01/12/2025
When Addiction Lives in Someone You Love...
I’m about to say something I never thought I’d say out loud:
Loving someone with addiction will break you if you don’t learn how to save yourself.
And no one talks about that part.
No one talks about the way you start disappearing —
piece by piece, boundary by boundary —
until you wake up one morning and can’t recognize your own life anymore.
No one talks about the way you carry their storms in your body,
how you scan the room for emotional landmines,
how you ration your truth because you’re terrified
that one honest sentence might push them over the edge.
And the worst part?
You don’t even realize how much you’re losing
because you’re so damn busy trying to hold someone else together
while you quietly fall apart.
Let me be brutally honest:
I stayed longer than I should have because I was afraid they'd use again.
I tolerated things no one should tolerate because I was scared they'd die.
I silenced myself because there instability was louder than my peace.
I let my home become a battleground.
I let my spirit become collateral damage.
I let her pain outrank my own humanity.
And the f**ked-up thing is —
They still found a way to make me the villain.
Addiction does that.
It twists the lens so every boundary looks like betrayal,
every “no” looks like abandonment,
every act of self-preservation looks like cruelty.
Here’s the truth I learned the hardest way possible:
I cannot save someone who is drowning by letting them pull me under with them.
So I finally chose myself.
God, that sentence feels both holy and violent.
I chose my kids.
I chose my peace.
I chose the version of my life where I’m not surviving someone else’s chaos.
I chose to stop apologizing for protecting the home I built with my blood, sweat, and broken bones.
And let me tell you something that might sound harsh but is painfully true:
I miss who they used to be.
But I don’t miss who they became.
Addiction swallowed them whole
and spit out someone I didn’t recognize —
someone who rewrote the story to make themselves the martyr
and me the monster.
But that’s not my truth to carry anymore.
That’s not my burden.
That’s not my war.
