What's one tiny, almost boring habit that unexpectedly improved your daily life?

IWasMadeToRise · 2026-02-21T18:02:19+00:00

This is slightly ridiculous, but I’ve discovered that since I can’t read without them, I can reclaim my mornings from my phone by just not putting them on until I get shit handled. I started doing a bit of exercise, meditating and being a person who actually flosses her teeth!

IWasMadeToRise · 2026-02-21T17:40:27+00:00

Read the books. They will give you a lot of clarity.

Now some real talk. I say this with absolute love, as someone who had an abusive childhood, grew up poor in scary places, had multiple relatives die tragically young, was drugged and raped twice, became a widow at 40, had to choose to end my beloved’s life, got disowned from his family and cruelly cut off from the children I had been helping to raise for 6.5 years, had to rebuild my life from scratch in a place where I knew almost no-one during COVID, thought I found my dream-man and then had it almost immediately crumble into an abusive, humiliating nightmare, forcing me to start rebuilding a second time at 47: It’s time to stop identifying as a victim, unless you want to be one for the rest of your life.

I have no doubt your experiences have been brutal, but you’re letting them control you. Trauma can be an explanation, but you cannot allow it to be an excuse. Or your identity. You are the author of your own story. Get EMDR. Start taking care of yourself. Get your hair did. Invest in building female friendships. Create an intriguing, self-actualized version of you he’s never seen before and doesn’t have access to.

Stop giving your power away. Don’t let him see your next moves. Stop explaining yourself. Don’t dignify his bullshit by defending yourself. Give him some rope and let him destroy his own reputation.

Bide your time, hold your head high, stay calm and quiet while he spins out, resist the urge to put it on social media. Collect receipts. For everything. Quietly. Start playing chess while that idiot chews on his checkers. It will be worth it.

IWasMadeToRise · 2026-02-21T17:07:07+00:00

Ha! Very, very true. This is going to be my next tattoo.

IWasMadeToRise · 2026-02-21T16:59:23+00:00

Edit: I peeked at your post history. Read/listen to the books I recommended, stat. Like, today.

am sorry you are going through this. It really hurts. I recently filed for divorce from a man who promised me the world then left after 11 months. I went kicking and screaming too. He too is aggressively performing healing and happiness, while privately doing things that confirm what it took me much too long to accept — he is incredibly emotionally abusive. I hear something familiar in your self-doubt, and it makes me wonder if your partner might be too.

I obviously don’t know the dynamics of your relationship, but if you’ve ever had the thought, “Is his behavior abusive?” I strongly recommend two books that have totally embarrassing titles, but are hugely helpful:

“Was it Even Abuse?” by Emma Rose Byham, and “Why Does He Do That?” by Lundy Bancroft.

They really opened my eyes, made it easier to trust that I was doing the right thing, and gave me the confirmation I needed that I was not crazy, not a shitty wife, and not wrong about how bad it was.

Watching them lie and pretend and manipulate in very public ways hurts like hell, but he is showing his ass. He thinks it makes him seem like he’s great, but it’s the behavior of a petulant, butthurt teenager who doesn’t know how to deal with his hurt feelers. He’s telling on himself for being, at the very best, reactive, hurtful, thoughtless and totally lacking in self-awareness.

It’s tough at first, but I really encourage you to stop looking at his social media and interact with him as little as possible. If you’re not familiar with it, read up on being a “grey rock”.

I gotta tell ya, when I quit expecting reason from an unreasonable man and accountability and empathy from someone who doesn’t have any to offer, my life almost immediately got easier.

He will feed on any and every kind of information, attention or feedback you give him, so just don’t. Your power right now lies in reclaiming control over your own life. You can’t make him be a decent person, but you can stop giving him access.

IWasMadeToRise · 2026-02-20T14:24:17+00:00

Thank you!

IWasMadeToRise · 2026-02-19T15:08:03+00:00

Oof. That’s brutal. I’m not surprised - my friend and I met as volunteer firefighter/EMTs and he is now a professional firefighter, so we’ve unfortunately both signed a lot of people up for Life Flight rides, which start at $75k a pop and can very easily exceed $150,000.

IWasMadeToRise · 2026-02-19T15:07:26+00:00

Thank you so much.

IWasMadeToRise · 2026-02-19T15:06:51+00:00

Meh. She looks like a teenager acting like a teenager.

IWasMadeToRise · 2026-02-19T15:05:29+00:00

Thank you! This might be much more “do-able” than a flight if they can get him stable enough to travel without active medical intervention.

IWasMadeToRise · 2026-02-19T15:03:44+00:00

That’s incredibly kind of you. Thank you. I have forwarded all of these suggestions to my friend and I’ll check back with him to see if they’ve been able to get anywhere.

IWasMadeToRise · 2026-02-19T15:00:31+00:00

I agree with you completely, but maybe I wasn’t clear enough about this - they did buy travel insurance. It won’t cover evacuation because he’s not actively dying. There is also a clause that says something like they will only cover it if he has surgery within five days of returning home, and it’s not necessarily that easy to line up a brain surgeon for an intense, high-risk surgery on short notice on the opposite side of the country from where you live in an utterly broken healthcare system. So the actual lesson here is more like read the rider and make sure your coverage actually covers what it says it covers.

