October 19, 2025 – Realize
I used to think patience could fix anything. If I worked harder, explained clearer, sacrificed more, I could build the kind of love that holds under weather and time. I told her what it would take to marry me—what care means when your body doesn’t always listen and your mind has to carry the extra weight. I spelled it out in plain words. Give me patience. Give me honesty. Walk with me at my speed.
Instead, I met a wall of demands. Expectations that looked good in a caption but bled me dry in real life. I became a prop in a story aimed at likes and a family portrait—my care turned into content, my limits used as leverage. Love shouldn’t be a marketing plan. It shouldn’t be a scoreboard. It shouldn’t ask you to trade your dignity for applause.
I won’t dress it up: it almost broke me. The constant proving, the bargaining, the long nights replaying every conversation in my head. I felt hatred rising like a fever—toward myself for believing, toward her for pushing, toward a world that celebrates the picture and ignores the cost. I started to forget the man I was before the noise.
There’s a special cruelty in losing time you can’t replace. As a quadriplegic, time is a currency I count carefully. Energy too. I had a season when my health felt steady enough to reach for a “normal” life—whatever normal is—and I gave that season to a marriage that ate it up and asked for more. I stood my ground when I should have been held. I explained when I should have been understood. I was patient because I believed patience would be repaid. It wasn’t.
When I finally left, I felt hollow and free at the same time. Freedom is strange that way. You step out of the burning house and you smell like smoke for months. But you’re breathing. You’re alive.
Then I met someone new. No performance. No campaign. Just a person who listened, who understood the logistics and the spirit of my life. She checked every box I need to not only survive in a relationship but thrive: steady presence, soft hands, sturdy boundaries, humor when the day gets long. She saw the chair, the routines, the reality—and still leaned in.
And here’s the hard part: by then my health had slid. Not a cliff, more like quiet erosion. A little less sleep. A little more pain. Muscles that used to cooperate deciding they won’t today. I looked at this good woman and felt something I hate feeling—doubt. Not doubt in her. Doubt in me. Can I be the man she deserves when my body is asking for stricter terms? Can I hold her dreams and my daily battles at the same time without dropping them both?
Hemingway wrote with a knife. Clean lines. No hiding. So here’s the truth with the fat cut off: I want a life that doesn’t require me to bleed for it. I want love that is quiet and strong. I want mornings that begin with real kindness, not public relations. I want to be chosen without conditions. I want to choose without fear.
I also want my time back, and I can’t have it. That loss is a fact I have to live with. So I count what remains and make it matter.
What do you do after a realization like this? You make a list:
No more explaining what basic compassion looks like.
No more carrying two people’s pride.
No more trading health for a temporary peace.
No more pretending that abuse is a misunderstanding.
And then another list:
Yes to love that moves at the speed of real life.
Yes to boundaries spoken out loud.
Yes to rest without apology.
Yes to joy that doesn’t need an audience.
Some days I am angry. I let it pass through me like a storm over flat West Texas land. It comes hard and leaves fast. Some days I am grateful because I made it out. Most days I am both. That’s OK. Two things can be true. Healing is not a straight road; it’s a series of short honest steps.
If you’ve been used, if your care became someone else’s costume, hear me: you are not a prop. You are the main character in your own story. It’s not selfish to ask for love that doesn’t drown you. It’s stewardship. It’s survival. It’s hope with work boots on.
To the woman who fits: I see you. I see how you make the complicated simple. I see how you meet reality with tenderness and structure. I won’t promise what my body can’t sign for, but I will promise this—truth, presence, and a heart that refuses to quit. Some days that will look like laughter and late-night records spinning in the dark. Some days it will look like quiet routines and a hand resting on a hand. All of it honest. All of it ours.
I lost time. I found clarity. Both carve a person into something truer. Patience still matters, but not the kind that lets others drain you. Sacrifice still matters, but not the kind that erases you.
Passion. Pride. Perspective.
This is where I stand now: not begging to be understood, but inviting those who already understand. Not selling a story, but living one. And if love meets me here—steady, unspectacular, relentless—then that will be enough. If it doesn’t, I will still be enough.
The realization didn’t kill me. It called me back to myself.
