The Lion and The Lamb: A Memoir of Borderline Survival and Softness

By Donato Perconti

Forward

I didn’t write this because I have all the answers. I wrote it because I was trying to make sense of myself. What does it mean to live, love, and survive with a mind that can feel like a battlefield?

For a long time, I believed I was both too much and not enough. I’ve been the storm and the silence. The outburst and the apology. The lion and the lamb.

This is about living with borderline. Not the clinical definition, but the lived experience. The kind that seeps into relationships, identity, memory, and the body. The kind that makes love feel urgent, fear feel constant, and connection feel both necessary and impossible.

It’s not a guide or a fix. But it is honest. If you’ve ever felt like you were too intense, too fragile, too emotional, too reactive, or just too tired to keep explaining yourself, I hope you find something here that meets you with understanding.

This is for the ones who are trying to hold onto themselves in the middle of emotional chaos. For those who are learning how to love without losing themselves. For anyone who has ever felt like they had to choose between protecting their heart and keeping it open.

You don’t have to be just one thing. You can be strong and soft. You can be healing and still hurting. You can be a lion. You can be a lamb. And you can be loved, exactly as you are.

Chapter 1: The First Split

The First Time I Felt Like a Monster

I’ve always been competitive. It wasn’t just about winning. It was about proving something. Sports were the center of my world, but more than that, they were how I learned to survive. On the court and baseball field, everything made sense. There were rules, clear goals, visible rewards. And if you performed, you were valuable.

Especially to my father.

His love was never unconditional. When I played well, I could feel a hint of pride from him. When I messed up, he disappeared. Sometimes emotionally. Sometimes physically. I learned quickly that affection had a price. That approval had to be earned. And if I failed, I wasn’t just disappointing him. I was becoming unworthy of love.

At night, I would wake up to my parents arguing in the next room. I didn’t need to hear every word to know they were fighting about me. My mother thought I needed more patience, more understanding. My father called it weakness. He said she was too soft. He expected more from me. Always more.

It was in those nights that the fear began. Not just of failure, but of being left. If I wasn’t good enough, I didn’t just lose the game. I didn’t just miss a shot. I didn’t just strike out. I lost connection. I lost safety. And in that environment, needing love felt like a liability.

Even my dreams gave it away. I used to have a recurring one. I’d find myself on a farm, walking toward a barn. Something felt wrong, like someone inside had been hurt. I could feel it before I even opened the door. It was always my job to find them. To rescue them. Most of the time it was a woman. Now I realize it was probably my mother. The one person who tried to protect me from the pressure and the punishment. The one I couldn’t save in real life.

Outside of sports, I didn’t connect easily. I wasn’t social. I had one real friend and a handful of other friends, and that was about it. In high school, I dated one girl. She was soft with me in a way no one else had been. For a moment, I felt chosen. Then she left me. Not long after, she grew close to another friend. That was the moment something inside me snapped.

I didn’t grieve. I hardened. My heart calloused. I rewrote the story in my mind. She didn’t care. She was fake. She was cruel. I told myself she never loved or cared for me to begin with. I went from longing for her to hating her. From feeling small to needing power.

That was the first time I truly split.

What people now call splitting was just survival for me back then. My mind couldn’t hold both love and hurt at the same time. So it chose sides. I loved her. Then I hated her. She was everything. Then she was no one. It felt logical, but it was all fear.

The anger didn’t stop with her. I started resenting women in general. I saw them as threats, as manipulators, as puzzles I didn’t want to solve. I objectified them in my mind to feel strong. I judged them to feel in control. It wasn’t about desire. It was about defense. I didn’t want to be close to anyone who could make me feel that kind of pain again.

I became emotionally predatory without realizing it. Attention was a game. Affection was leverage. I wanted to be the one who walked away first. I wanted to win, even in connection. Especially in connection.

