What he took wasn’t just my comfort. It was the quiet right to feel safe in my own skin, to exist without bracing for impact. That loss didn’t come all at once. It was chipped away slowly, through every moment I flinched and he didn’t notice, or worse, didn’t care.

He made everything his. My time, my space, my body, my voice. I was expected to move around his moods like weather, adjusting myself to keep the peace. But peace that demands your silence is not peace at all. It’s control dressed up as love.

There were no bruises. Just the constant pressure to give more than I had, to shrink so he could feel big. I wasn’t allowed to rest unless it served him. I couldn’t say no without being punished by his rage or his withdrawal. He called it a marriage. I lived it like a war.

The hardest part was how normal it became. How I stopped noticing how much I lost, until I had almost nothing left. Healing meant facing that truth without flinching. It meant naming what he did even when no one else saw it.

Now I reclaim what he tried to take. Not just my safety, but my softness, my voice, and my right to move through this world without apology. That is mine. It always was.