A friend of mine on Substack asked me this question one day—do you think that after everything you’ve been through that you can love again? I’ve been contemplating what that would mean, what that would mean having to overcome. Of course, my answer was yes because I have felt real unconditional love for someone I was in a situationship with, and the only reason that ended was because I want a real relationship one day. I want a life with someone. I want a soul connection that’s full of depth and emotional intimacy. I want trust and openness and mutual respect. I want something authentic. But right now? I am still exhausted and am still recovering.
Losing Sean is still an ache—how dramatically my life has changed as a direct result of everything that happened is still deeply affecting me. I’ve started waking up at night and feeling the impacts of the C-PTSD that was caused by both dating someone whose behavior was extremely abusive and narcissistic but also by being stalked in the aftermath of that relationship, of having my openness to finding love being exploited as if such a thing is a weakness and not a huge strength. And that’s okay. I won’t be the one suffering for that because I didn’t lose or mistreat me, but I am still having to weather the consequences of being drug through other people’s small-minded abuse. And I don’t mind calling it that because it is small-minded to run with gossip and to gang up on a person that they don’t know.
I’m listening to Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn again because I feel like she understands. I relate to the main character, Camille Preaker, in many ways. Camille was a cutter. I was a bulimic. Same underlying issues, different self harm employed to fill holes that were dug over the course of decades. Internalized ugliness that takes legitimate mental reprogramming to heal. And for my part—I have. I had my last bout with bulimia in the fall of 2019 after Sean died. It was actually more complicated than just the bulimia. Stricken with guilt that Sean was no longer here to eat or to live his precious life, I felt ashamed if I ate. I also had lost weight during the final months of his illness, the most harrowing stretch of that gamut starting seven years ago tomorrow on July 26 when Sean would develop a low fever that would become a migraine. I had a lot of guilt around that, too.
I’d been invited to have dinner with a few women from church. One of the moms would’ve given birth to twins that she miscarried that day, and they thought that with my having lost Jude and having been so willing to write about it that I’d be a good companion to have along. I had worked at my mom’s store that day—Sean had been healthy for July, a cruel trick by the universe, leading us to believe that in under a month, we’d be at UAB for his life-saving stem cell transplant, but no—it was like the eye of the storm…a month of gaining weight and feeling better that would end with the rug being pulled out from beneath us.
When I got home the night of July 26, 2019, I was exhausted from both talking about the grief of child loss and working. Sean wanted to be intimate. I told him I was too tired, and that night—he ran fever and then developed a migraine, which would end up being the cancer traveling to his brain. I still don’t like telling that story. The denial of physical intimacy and his getting sick after made me feel ashamed as if that was what killed him. Objectively, I know it’s not, but grief and emotions don’t make sense, and the correlation between the events that are still so clear in my mind are infinitely tethered together.
But after he died, I became unmoored. Sean had been my anchor. What can only be described as nightly wine ballooned into alcohol use disorder. The overwhelming amount of unresolved trauma that bubbled up when he died in conjunction with guilt, shame, and grief had to be numbed. I didn’t know where to start. Still, coupled with the resurgence of bulimia, it’s a miracle I survived given the drop in electrolytes as a consequence of purging can be fatal.
My therapist and I worked through that first. By journaling to my eating disorder as though it wasn’t a part of me but an entity outside of me, I was able to finally let it go. I still remember how surprised I was that after almost a decade of remission it was still in there.
I realize now what happened—Sean’s death dropped me back onto a low vibrational timeline that I’d been existing on in my early 20s. I’d had the first invitation to heal unresolved childhood trauma with second boyfriend, but I didn’t. Instead, I emerged from that relationship wounded and weary of men. The second invitation would come in the fall of 2019, and I would eventually start to figure out the issues that needed to be addressed including how they manifested in the first place.
I had to learn to sit still with difficult emotions. I had to learn to sit with the complex emotions that surrounded things I carried guilt and shame around. That’s part of what I’m doing now. Being stalked had very real, very damaging consequences to my relationship with my children partially because when I was going out of my mind, I lost it. Not on my kids, but I couldn’t hold it together. I am thankful that when I wasn’t sure for my children’s safety or my own, my parents were able to watch my children, but I can’t help but feel like so much was stolen from me.
It helps to have read in Dr. Jessica Taylor’s Click. Stalk. Destroy. that it’s both normal and intended to lose your freaking mind when you’re being group and cyberstalked. I understand, but my children don’t. I can’t make them understand, so I’m having to learn to be accepting and to wait for them to learn to trust me again. I’m doing that with stability and consistency.
As for how I feel about the person who instigated the smear campaign and who initiated all of this—I feel the world will be a better and safer place one day when they are not in it. There are some people who are too selfish and too cruel and too entitled, too sadistic, too narcissistic, too Machiavellian, too psychopathic to be redeemed. I used to say I believed that anyone could heal, anyone could change, but clearly, not everyone chooses that. The reality is that these are the people who will evolve out of the species—these are the people who absolutely nobody should date or give attention—energetic supply—to. These are the people who see their likeness in the abusive political hitmen who hurt women, children, minorities, and immigrants with brazen confidence and delusional self-justification.
These are the people who make me hesitate when it comes to pursuing love again. These are the people who made me so acutely aware of subtle context clues in dialogue, in micro-expressions, in brief flashes of any intimation of selfishness or entitlement. These people are why I’ve been “laying low”. I got tired of going out, of going downtown. I got tired of being around people who I know knew my former partner and who might be acting as flying monkeys.