At the root of it all was fear. And underneath the fear was grief. I was a boy who just wanted to be enough. But I never believed I was.

No one told me what borderline was. No one explained why I felt things so deeply or why my reactions overwhelmed even me. One moment I would obsess over someone. The next I would tear them apart in my head. One second I felt safe. The next I was certain they would leave me.

This was the first time I turned love into hate. The first time I made someone the villain because it hurt too much to admit I still missed them. The first time I used emotional distance as a shield.

It was the beginning of a pattern. One that would take years to even see clearly. Love. Loss. Anger. Guilt. Repeat.

The lion in me was born from pain. The part that attacked first. The part that refused to be hurt again. But the lamb never really left. It just hid. It curled up inside me, waiting for a moment when it would feel safe to come out.

I didn’t know how to hold both sides yet. I only knew how to survive. And survival always came at a cost.

Chapter 2: Connection, Abandonment, Repeat

Attachment and the craving for safety

I always told myself I was loyal. That I cared deeply. Sometimes people would tell me that too; I was empathetic and thoughtful. That I gave everything to the people around me. And in some ways, that was true. But the way I did it came with rules I didn’t always admit to myself. You were either with me or against me. There was no middle ground.

That mindset showed up early, especially in sports. I lived for competition. I wasn’t just trying to win; I needed to win. I needed to prove I belonged. Coaches weren’t just there to guide me. They were judges. Some of them became heroes in my eyes. The ones who praised me, who started me, who built me up. I wanted to earn their pride, not just their approval. And when I had it, I gave everything I had in return.

But the ones who didn’t value me, or who I believed didn’t, became the enemy. I didn’t just lose respect for them. I felt betrayed. Like they saw through me. Like they confirmed the fear that I wasn’t good enough. I started to resent them. I would criticize their decisions in my head. Dismiss them as incompetent. I couldn’t handle being benched without it cutting all the way down to who I was.

It wasn’t just about sports. The same thing happened with teammates. If they stood by me, defended me, supported me, they were brothers. If they questioned me, even once, they became outsiders. If someone laughed when I failed or didn’t notice when I was hurting, they were disloyal. I couldn’t hold both good and bad feelings toward someone. It was always one or the other.

That all-or-nothing thinking followed me into adulthood. The older I got, the more isolated I became. I studied alone. I lived alone. I trained alone. I told myself I preferred it that way. And sometimes I did. But mostly, it was easier than risking connection. Friends would come and go, but none of them stuck. I would bond with someone quickly, sometimes intensely, and then without warning, it would all fall apart.

Sometimes it was something small. A conversation that didn’t sit right. A feeling that I wasn’t being prioritized. Other times it was something I couldn’t even explain. Just a shift. A mood. A gut instinct that told me I was about to be left, even when nothing had actually happened yet. Instead of talking about it, I would pull away. Or worse, I would say something sharp. Something that pushed them out before they had the chance to leave on their own.

Female friendships were the hardest. I dated a few women in my twenties, but none of it lasted. The longest relationship I had barely made it past three months. Each time, it followed the same path. Obsession. Idealization. A feeling like I had finally found someone who saw me. Then, something would happen. A comment. A quiet moment. A delay in a text.

That was all it took.

Then came the breakup. The silence. The private unraveling. I would feel embarrassed. Ashamed. Sometimes I would miss them so much it physically hurt, but I was too proud, or too afraid, to say anything. I would move on eventually. But not without building another layer of armor.

My friendships with men weren’t much different. I often saw them as threats, as competition to beat, to out-earn, to outshine with flashier cars and bigger moves. Around other men, I would insist on paying for everything, masking it as generosity when really it was a power play. It looked thoughtful on the outside, but deep down it was rooted in insecurity. I didn’t recognize that pattern until well into my thirties.

Suddenly, I couldn’t see the good anymore. I would fixate on what felt off. I would convince myself they didn’t care. I would spiral. And then the thoughts would turn aggressive. I would hate them in my mind. Degrade them. Call them fake. Tell myself I was better off without them. I didn’t always say it out loud, but it played on a loop in my head.

