A few months ago, I was on a business trip where we carpooled to a conference. My colleagues asked me what my favorite song was. I laughed. “I don’t know,” I said. They laughed too, assuming I was joking. I wasn’t.
Since then, I’ve noticed how often it happens. Where do you want to eat? You pick. What movie do you want to watch? Whatever you want. What’s your favorite anything? I don’t know. And almost every answer comes wrapped in an apology I didn’t realize I’d started making: I’m sorry. I don’t know. I’m sorry I’m difficult. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
The people around me are kind about it. They tell me I don’t have to apologize, that it’s okay to have an opinion. They seem a little confused that a 46-year-old woman doesn’t appear to know what she likes. The truth is, I used to. I just spent so many years trying to shrink to survive that I forgot how.
People often assume that leaving a relationship happens because of one terrible day — some single moment that finally makes the decision for you. In my experience, that’s not how it works. It happens one transgression, one exchange, at a time. One compromise. One criticism. One opinion that’s easier to keep to yourself than defend. One decision that just isn’t worth the argument it would start. Then another. And another, until one day you look around and realize your entire life has quietly rearranged itself around keeping someone else a little calmer, a little more comfortable, a little less volatile. It wasn’t even subliminal. He had a sign on our bathroom mirror that read “Preference Is Violence.” He claimed it was stoicism. But it was strictly enforced.
By the time I noticed, my life had narrowed to the size of his approval. Eventually it narrowed even further, to his tolerance. It wasn’t just the big decisions, either — it was everything. What we ate. Where we went. How we spent money, and who we spent time with. How I parented, how I worked, how I spent whatever “free” time I had left. Even the way I remembered things: after years of being told I was wrong, too sensitive, overreacting, or simply misremembering, I stopped trusting my own experience of my own life. I know now that someone like that doesn’t stop at controlling one part of you. Eventually they control all of it, including the parts that make you you.
Recently I learned about something conservationists call an extinction vortex. When a population gets small enough, every loss makes the next loss more likely — diversity disappears, resilience weakens, and without intervention the species can’t recover on its own. I couldn’t stop thinking about this concept, because it’s exactly what happened to me. Not all at once. By inches. Every time I chose peace over honesty, made myself a little smaller, told myself my preferences didn’t really matter — until eventually I wasn’t sure I had any left.
The greatest thing I lost wasn’t my marriage. Not at all. It was my relationship with myself.
When my marriage ended, I assumed healing would mean rebuilding the life I’d lost. Instead, it has felt more like rehabilitation. For the past year, I’ve lived in what I think of as my tank: therapy, long walks, friends who don’t expect me to earn their kindness, quiet mornings, a home where I always know what kind of evening I’m walking into. Enough safety that my body has finally started to believe the danger has passed. Little by little, I’ve gotten healthier. I’ve laughed more. I’ve started sleeping again. I’ve become strong enough to imagine a future instead of just surviving the present.
I found my way to a domestic violence support group, certain it wasn’t really for me — surely my situation wasn’t “that bad.” I should have known better. But domestic violence doesn’t discriminate. Single or married, with kids or without, it happens across every income level. And the pattern I lived — the slow shrinking, the second-guessing, the disappearing opinions — isn’t unique to me. It’s the design. Smallness is the point.
Just when you are getting stronger, there’s a twist: the skills that kept you alive in the tank don’t work out in open water. Out here, people ask what restaurant I want, what music I like, where I’d like to sit — and I freeze, because for so many years having a preference simply wasn’t safe. Anticipating everyone else’s needs, apologizing before I’d even spoken, making myself smaller, pretending I didn’t care — those were brilliant survival strategies. They’re also terrible ways to build a new life.
These days, I’m practicing something I think of as rewilding. It’s less dramatic than it sounds. Sometimes it means picking the restaurant. Eating watermelon on a salad. Buying a vinyl record. Going to a concert with friends. Sometimes it means saying, “Actually, I’d rather…” and not immediately backing down. Sometimes it’s buying flowers because I like them, or playing the same song three times in a row because it makes me happy, even if nobody else gets why. Sometimes rewilding is nothing more than noticing that I have a preference at all.
I’m discovering that healing isn’t about becoming someone new. It’s about recovering someone who was almost lost — someone curious, someone joyful, someone who had opinions and dreams and favorite songs, who sings and dances and collects weird lamps, long before survival became her full-time job.
I still apologize too much. I still catch myself scanning the room before I answer simple questions. I still have moments when “I don’t know” is the truest thing I can say. But instead of judging myself for it now, I get curious instead. Maybe I don’t know yet. Maybe that’s allowed. Maybe after years of making myself smaller, the work isn’t to have all the answers right away — it’s just to start asking the questions again. What do I like? What do I want? Who am I when no one else is deciding for me?
If any of this sounds familiar — the over-apologizing, the not-knowing, the way a life can shrink so slowly you don’t notice until it’s already small — I want you to know you’re not broken, and you’re not “too much” or “not enough” or any of the other things you’ve probably been told. You were surviving, and survival is its own kind of intelligence, even when it costs you pieces of yourself along the way. Those pieces aren’t gone. They’re just waiting for it to be safe enough to come back.
For the first time in a long time, the question of who I am when no one else is deciding for me doesn’t terrify me. It feels a little like freedom. Not always. But there are moments — when I can close my eyes, take a deep breath, and be in my body, in the present moment.
And I think that’s what healing actually is. Not forgetting who you were, but slowly, gently, becoming impossible to lose again.