But I will say I’m grateful for the lessons. I’ve learned every step of the way—how to set boundaries, how to protect my energy…all of the things. They might have put cracks in my ability to trust, but they couldn’t take away my willingness to be open and vulnerable. I still choose honesty, and I know that I’m allowed to have my feelings.
I know what’s happening right now is that hurt feelings—unresolved feelings—from the past have come back to strike fear in me, but I refuse to give them that power (them as in those hurt feelings). I remember what Anne Lamott said—that you own your story, that you own everything that ever happened to you, and that if people wanted to be written about warmly, they would have acted better.
I am working on writing this all into a hybrid of fiction and reality. So many pieces of the puzzle from the last two years are known solely because of intuitive downloads and learning to read those micro-expressions and to pay attention to mirroring behavior. It is insanity inducing, and it’s shocking what some people will do. I was asked more than once to join a Satanic cult. Their principles, which were listed to me twice—once in 2025 and once in 2026, don’t sound bad, however, I have done enough research into what happens within these cults, and I’ve paid attention to the way that people have tried to get close to me with what I’d call a bit of unhealthy interest in my children, so I know that declining was the right thing to do in every instance. Further—I think for myself. I do not adhere to group think or a system of beliefs that are dictated to me. That’s just not how I operate.
I do know there are good people out there—normal people, people who think for themselves, people who invest in their work in healthy and productive ways, and who are community oriented and caring but who are ultimately highly individuated. I’m one of those people. Sean was one of those people. First boyfriend was one of those people.
As for the rest—I know we’re all battle-worn. I know we all have wounds. I know we all have trust issues in some form or another. But it’s our responsibility to heal from those wounds and to focus on what matters. For me, right now, that’s my writing and my children. I love them deeply, and I am dedicated to continuing on my quest to become the best and most healed version of myself, so I can be there for them. As a mother, one thing I didn’t want—perhaps too much—was for them to emerge from childhood with the traumas and the issues that I carried. I know that I really don’t have control over that, and if there’s one lesson I can take forward it’s that clinging to control is a recipe for disaster. The same is true of fears. I am working on letting them go, but I am still waking up at night and failing to fall back to sleep because like ghosts in the night, they haunt me.
I know I need to forgive myself for the ways I could have handled things better. I also have to give myself grace. It was that bad. I know it could have been worse, but that doesn’t diminish that it was really traumatic for me—all of it…the sudden shock of losing Sean, the pain of not being tended to emotionally when I needed it the most in the early stages of loss when I had no concept of how to do that for myself, the atrocity of narcissistic abuse, and the smear campaign and stalking attack that came because I wrote about the abuse from a wide-angle lens in the aftermath of that relationship.
I was literally being Gone Girled based on an article that I’d written in the summer of 2024 about how Gillian Flynn does such an exemplary job of showing—not telling—narcissistic abuse. I suppose—they did, too. The end game was for me to not be here. So, perhaps I should count that as a win. I’m having to revisit some of the internal work to heal, but I am still here, and I’m not in an institution—both of those are end-game goals of gang stalking. It parallels with the abuse conducted against strong, independently minded women since the dawn of the patriarchy where men could and did have wives and unruly daughters committed for refusing to capitulate to unbalanced social standards that subjugated them to roles that were subservient. Legally, they can’t do that now—it takes a lot more effort, but it’s still being done conspiratorially with the pathologisation of mental health issues. For example—Dr. Taylor says we pathologise ourselves by saying “I have anxiety” and it becomes medicated without addressing what’s causing the fear, what’s causing the anxiety, which is usually returning to an abusive partner or environment.
I, thankfully, don’t have any formal diagnosis on my record other than my holistic therapist diagnosing me as an “island girl” after my first solo trip to Roatan. For that I am grateful because I know that could and would be leveraged against me if I were to ever be in the company of an abuser again. Never again. I know they say “never say never”, but in this case—it’s never.
So, I suppose the answer is yes. I do think I can love again. I think I can one day feel safe enough to love openly and fully and without fear or hesitation. I’m not a naturally jealous or skeptical person, and I know now all of the red flags to look out for. Whoever I find—if I do, to share this journey with, will be someone who is open and honest, someone who is willing to be vulnerable and authentic. It will be someone who shows up and who cares as much about my wellbeing as their own. It will be someone who shows a genuine interest in what I think and feel and who lets me into their own world. It will be someone who is healing, not withholding. It will be someone who is secure and emotionally mature. I know I’m writing up a tall order, but I no longer have the capacity to tolerate partners who have yet to do the work.
For now, I’m doing my own work. I’m sitting still with discomfort and trying to gain understanding about my own inner struggles. I’m healing. It’s not always easy, but it’s doable. I am assuaging fear and embracing acceptance and forgiveness and where I can find it, gratitude. As Glennon Doyle says in Untamed—we can do hard things. I can do hard things, and I can also do my best to make the transition across this sea of grief and deep disappointment in how some people are, in how some people in the world choose to show up, as smooth as possible for myself.
I suppose that’s another aspect of things. Two years ago, I genuinely believed that people could heal from their narcissism and sociopathy. I still believe they can, but I also believe most people would rather not. They’d rather call “peace” compliance and avoidance rather than deep interior exploration and pulling the bucket from that well within themselves. Peace is being calm even in chaos. I can’t say I was always calm in the chaos that swarmed around me in the last couple of years, but to be sure, I knew how to find it, and when I did, it sat next to me like a lover who only wanted what was best for me. I can’t control other people, but I can control my thoughts, and in doing so, my feelings. I can forgive myself for the mistakes I’ve made along the way, and I can show myself grace. And I know that if I can do that, so can anyone.