Maybe it’s supposed to…
Nobody warned me that waking up would feel like the worst day of my life.
I thought the moment I finally saw the truth, I’d feel powerful. Liberated. Like some warrior goddess rising from the ashes with a killer soundtrack playing in the background and maybe a slow-motion hair flip for good measure. Instead I was curled up on my bathroom floor at 3am, hyperventilating into a towel so nobody could hear me, feeling like someone had reached inside my chest and ripped out something I couldn’t name.
That wasn’t a breakdown.
That was an awakening. And it nearly killed me before it saved me.
I’ve spent a long time trying to understand why leaving a toxic relationship doesn’t feel like freedom. Why the moment you finally see it, the moment the fog lifts and you realise what’s been happening to you, it doesn’t feel like relief. It feels like your entire world is collapsing. Like the ground you built your life on just opened up and swallowed everything you thought was real. Every woman I’ve ever talked to who’s been through this describes the same thing: not liberation, not power, not clarity. Devastation. The kind that makes you wonder if you’ve made the worst mistake of your life. The kind that makes the cage you just escaped look warm and familiar compared to the open, terrifying emptiness of being free.
And then I found something that changed the way I understood all of it.
Across ancient sacred traditions, from civilizations separated by oceans and centuries who never exchanged a single word, the same pattern shows up when they describe what happens when a human being wakes up to the truth. And not one of them described it as a celebration.
They described it as a sort of death.
Jesus said it plainly: unless a man dies to himself, he can’t live. The Buddha taught that pain isn’t a detour on the way to enlightenment. It’s the actual doorway. You don’t walk around it. You walk through it. And in Romans, it says pain produces perseverance, perseverance produces character, and character produces hope.
Pain first. Hope last.
They weren’t being cruel. They were being accurate. And when I read that, laying on the floor of my apartment with mascara on my pillowcase and a heart that felt like it had been put through a shredder, I finally understood what had happened to me. I wasn’t falling apart.
I was watching the illusion die.
The version of him I’d created in my head. The version of us I’d defended to everyone who tried to tell me the truth. The version of me I’d become to survive inside that relationship. All of it was burning. And the fire felt like dying because in a very real way, it was. The woman I’d been inside that relationship wasn’t going to make it to the other side.
She wasn’t supposed to.
When you leave a toxic relationship, or even when you just start seeing it clearly for the first time, you’re not simply ending a partnership. You’re dismantling an entire reality you built to keep yourself safe. Every excuse you made for him. Every time you rewrote the story so it was your fault. Every lie you told yourself about who he was and who you needed to be to keep him. That was a world. You lived in it. You furnished it with justifications and hope and selective memory. You made it feel like home.
And now it’s crumbling.
Of course it feels like dying. You’re watching your whole world burn down. The fact that it was built on lies doesn’t make the flames hurt any less. If anything, it makes them worse, because now you’re grieving something that wasn’t even real, and there’s a particular cruelty in that. You can’t even mourn it honestly because the thing you’re mourning never existed the way you thought it did.
This is why so many women go back. Not because they’re weak. Not because they’re stupid. Because the pain of awakening is so overwhelming that the illusion, even a toxic one, feels safer than the fire. At least inside the lie, you knew where everything was. At least inside the cage, you knew the dimensions of your world. Freedom is supposed to feel expansive, but when your nervous system has been living in a box for years, open space feels like falling.
The Sufi mystics had a term for this: the annihilation of the self. And before you panic, they didn’t mean the destruction of you. They meant the destruction of the lie you’ve been living as. The mask. The performance. The version of you who learned to shrink and apologize and edit and accommodate until there was almost nothing left. That’s the self that has to die. Not the real you. The survival costume you built to get through a relationship that required you to be someone other than who you actually are.
And that costume will fight like hell to stay. Because the ego, the part of you that spent years constructing that entire survival identity, doesn’t want to burn. It’ll tell you the pain means you made a mistake. It’ll tell you the grief means you still love him. It’ll tell you the emptiness means you’re nothing without him. And in the middle of the fire, when every nerve in your body is screaming, those voices sound an awful lot like truth.
They’re not. They’re the mask trying to convince you to put it back on.
But every ancient tradition that described the death also described what comes after. And every single one of them agreed.
After the death, resurrection. After the dark night, morning. After the ego burns away, what’s left isn’t nothing. What’s left is everything.
The real you.
The one who existed before he ever touched your life. The one who had opinions that didn’t need permission. The one who trusted her gut before someone spent years convincing her it was broken. The one who laughed without checking his face first to see if it was allowed.
She didn’t die in that relationship. She was buried alive under a version of who you were supposed to be. And the awakening, the pain, the fire, the bathroom floor at 3am? That’s her digging her way out.
So if you’re in the middle of it right now. If you’re on your own bathroom floor, or sitting in your car in a parking lot, or lying awake next to him while your whole body screams that something is wrong. If the pain is so enormous that every cell in your body is telling you to go back to sleep because at least the dream didn’t hurt this much.
Don’t.
You’re not actually dying. You’re waking up. And the ancients were right: the pain isn’t the punishment. It’s the passage. On the other side of it is the real woman, because she’s been underneath the performance this entire time, waiting for the fire to burn away everything that was never hers.
She’s coming. And she’s worth every second of the flames.
Choose all,
xoxo Viktoria
P.S. If you went back after an awakening, that doesn’t make you a failure. It makes you human. The fire is terrifying and the cage is familiar and sometimes you need to leave more than once before the leaving sticks. But you felt it. You saw it. And once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it. The illusion doesn’t work as well the second time. Or the third. Eventually, the truth becomes louder than the fear.