I was often lonely. But I rarely wanted to be around people. That contradiction lived in me constantly. I craved connection, but I didn’t trust it. I wanted to be seen, but I also wanted control. I believed people would leave the second I showed too much, so I either held back or went all in, too fast, too intensely. Neither approach ever worked.

The pattern repeated itself. Over and over. I would open up. Then panic. Then destroy the thing I had just built. And afterward, I would sit in the ruins, telling myself it was their fault for not understanding me.

It took a long time to admit that I didn’t know how to do connection without preparing for abandonment. I didn’t know how to exist in a relationship without trying to manage every detail of how I was seen. I couldn’t tolerate feeling uncertain, and most of the time, that’s exactly what relationships require.

Connection felt like a performance. And when I couldn’t keep it up, I disappeared.

That’s what it was like for me. Connection. Abandonment. Repeat.

And somewhere in the middle of it all, I convinced myself that being alone was easier. That it hurt less. Even though, deep down, I never stopped hoping someone might stay.

Chapter 3: Borderline

The diagnosis that explained everything and nothing

I got married young. Twenty-three. I was still figuring myself out, but I thought I was ready. By twenty-six, we had our first child. From the outside, it probably looked like a steady life. Marriage. Family. Career. But something had already started to slip under the surface.

There were signs.

People called it depression. Or anxiety. Sometimes ADHD. Labels that sounded common and made sense to everyone, including me. For a while, I believed them. I would fall into dark episodes, usually once a year. Some were mild, others completely took me out. I couldn’t function. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t show up for my life.

Arguments with my wife were often the trigger. And slowly, over the years, those arguments became more frequent. More intense. It wasn’t always about one thing. Sometimes it was small. But the rupture always felt big.

Then came NJ.

He was a coworker of my wife’s. A 2 a.m. message asking for her hotel room number during a work trip. She told me it was nothing, that it was platonic. She tried to prove it. She opened her phone, showed me messages, offered access to her social media. She wanted me to see there was nothing to hide.

But my mind didn’t rest there. I couldn’t stop circling the pieces that didn’t fit. Why send pictures to a platonic friend during a family vacation? Why send him a gift when she struggled to send her best friend a baby shower gift? Why exchange more messages with him than with anyone else?

No matter what she said or did, my brain clung to the possibilities. Every attempt she made to be transparent landed against the wall of my suspicion. I wanted to believe her. I tried. But the questions outlasted the answers. And the more I tried to push them down, the more they grew.

Everything in me started to fracture.

I tore my ACL around the same time. It was devastating. Sports had always been my release. My identity. My way of keeping the chaos inside me from boiling over. Without that outlet, I had nothing left to ground me.

Then came the fights with AW’s friends. They didn’t like me. I could feel it. I started to resent them too. The more they came between us, the more I felt like I was being pushed out of my own marriage.

And then, I lost my job.

It was one of the hardest periods of my life. Emotionally. Financially. Mentally. Everything I relied on fell apart at once. I was stripped down to nothing. I had no sense of worth. No clear future. No stability.

I became angry. Bitter. Suspicious. I never truly recovered from what happened with NJ. My mind kept circling around the same question. What if she leaves me? What if she already has? What if I’m not enough?

That fear fed everything.

I started thinking I needed a backup plan. Someone else. Someone who could make me feel wanted. Someone who could prove I was still lovable. I would bounce between feeling close to AW, to resenting her completely. Then I would seek out validation somewhere else. Then I would crash into guilt and shame.

Then it would start again.

I knew something was wrong with me. Broken. Off. Damaged. I spent years trying to fix it. Psychiatrists. Psychologists. Medication. I filled out every form, answered every question. But no one gave me a clear answer.

Until everything boiled over.