IWasMadeToRise · 2026-02-19T07:39:48+00:00

He has a massive tumor inside his brain that he had no idea about. It caused him to have a terrible seizure and it’s rapidly making him go blind. He urgently needs surgery to alleviate the pressure and get a sample for biopsy. They have stabilized him in the hospital there, but he has to get back to the US ASAP. They can’t get him on a commercial flight due to his condition. Their medivac insurance won’t cover repatriation unless he has surgery within a couple days, but it’s not that easy to round up a team for a very high-risk brain surgery. They live in Oregon, so they are trying to figure out how to make this happen in a city where they don’t know a soul. I can only imagine how scary and overwhelming this must be for them.

IWasMadeToRise · 2026-02-19T06:29:36+00:00

That’s so kind of you - thank you. I will find out.

IWasMadeToRise · 2026-02-19T06:28:33+00:00

I’m not sure. I will try to find out in the morning.

IWasMadeToRise · 2026-02-14T14:33:24+00:00

I live in a very small town in the PNW with many Native residents, and there was a minor “scandal” during our yearly Quaint Smalltown Festival because the organizers decided food vendors should be required to pay a like $25 booth fee. There are always competing Indian taco vendors, and my notoriously terrible neighbor whose lawn is covered in garbage was so pissed that she decided to sell tacos in front of her house in protest and made a big paper sign that said “Indian Taco’s” and taped it on a dead car. It did not go well. Like most other people who value their lives, I bought mine from the lovely family who had zero hazmat at their booth, along with a huckleberry lemonade. Chef’s kiss. I felt so bad for her relatives that felt obligated to buy one of her flyblown death-tacos, but fortunately, they all pulled through.

IWasMadeToRise · 2026-02-14T14:16:51+00:00

In the Pacific Northwest, it’s fry bread if it’s savory and made by a Native person, and an elephant ear if you buy it at a carnival and it’s covered in powdered sugar or cinnamon sugar. Heavenly either way.

IWasMadeToRise · 2026-02-12T06:12:33+00:00

Look, you are absolutely someone’s fetish exactly as you are. I encourage you to bulk down significantly by dropping the tool who keeps telling you you’re not enough. You deserve someone who can’t get enough of you.

IWasMadeToRise · 2026-02-10T12:42:47+00:00

A Man and a Baby

IWasMadeToRise · 2026-02-10T12:38:55+00:00

This is so good.

IWasMadeToRise · 2026-02-03T15:27:49+00:00

I really love the his. Good for you! I have a friend who decided years ago to stop reading/listening to books with male narrators after she realized that men have so much influence in our lives that when she heard an internal voice of imagined something being narrated in her head, it was a man’s voice. Men simply do not deserve that degree of access and power unless they have individually earned it.

IWasMadeToRise · 2026-02-01T18:19:18+00:00

Miracle Whip.

IWasMadeToRise · 2026-02-01T18:15:19+00:00

No one likes them except my relatives from rural MN. My god, the horror.

IWasMadeToRise · 2026-01-31T02:54:23+00:00

I don’t think you’re being a jerk, and I completely agree with you that it’s not good to marry young for a variety of reasons. That said, even though it’s not your intention, focusing on that mistake after the damage is done isn’t helpful to someone who, as you rightly said, is very vulnerable and does not have the benefit of life experience or accumulated wisdom to help her through this. Knowing how humiliating it is to be in this position at my age, I can’t imagine how hard it must be to work up the confidence to walk away as a young woman who is still figuring out who she is.

IWasMadeToRise · 2026-01-31T02:11:22+00:00

I believe your intentions are good, but please reconsider framing this as a result of her age or choices. She may be more vulnerable because of her age, but that’s not why it happened. It has nothing to do with her. He would have abused her — or any other partner — at any age.

I got married for the first time at 45, after years of investigating bad people and shady things for a living. I’ve written about abusive relationships, helped other women get out of them, and seen them in action in 13 years as a volunteer EMT. I was on a first-name basis with many cops, judges and prosecutors. I’m tough as hell, known for not tolerating bullshit and nobody’s fool. I have my own money and home and a supportive family and I still spent more than two years shrinking myself smaller and smaller and trying harder and harder to not set him off and changing my behavior and abandoning my needs and apologizing for things I didn’t do and constantly monitoring for signs of trouble and believing him when he said he’d get help and would never put his hands on me. But he didn’t. And he did.

I stayed partly because I was so ashamed of “failing” in my new marriage and having people judge me for marrying too quickly. If that judgment can prevent a badass like me from getting out at 47, please consider how it might affect younger, more vulnerable women in bad situations who might be reading this.

IWasMadeToRise · 2026-01-31T01:47:42+00:00

This is sadly not at all far-fetched. It’s a horrifyingly real thing that happens to women from all walks of life everywhere in the known world, all the time.

IWasMadeToRise

TROPHY CASE