A Note After "I Appreciate You"

After I posted my recent piece titled “I Appreciate You,” I found myself thinking about something.

Much of my writing over the past ten months has been critical of what I experienced in my last relationship.

And it is.

It needs to be.

Writing about what happened is part of how I reclaim the narrative of my own lived reality and process everything that occurred. I refuse to carry this with me for years in silence, quietly hurting while pretending it didn’t matter. That isn’t healthy, and it isn’t acceptable to me.

So I write openly and honestly about my experiences.

But something important also deserves to be said.

While he and I were together, I expressed gratitude to him constantly.

Words of appreciation flowed out of me easily and often.

I left him notes telling him how thankful I was he was in my life.

I told him how deeply I loved him,

how much he meant to me,

and how much I appreciated him as a human being.

Even when things happened that hurt me deeply,

I often turned the focus back onto gratitude. I would apologize for bringing up the pain and promise I would try harder not to focus on the things that had wounded me.

Looking back now, that reality is difficult to even put into words.

Because some of the things he did while I was thanking him were not small mistakes or misunderstandings.

Some of them were deeply disrespectful.

Some of them were humiliating.

Some of them were profoundly wrong.

And still, I thanked him.

Even in the months after the night he didn’t come to the hospital, when our relationship fractured and something inside me knew things were not right, I continued to tell him how thankful I was for him.

Until I learned the truth.

Today, most of what I write reflects the reality I came to understand later — the betrayal, the manipulation, the disrespect, and the ways my dignity was violated.

Because that truth matters too.

What I write about far less often are the things I appreciated about him while I was inside the relationship.

The parts that were meaningful.

The reasons I loved him so deeply.

Not because those things didn’t exist.

But because after everything that I learned happened —

the levels at which he disrespected me,

abused my dignity,

used me,

betrayed me,

and treated me as less than human —

those happy and meaningful memories are not places I can comfortably sit.

Not anymore.

What I can say with complete clarity is this:

When I say the words “I appreciate you,” they are never empty.

They come from a heart that has always been willing to love deeply, recognize goodness in others, and express gratitude openly.

Even when it wasn’t deserved.

Even when it aided in my own disrespect.

And that breaks my fucking heart and leaves me repulsed at the same time.