AW and I had another argument. It was about NJ. Boundaries. Trust. The lack of both. And I broke.

That night, I planned to jump from the local bridge. A teenager had done it just the week before, so I knew it was possible. I had done the math. Thought it through. I wasn’t trying to scare anyone. I just wanted everything to stop.

On the way there, I went past the hospital. I don’t know why I stopped. It just felt safer than the bridge. Something in me wanted help. I walked in, thinking maybe I could speak to someone.

I regretted it immediately.

They locked me in a room. No windows. No phone. No shoes. A police officer was stationed outside to make sure I couldn’t leave. They called AW. I curled up in the corner, alone and humiliated.

Later, I told our couples therapist what had happened. She laughed. A quick laugh, almost like a reflex. But it stayed with me. Still does.

Shortly after, I told my individual therapist the full story. She didn’t laugh. She gave it a name. Borderline.

When I told other people, most of them shrugged. They had never heard of it. Our couples therapist winced. She didn’t say much after that.

To me, the diagnosis didn’t bring clarity. It brought confusion. Was this serious? Was this another version of depression? Was this just another label for someone who felt too much and ruined too many things?

I didn’t know what to do with it.

All I knew was that something in me had always felt unstable. That love and fear lived too close together. That connection came with conditions. That I never felt fully safe in my own skin, or in any relationship.

Borderline.

It explained everything and nothing all at once.

Chapter 4: The Lion

Anger, defense, self-destruction

I was sharp. I knew how to fight before I knew how to feel safe. When I felt abandoned, I’d roar so loudly it shattered everything around me. I didn’t know I was scared. I thought I was powerful.

But the truth is, I was unraveling.

The cracks didn’t start with an affair. They started in the quiet moments. When I’d scroll through Instagram and feel a flicker of interest in someone else’s softness. When I’d notice who noticed me. A glance. A comment. A reply that lingered a little too long. It felt harmless at first. A private way to feel wanted. To feel like I still mattered. That I could still spark something in someone.

But those moments weren’t harmless. They were seeds. Tiny, sharp betrayals I told myself didn’t count. Because I hadn’t acted on them. Not really. I was just browsing. Just playing. Just staying one step ahead of rejection.

That’s how I justified the backups.

I never said it out loud, but I kept people in my orbit. Women I could text if things with AW fell apart. Women who reminded me I was still desirable. Still wanted. Still lovable. I told myself I wasn’t cheating. I wasn’t crossing a line. But I was building an escape hatch. Just in case she left. Just in case she stopped loving me first.

And she noticed.

Of course she did. She always noticed more than I thought. Her eyes would narrow when I flipped my phone over at dinner. Her voice would tighten when I got defensive. She’d ask, gently at first, if something was going on. If I was still with her. If I still chose her.

But instead of meeting her with truth, I met her with fury.

I didn’t know how to sit in shame. So I spun. I twisted the story. Accused her of being paranoid. Of not trusting me. Of pushing me away. I said whatever I needed to say to flip the script. To make her feel like the unstable one. Like her intuition was the problem. I gaslit her, not because I didn’t know what I was doing, but because I couldn’t bear to look at myself.

Shame made me cruel. And worse, it made me convincing.

I knew the right tone to take. The right mix of logic and hurt. I weaponized her tenderness. I turned her longing for closeness into evidence that she was too much, too emotional, too sensitive. I made her question what she already knew.

And every time she pulled back, I panicked. Every time she stood her ground, I broke mine.

I couldn’t hold the weight of being wrong. I couldn’t say, “Yes, you’re right. I’ve been pulling away. I’ve been looking elsewhere. I’ve been scared and ashamed and trying to fill a hole I don’t even understand.”

That kind of honesty felt like death.

So I roared instead.

And it worked, for a while. She’d back down. I’d win. But every victory felt emptier than the last. Every argument left us further apart. Every denial took something from me. My integrity. My softness. My ability to show up and say, “I’m afraid.”

