The Death of the Woman I Used to Be

When I think back to five years ago and everything life has thrown at me, I honestly could not be more surprised by where I am today and who I have become, and continue becoming.

Five years ago, I was married to the father of my daughter, living the little nuclear family life I had always dreamed of. As an only child raised in a divorced family, creating a family of my own was my greatest dream. To be a wife. To be a mother. There has never been a greater calling on my life.

For the first ten years of our marriage, that dream felt real.

Then one day, at 28 years old, I saw a positive pregnancy test.

Our daughter was on the way.

A tiny genetic blend of the two of us. Our little family was becoming real, and I truly thought I could have died happy.

But that is not how the story ended.

I was fortunate enough to stay home with my daughter during her first three years of life. Around that same time, we moved from Franklin, Tennessee to Raleigh, North Carolina so my husband could pursue an opportunity that seemed incredibly promising for our future. I had also been offered a role within the company, so it felt like we were stepping into an exciting new chapter together.

Eventually, my daughter started Montessori school, and I joined the company as well. We were building a life in a new city, raising our child, advancing our careers, and creating what looked, from the outside, like a beautiful life.

About a year later, we had purchased a home in downtown Raleigh that we absolutely loved, and work felt meaningful, even with its challenges.

Working with your husband while he is also your boss is not easy.

He would often tell me he had to be harder on me publicly so people would not think he favored me. So I swallowed the public disrespect quietly and continued trying to be grateful for the life we had built.

Then 2020 arrived, and like so many others, COVID changed everything.

One of the first moments that deeply hurt me was when I got COVID in March of 2020. Instead of staying home to help care for me and our daughter, he temporarily got an AirBNB because he could not risk getting sick himself.

I remember thinking, even then, something felt wrong.

From 2020 to 2021, the emotional distance between us grew rapidly. Ironically, while the world was forced six feet apart, we somehow became even more disconnected inside our own home.

That was when I finally allowed myself to acknowledge the discontentment I had buried for years.

I felt incredibly lonely. (And I was an influencer at the time… so super duper double lonely!)

Work always came first. The hours got longer. The excuses for coming home late increased. His face stayed buried in his phone until late at night, always texting, always distracted, always somewhere else mentally.

I slowly stopped feeling like a wife and started feeling like furniture. Something pulled out only when convenient.

Invisible in my own marriage.

I started drinking a little more. Crying a little more. Reaching for any sort of reassurance that I was still worthy of love, attention, and care.

Then eventually, it became impossible not to notice the shift happening right in front of me.

There was another woman who had become emotionally close to my husband through work. At first, I trusted him completely. I wanted to believe the explanations. We had been married for fifteen years. Why would I assume otherwise?

But intuition has a way of speaking before evidence ever arrives. This is my super power and curse.

One morning, I noticed a symbol drawn in permanent marker on her desk. A tiny heart with stars beside it.

My stomach dropped instantly.

I recognized it because I recognized him. The little mannerisms, the handwriting, the symbols from years of growing up together. Some part of me knew before my mind was willing to admit it.

From that point forward, I noticed everything.

The private conversations that lasted for hours. The laughter. The walks outside together. The subtle glances exchanged across rooms. The early morning phone calls on the way to work. The secret text messages that make DM’s disappear. And one of the more painful ones… the softness shift in his energy that I had spent years begging to receive myself.

Meanwhile, for years, I had asked for simple things. Presence. Attention. Connection. A slice of his time. Twenty uninterrupted minutes together that did not feel forced or inconvenient.

I watched another woman receive the tenderness I had spent years mourning inside my own marriage.

What hurt almost as deeply was the closeness she had cultivated with me personally. She had positioned herself as someone safe. Someone who cared. Someone I trusted enough to confide in.

And during that season, I openly shared how lost I felt in my marriage. How desperately I wanted my husband to remember me. To see me again. To choose me again.

I had spent years supporting his ambitions, sacrificing parts of myself to hold together our home, our family, and the life we were building.

Then suddenly, it felt like everything collapsed at once.

Not only did I lose my marriage, but I lost half of my time with my daughter through circumstances I never imagined for my life.

That grief nearly destroyed me.

I questioned everything.

My worth.
My faith.
My identity.
My understanding of love.
Even my understanding of God.

How could I have tried so hard to be a devoted wife and mother, only to watch my entire world unravel anyway?

What was wrong with me?
Why was I not enough?
Where had I failed?

I spent years tormenting myself with those questions.

And the hardest part of all was knowing my daughter witnessed pieces of that unraveling in real time.

She watched her mother grieve while still trying to survive.

That was the season that broke me completely.

I have never been the same woman since.

Not the same wife.
Not the same person.
Not the same version of faith I once carried so confidently.

Everything I thought I knew fell apart.

But looking back now, I can see something else clearly too.

The breaking was also the beginning.

Because sometimes God allows the life you built to collapse when it can no longer contain the woman you are becoming.

And that is where my story truly begins.