GOD SAVED YOUR LIFE,
NOW YOU MUST LIVE IT
Maybe now, I can look myself in the eye in the mirror without cringing and smile. Maybe now, I can accept and feel loved because I am learning to love myself. Maybe now, I can take a day off work to have a ME day without drowning in guilt. Maybe now, I can start living. I try my best to enjoy every moment to the fullest. I am grateful for everything, even when things do not go my way.
Travel whenever you can. Spend a little bit on things that will make you happy. Try something new. Develop hobbies. Always have hopes and dreams for the future…but do not plan to do your ‘real’ living in the future. Live now.
I did not think so but there is life after breaking free from a narcissistic relationship. In fact, this gives you an opportunity to become a better person, perhaps the person you always wanted to be.
Recovery is a long road. It was particularly important that I took my time. I wished it were as simple as just getting over 21 years of abuse. Just like it took years to get in and out of it, I would need years to get over it.
I did just enter the warm season after a particularly long and brutal winter, after all. If I forced myself to bask in the sunlight to soon, the harsh Chicago wind would have certainly been waiting around the corner to nudge me back to reality.
Instead, I chose to practice self-care and nourish myself. There were times when I was hard on myself. I learned to forgive myself and my ex. I am finally learning to laugh, live and love myself for the first time in my entire life.
When I escaped my former abusive life on June 28, 2013, I never imagined that I would share that traumatic storm with anyone outside of my village. As I was navigating through to my healing, a good friend going through something similar however told me that others needed help and motivation to get out of abusive or other toxic environments that are preventing them from being their true selves and need to read my story to know that they can change their lives as well.
This was where my first book, How to Get the F@#% Out, A Step-by-Step Guide to Leaving an Abusive Relationship by Skylar James (my pen name), was born. I used a different name because I wanted to protect our identities throughout the healing process, and I was not quite ready to be a public face of domestic violence.
I never thought I had an actual story to tell because I was not being physically abused so I wrote the book in a self-help format because the story is not the actual summation of what happened to me. The story is about how I got out of that abusive relationship. I give the reader a play-by-play of planning and facilitating my escape.
My second book, A Mother’s Love Through a Broken Heart, tells the story of how I ended the dysfunctional relationship I had with my mother with my own child. I simply detailed how I treated my daughter which was how I wish my mother would have treated me growing up and even into adulthood.
Those tips are for anyone who can benefit from them and implement them in their daily lifestyle. No one can know exactly how to be a parent until they become one, but not having a good role model or example to mimic is no excuse for being mentally or emotionally abusive.
Over the past nearly seven years, I have learned that generational curses were the root causes of the dysfunctional relationship with my mother and the abusive relationship with my daughter’s father. Once I was able to acknowledge that and heal, I was able to change the course of my life.
My third book, How to Identify Four Generational Curses & Three Proven Ways to End Them for Good, which is an eBook, discusses some of the most common generational curses and how to overcome or avoid them.
I have turned my experiences into lessons that I share with the world. While going through those things I thought that I was the only person experiencing them. By speaking up and telling my story I found out that those toxic and abusive relationships were far more common than I ever imagined.
To further my commitment to helping victims become survivors, I have become a Certified Domestic Violence Advocate and help I victims safely escape their abusive environments. And as a true believer in sound mental health, I have entered graduate school to add Mental Health Counselor to my list of titles. Remember, it is never too late to learn something new or to write a new chapter of your life.