Because that’s what it was. Fear. Not power.

I didn’t cheat to hurt her. I didn’t lie to destroy her. I did it all to protect myself from the possibility that I wasn’t enough. That if she really saw me, how insecure, how hollow, how desperate I could be, she’d leave.

But she saw anyway.

And what she saw wasn’t a lion. It was a man afraid of being unloved. A man who would rather burn his marriage to the ground than sit in the quiet and say, “I’m lost.”

And I was.

Chapter 5: The Affair

Months before the affair, I was trying. Really trying.

In individual therapy, we talked about self-esteem. About becoming someone I could find attractive again. Someone AW could be drawn to again. I planned dates. I made space for her to take time for herself. I poured into her, our family, our marriage. I knew we were in trouble, and I wanted to turn us around.

Then came February. The day before Valentine’s Day, AW came back from another work trip. That’s when everything shifted.

She told me she knew our spark was gone. She wanted to relight it. She wanted us in therapy. She wanted to focus on our marriage.

And then, in the same breath, she told me she’d noticed she was attracted to her coworkers. That she enjoyed flirting with them. That one had made an advance on her. She said she rejected him, but I couldn’t hear that part. My mind locked onto the rest, the possibilities, the fear, the anger.

Not long after, she told me she was considering all options, including divorce.

I came undone.

Somewhere in that chaos, I stopped taking my bipolar medication. Cold turkey. No plan. No taper. No call to my doctor. I just stopped.

I still don’t know exactly what that did to me. What I do know is that something in me shifted overnight. My stability was gone. My risk tolerance disappeared. The filter between thought and action vanished.

Then the signs started showing. My spending exploded. Gear. Gadgets. A bike. Things we couldn’t afford and I didn’t really use. It was like I was chasing a version of myself I couldn’t catch, hoping if I found the right thing, I’d finally feel whole.

I didn’t.

I pushed AW away. My tone grew cold, clipped, sharp. Not just with her. With everyone. My kids felt it. My friends felt it. My colleagues felt it.

Then I lost my job.

That’s when the spiral deepened. I kept spending. I kept lying. I kept breaking things that mattered and convincing myself it was survival. I joined dating sites. I searched for validation anywhere I could get it.

And underneath it all, I was still the lamb, terrified, desperate to be held; but I didn’t know how to ask for comfort without hurting someone first.

By the time the affair happened, I barely reacted. Not because I didn’t care, but because I had already stopped believing I was worth saving. I told myself I was gone. Too far gone.

I moved through days dissociated. Numb one moment, panicked the next. Crying in my car, at my desk, in bed. I could barely look at myself in the mirror. I hated who I was becoming, but I couldn’t stop.

And I still don’t know how much of that was me, and how much was the chemical crash I caused when I ripped the medication out of my system.

But I was still accountable.

I had broken trust. I had shattered my family’s safety. And I kept driving the wedge deeper; with every purchase, every sharp word, every lie.

Somewhere in all of it, I kept hoping someone would see past the wreckage to the boy inside. The boy who didn’t want to be scary. The boy who just wanted to feel safe.

But safety doesn’t come from avoidance. And healing doesn’t come from destruction.

The lamb in me knew that. It always did. But the lion had sunk his teeth in, and I didn’t know how to pry them out.

Then a woman I had known before came back into my life. She was part of my community. She knew divorce. She knew pain. She knew abandonment. She felt safe. She felt empathetic. I didn’t care if it was real or just a façade. I was drowning in conflicting emotions, and I clung to her validation.

And from there, the line between survival and betrayal disappeared.

Chapter 6: The Bloodbath

Trying to love while surviving myself

Loving with BPD feels like holding someone in a house that’s always on fire. Sometimes I was the one burning. Sometimes I set the fire. Sometimes, I begged them not to leave while I lit the match.

