to that single point in time.

When the call began, Daniel spoke with me briefly before my mother joined.

Everyone kept telling me the same thing before she came on.

She had lived a very hard life.

Then she appeared.

The entire world went quiet.

She was on my phone screen. The woman I had waited more than two decades to see was suddenly there.

My hands started shaking so badly I could barely hold the phone steady.

I scanned her face, searching for the similarities. Looking for pieces of myself in her.

At first, it was difficult to see them through the pain in her eyes. Years of life, hardship, and quiet suffering had left their marks.

But then I saw her.

And something inside me clicked.

I have a mom.

A real, living person on the other side of the screen who had carried me into this world.

Then her face changed.

She started to cry and smile at the same time.

And so did I.

She did not speak English, but I could see something in her face. Something was loosening. Something was releasing. It looked as though a part of her had finally been allowed to breathe again.

For her, maybe it meant letting go of the weight she had carried since she was a young girl.

For me, something inside my mind suddenly clicked into place.

For the first time in my life, I could see the map of where I came from.

My eyes.

My lips.

The shape of my face.

They finally had a place.

There was no more searching every corner of the internet. No more emails to Romanian agencies. No more waking up and wondering if today would be the day I found her.

The question that many adoptees carry their entire lives was finally answered.

Where do I come from?

For a moment, part of me healed instantly.

But another part of me hurt.

I could see pain in her eyes. I saw systems that failed. I saw a family that failed. I saw a life that had clearly been difficult in ways I am still trying to understand.

The hardest part was recognizing pieces of that pain in myself.

I hope a part of her can rest now knowing that I am okay.

The first words she spoke to me in Romanian were translated as:

“I kiss you. I hug you.”

There was no hesitation.

When she saw me, her entire face lit up in a smile that looked just like mine.

She was so happy.

But when the smile softened, I could see something else underneath it.

Years of quiet hurt.

She asked about my life. She asked about the people who raised me. I could tell that both of us had a thousand questions we wanted to ask, but the language barrier made it difficult.

These are not the kinds of questions you want someone else translating.

They are too personal.

Too emotional.

So we spoke about simpler things until the call ended.

Afterward, I sent her a message. I told her it felt so good to talk to her. I wrote that I hoped she knew I was okay and healthy, and that hearing her voice made my day. I translated the message into Romanian for her.

I sent pictures of myself as a baby and around eight years old so she could see pieces of my life.

She sent photos back.

When I compared them, the resemblance was undeniable.

We have the same features.

It felt like looking into a mirror across time.

She wrote to me:

“My dear daughter, I love you with all my heart. I am happy to see you again. You were always in my mind.”

Her neighbor helps her write and translate.

Then she said something that stopped me completely.

“You are blood of my blood.”

No one in my entire life has ever said those words to me before.

She also asked me to forgive her for not having the opportunity to raise me beside her.

But the truth is that the only thing that matters is that we found each other.

The reunion I had dreamed about for years finally happened.

My mother, kinder to me than almost anyone I have known in my life, saying the words:

I love you.

Blood of my blood.

And for the first time in my life, I knew exactly where I came from.

Romanian adoptee writing about identity, truth, and the long road back to where I come from.

More of the story is still unfolding.

Pictures below