Who Am I Without Us?

My life has been turned upside down.

I’m sobbing. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I’m staying with a coworker while I figure out my move-out plan—my exit strategy. I want out as quickly as possible, so I’ve given myself less than a week to pack up my entire life. A friend in another city offered her spare room while I try to land on my feet.

Okay. That’s the beginning of a plan.

But I feel nauseous all the time. I don’t want a life of my own. I wanted a shared life—with him.

That first week was filled with anger and despair. I wasn’t waking up beside my partner or my sweet dog anymore. I wasn’t eating my usual bowl of cereal in silence at our dining room table. A million small details of my daily routine disappeared overnight. Without my partner, my dog, my apartment—everything changed.

It’s exhausting.

Everyone who loves me keeps reaching out. Talking to them is exhausting too, even if it’s a welcome distraction. Hobbies that once filled my solo time now feel unbearable. I can’t sit through a single YouTube video. A movie feels like too much of a commitment. My brain insists I have bigger problems to solve: I’m single. I need a new apartment. Maybe a new job. Maybe even a new dog so I’m not alone and don’t lose my mind.

A million thoughts race through a brain that’s been starved of food and sleep.

I know I need some semblance of routine. Thankfully, my job let me switch to working remotely while they look for my replacement. I feel guilty about that, too—like I’m inconveniencing everyone just by falling apart.

There are almost too many possibilities now. I’m used to filtering everything through him—his feelings, his preferences, what movie he’d want to watch. Now every decision is mine. That kind of freedom feels heavy. Uncomfortable.

So I focus on distraction. I shift from being nauseous because I haven’t eaten to being nauseous because I forced myself to. My favorite meals aren’t appetizing anymore. I dread the thought of never ordering from my favorite local takeout spots again. I dread never stepping foot in the grocery store that became so familiar over the three and a half years we lived together.

So much of my energy—all of it, really—was focused on him. Now all of that energy is just… here. For me.

And that feels strange.

But beneath the grief, there’s the faintest glimmer of relief. Because it’s exhausting to pour yourself into someone who doesn’t pour back into you. It’s exhausting to chase connection that no longer exists.

Maybe this space—this painful, nauseating, disorienting space—is where I finally get to ask:

Who am I when I’m on my own?

From “We” to “Me” - How Did it End?

For us, it didn’t end with shouting or slammed doors. There were no explosive fights, no dramatic ultimatums. It ended quietly. Gradually. So subtly that I almost missed it.

It ended the first time he stopped asking about my day when I came home. It ended in the evenings he chose to sit alone instead of beside me. In the small pauses where connection used to live.

At first, those moments felt insignificant. Easy to excuse. We were busy. We were tired. We were comfortable. I was in love with him…he was kind, intelligent, handsome. We didn’t fight. He carried most of our bills. We had built years of history together. From the outside, nothing looked broken.

But something was.

The connection that once felt effortless began slipping through my fingers. And every time I reached for it, suggesting a date night, asking deeper questions, trying to pull us closer, he drifted further away. The more distance I felt, the harder I tried. I told myself this was what commitment looked like: fighting for us.

What I couldn’t see then—the hopeless romantic in me refused to see—was that the love we had in those early years was already gone. I wasn’t fighting for a relationship anymore. I was fighting a cycle. A push-and-pull dynamic that gave me just enough hope to keep trying, and just enough distance to keep me anxious.

I mistook obsession for devotion. I told myself I was loyal. In reality, I was unraveling.

I lost myself in the process. My mental health, my physical well-being, my joy. I was clinging to someone who had quietly let go of me long before. I felt it in my bones, but I refused to accept it. I kept believing that if I just tried harder, loved better, fixed whatever was broken, we could get back to what we once had.

But you can’t resurrect something that’s already been laid to rest.

My breaking point didn’t arrive all at once. It crept in through tears I couldn’t explain. Through irritability at work, with family, with friends. I felt like a failure, like I was watching a quarter of my life slip through my hands and couldn’t stop it.

When I finally gathered the courage to start the conversation, I was shaking. I was crying. I was ready for some sort of response from him, anger, grief, resistance, anything.

He had nothing to say.

I stood there, sobbing, stunned that I had intertwined my life so deeply with someone who seemed untouched by my pain. In that moment, something in me shifted. I was exhausted from begging to be understood. From trying to earn love in the ways I so desperately needed it.

So I walked away.

Not because it didn’t hurt, but because it hurt too much to stay.

I wanted to fix everything immediately. I thought it was my responsibility to repair what had broken. To save us. To save myself. (It wasn’t.)

For the first time in years, I gave myself space. Real space. The kind I didn’t know I was starving for.

When I returned to our apartment days later, he finally said what we both already knew. He didn’t like spending time with me. He hadn’t wanted to leave because he didn’t want to be “the bad person.” But he didn’t want to be in a relationship with me anymore.

There it was. Not dramatic. Not passionate. Just…flat.

I was devastated. Everything I had built my world around collapsed with the quiet disappointment of a cheap Fourth-of-July firework—brief, underwhelming, and final. I expected tears. I expected emotion. I expected something that matched the magnitude of what was ending.

There was nothing.

I swallowed my pride. I held back the urge to beg him to love me. I bit my tongue to keep from saying cruel things I didn’t mean. I packed my bags.

And I left.

And even though it felt like my world was ending, it was the first moment in a long time that I chose myself.