After the affair, I didn’t soften. I didn’t fall to my knees and reach for repair. I sharpened. I doubled down. I cut everyone around me as deep as I could.

It wasn’t conscious. But it wasn’t accidental either.

There’s something I heard once. A child who doesn’t feel the warmth of their village will burn it down just to feel the heat. That was me. I wanted the pain to be seen. I wanted the world to feel what I felt. The desperation. The disorientation. The scream I couldn’t get out of my body.

I poured gasoline on everything that mattered. And when it caught fire, I stood there with a match in one hand and a look of betrayal on my face like I didn’t know how we got here.

I said things I can never take back. Not just in arguments. In calculated moments of cruelty. I turned everything I knew about AW into weapons. I attacked her heart. Her family. Her story. I used her past as an excuse for my pain. I made her wounds about me.

I wasn’t trying to fix anything. I was trying to win. But there was nothing left to win. Just wreckage.

I turned our home into a war zone. Our kids watched pieces of their parents break off. I thought the lion in me was there to protect. But this lion destroyed. I didn’t want to hurt her. I wanted her to feel what I felt. The powerlessness. The confusion. The shame.

And when she didn’t, when she stayed grounded, I burned hotter.

I was not regulated. There was no tenderness. No curiosity. No breath. My body was a weapon. My shame was volcanic. I needed her to be the villain so I didn’t have to look at myself. I needed to blame her for the pain I was creating. Because the truth, that I had done this, felt unbearable.

There’s this image that lives in me that AW shared. When I’m regulated, I’m a wave. Fluid. Communicative. There’s space to move. To pause. To listen. But when I start to spiral, I turn into a brick wall. Like water hardening on impact. No one gets in. Logic bounces off. Empathy slides down the surface and puddles at my feet. I can’t hear. I can’t be reached. I can’t move.

But inside, I’m still drowning.

I’ve had to face it. The abuse. My abuse. What I did. The way I turned my fear into control. My insecurity into punishment. My grief into rage. It wasn’t always yelling. Sometimes it was silence. Withdrawal. Tone. Dismissiveness. The sharpness that made AW question her own reality. The emotional chaos that made love feel like walking through a minefield.

She didn’t deserve that. My kids didn’t deserve that. No one did.

And still, I kept spilling blood. I wanted everyone to feel the collapse. The decay. The carnage. The unbearable weight of my own shame. But that wasn’t their burden. My friends. My family. My community. They didn’t ask to carry this. But I threw it at them anyway.

The truth is, I didn’t know how to lose without lashing out. I didn’t know how to be ashamed without making someone else feel worse. I didn’t know how to be the one hurting without becoming the one who hurt others.

I hadn’t learned yet that love can’t survive the bloodbath. Not unless someone chooses to stop the bleeding.

And for a long time, I didn’t.

I kept cutting.

And every scar I left behind became a mirror I would one day have to face.

Chapter 7: The Lamb

Vulnerability, softness, and shame

After the storms came the silence. The part of me that curled up and apologized for existing. That whispered, You’re too much. You ruin everything. The lamb never yelled, but it bled.

The second unraveling came quieter. Not less destructive. Just softer around the edges. At first. The roar had already scorched so much. What followed was an ache I didn’t know how to name, and a void I didn’t know how to fill.

After the affair, everything fractured. I moved out. We had separate houses. The savings we once had evaporated. Tens of thousands of dollars in debt piled up after I lost my job. My days were marked by loneliness, isolation, and the echo of a home I no longer belonged to.

My community abandoned me. People I had laughed with, prayed with, coached their children, sat across from at dinner… gone. Some quietly stepped back. Others slammed the door. I tried to rent multiple places, but the wives took AW’s side. They refused to have me near. I was told I wasn’t welcome. I was shunned. Shamed. Literally uninvited from children’s birthday parties because of what I had done.

It was exile.

