On explaining your pain to the person who caused it, and the power you hand over every time you do
The text came and I was calm.
That’s the part I still think about. Not the content of the text, not what it confirmed, but the strange stillness that settled over me when I read it. A year of knowing in my gut. A year of telling myself I was wrong, that I was paranoid, that the feeling I couldn’t shake was my own damage talking. And then the proof arrived in my hand and something in me just… exhaled.
The anger was there. The hurt was there. Both of them real and immediate. But underneath them, almost embarrassingly, was relief. Because my body had already been living in the truth for twelve months. The text just made it official. I finally had the receipt.
And then my subconscious did something I didn’t expect. It started building the case.
Not deliberately. But somewhere between reading the text and putting my phone down, the lawyer woke up. Started organizing. What he did. Why it was wrong. What it cost me. What it meant about us. Precise and articulate, the way I get when something matters and I need the other person to understand that it matters. I went through it more than once. Maybe because I believed a different arrangement of the same words would finally produce what I needed. Maybe because I thought clarity of argument could generate accountability in a man who’d already demonstrated he wasn’t accountable for anything.
No. My first instinct was right. This is my ultimate violation of trust. Explaining isn’t worth it. Cut the tie.
Then fucking 2am came.
The confidence didn’t leave dramatically. It just got quiet, and in the quiet something else moved in. The anger finished first, the way anger always does, and underneath it was the pain. Just the pain. Sitting there in the dark with no argument left to make and no case left to build, and the question that crawled in wasn’t about him exactly. It was about the apology. Whether it was ever going to come. Whether he even understood the impact of his actions. Whether there was any version of this where he looked at what he’d done and felt the full weight of it.
I already knew the answer. I think that’s why the question kept coming back. Who exactly had I let into my heart?
That’s the thing about the apology you already know isn’t coming. You don’t keep reaching for it because you think you’ve miscalculated the odds. You reach for it because you haven’t finished grieving that the person who owes it to you has already decided not to give it. The explaining isn’t hope. It’s the long way around to accepting a loss you already know is real.
When we explain our pain to the person who caused it, we’re not processing. We’re petitioning. Submitting a formal request for validation to someone whose cosignature we’ve decided we need before we’re allowed to keep feeling what we already feel. And while we’re doing that, while we’re working that hard, we’ve handed them the opening to negotiate. To find the flaw in our argument. To minimize our experience. To introduce reasonable doubt into our own feelings.
The moment she explains, her feelings are up for debate. No explanation, no opening. No opening, and her clarity stays hers.
I know what I should have done when that text came. I should have drawn the line and walked. Infidelity is one of my lines. It always was. I didn’t need to explain why. I didn’t need him to understand why. The line exists because I put it there, and it doesn’t require his agreement to be valid.
His understanding of why it matters was never a condition of it mattering.
But I explained anyway. Because somewhere in me there was still a woman who believed her standards needed to be justified to the person who’d violated them. That she owed him a thorough account of her own limits before she was allowed to enforce them. That her pain wasn’t fully real until he confirmed it.
He never confirmed it. And I never doubted it.
The explanation was just the long way around to a door I should have walked through immediately.
I did this for years, with him and before him. I explained why the silence hurt. Why the cancellations mattered. Why I needed more than what I was getting. I explained it calmly, then more clearly, then with tears, then with fury, then with the specific exhaustion of a woman who has made the same case so many times she could deliver it in her sleep.
What I was actually doing was asking permission. For my feelings. And the problem with asking permission to feel something is that you already feel it. It’s already in your body. The explanation doesn’t create the feeling. It just asks someone else to sign off on it. And when the signature doesn’t come, you explain more, as though more words could produce what only fewer words can.
She learned this early. In a house where her emotions were inconvenient, where her needs were managed rather than met, she figured out that the path to having any feeling acknowledged was to present it carefully. Make the strongest possible case. Wait for approval. She carried that into every room she walked into after.
Including the ones with men who were never going to approve anything.
She has to remember one thing: She is trying to make sense of insanity.
Stopping the explanation is one of the quietest and most significant things she can do for herself.
When she stops explaining, she stops asking. And when she stops asking, she finds out very quickly who was only staying in the conversation because the asking gave them something.
Power, mostly.
The particular power of being the one whose understanding she needed in order to move.
Her feelings were valid before he knew about them. They’ll be valid after this conversation ends. They don’t live or die on his response. They’re not a case waiting for a verdict.
She doesn’t have to make him understand. She just has to decide what she’s going to do with what she already knows.
She already knows.
Choose all,
xoxo Viktoria
P.S. The fact that you can explain it so clearly, so precisely, so well, is not a reason to keep explaining it. It just means you understand what happened. You’re allowed to do that without his approval.