Meanwhile, AW’s friends surrounded her, protecting her, lifting her up. They introduced her to men. She was transparent about it with me, even telling me how attractive she found them. I don’t know if it was intentional or not, but it landed like a knife every time. A reminder. A twist. Proof that she could replace me.

The lamb was covered in blood. The shame didn’t just linger, it multiplied. I was reduced to the little boy again, scraping for a sliver of validation from a father who never gave it. I searched for it in every interaction. I didn’t care how small the crumbs were. I just needed to feel worth something.

But worth doesn’t grow in exile. It withers. And I was withering fast.

I kept quiet. I kept apologizing. I made myself smaller, thinking maybe if I could be less of a burden, I might be let back in. I thought humility would heal me, but what I was really practicing was disappearance.

The lamb was still alive, but barely.

Chapter 8: Dust and Ashes

Shame, sin, and returning anyway

I didn’t belong there.

That’s what I told myself the first time I walked back into church. My body felt like it didn’t fit the space. Like my skin carried smoke and ash, and everyone around me could smell it. I kept my head down. I couldn’t sing. I could barely stand. The words on the screen blurred behind the weight of everything I had done.

I was the man who had an affair. Who lied. Who gaslit. Who emotionally abused the woman who gave me everything. Who weaponized scripture when it was convenient and abandoned it when it wasn’t. Who spoke like the serpent in Genesis. Twisted. Clever. Laced with charm and poison.

I didn’t feel like the prodigal son.

I felt like Cain.

I had spilled blood. Not with my hands, but with my words. With my tone. With my withdrawal. With my betrayal. I thought of the field. Cain luring Abel out there. The way pain turned to rage, and rage turned to death. I thought of God’s voice afterward, not angry, but haunting. “Where is your brother?”

I imagined God asking me the same thing. Not just with confusion. Not just with grief. But with disappointment too.

“Where is your wife? Where is your family?”

His voice wasn’t soft. It struck like thunder in the hollow of my chest.

“Donato, where are they?”

It wasn’t a question about location. It was about loss. About presence. About absence. About the space between who I claimed to be and what I had done.

“Where are they, Donato?”

And I had no answer. Only silence. Only the echo of everything I had burned.

I threw myself into therapy. Then I added another therapist. Then group DBT. Three hours a day, at least. I met with a psychiatrist who doubled most of my medication. I couldn’t sleep. My appetite disappeared. My nervous system was wrecked. I saw a naturopath, trying to regulate through food, supplements, anything. I joined men’s groups. AA. Support groups. Anything.

I was desperate.

I told one of my therapists that I felt a crushing urgency. I needed to fix it. My marriage. My family. My mind. I needed something, anything, to work. Anything to make it feel less like I had ruined everything beyond repair.

She looked at me, calm and grounded, and said the same thing they all said.

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.

I hated that sentence. At first it sounded hollow. Like something people say when they haven’t scorched their own lives down to the bone. But it stayed with me. It clung to the walls of my mind. It followed me when I was quiet. When I lay awake at 2 a.m. staring at the ceiling. When I looked at the drawings my kids left on the fridge. When I passed the empty space in the bed.

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.

I didn’t want to sit with it. I wanted to crawl out of my skin. But the truth was, I had to. There was no shortcut. No fix. No timeline that would make the reckoning easier.

I had to sit with the pain. The grief. The guilt. The full weight of what I had done. What I had said. Who I had hurt. I had to stop clawing for comfort and sit inside the fire I started.

Regret and reject. Dust and ashes.

That phrase from Job would not leave me. A man brought to ruin. Stripped of everything. Still speaking to God from the middle of the wreckage. Still scraping his wounds with broken pottery. Still holding on.

I was not Job. I had done this to myself. But I understood the dust now. I understood what it meant to sit in it. Not as punishment. But as a beginning.

I wasn’t healed. But I had stopped running.

I sat in the pain.

I sat in the dust.

And I waited to see what might grow there.