This space is my personal blog. I use it in a professional capacity to write and post photos for client photography work, as well, but my dream as early as 2006 when I was pregnant with my first child was to have a blog like the blogs I read written by other moms in similar phases of life.
As such, sometimes I write about extremely personal topics.
I have never written a piece more personal than what follows.
This open letter is not going to make sense to many of you in my audience, and that is okay. I am writing it directed toward one person in particular even knowing that person may never, ever read it. I am putting these words out in the universe not for him, but as a continuation of my own healing journey.
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****Edited to add, on Tuesday, January 21, 2025: Everywhere I use the word love in reference to you, Bill, in this post: it is far more accurate to substitute the phrase “deeply entrenched trauma bond” in the place of “love.” It has taken me 45 years of my life to understand the difference between the two. Thank you, Jared.****
Bill: You know, I meant everything I said to you during those last two meetings on December 4 and December 5 of 2024, and I meant every word I said to you in that very last text we exhanged.
To my dying day, I will always love you. It’s just who I am.
I would not have been interested in a romantic relationship with you in 1998 had you been honest about your age and your previous marital status. You didn’t give me the courtesy of that honesty, however. I know because I remember: at the time, I really only wanted to be involved with someone who hadn’t ever been married before.
I would have been interested in being friends with you. Being friends was clearly what I was interested in with you prior to that first breakup with Steve in September of 1998, when I broke up with him to see you in what I assumed would be a mutually exclusive capacity. And, Bill: friendship came so easily with you in the beginning of our knowing one another. I felt instant connection with you.
Our moment of meeting was a red flag that I know now that I missed. When I walked into the fitness center at the GSU Village the night before classes began in the Fall of 1998, you looked up from your stationary bike as I walked in the door like I was someone you knew, and you were very obviously glad to see me. In hindsight, this felt like a red flag to me.
I know now that men who are truly gentlemen interested in a relationship with a woman don’t behave or look at women that way: as if the woman in question is an object to be conquered, which is how I know now that you saw me in that specific moment.
You were wrong on December 5, 2024, though, about one very specific thing.
You asked if I thought I was naive when we met on that Thursday morning in December of last year. I wouldn’t phrase it in terms of being naive, so to speak. The very term “naive” connotes a negative deficit of some sort, as if to insinuate that I was somehow lacking something in my core being when I was 18 years old.
Despite the fact that I had been in a manipulative romantic relationship for quite some time in 1998, I wanted to see the good in everyone in college. I still do want to see the good in everyone today.
So, the good in you— your capacity, the potential I saw in you, the good that is actually truly there, to this day— that good is what I chose to see in you, Bill, in the years that I knew you: I chose to trust that potential I saw might become reality at every turn in our relationship.
Part of my response to you between the years of 1998 and 2003 and the years of aftermath of our relationship was a reaction based from my own codependent tendencies, I know now.
My approach to our relationship was not based in naivety, however. You were right on December 5, 2024: I was not naive in 1998.
You were wrong, though, when you stated that you thought I was not naive because of the way Steve had treated me previous to my meeting you. Manipulation in another relationship is never grounds for mistreatment in subsequent relationships.
The approach my Jared has brought to our sacred marriage and relationship is an example of how to care for vulnerable women who have experienced manipulation in previous relationships. What you saw as an opportunity for exploitation when you met me was a missed opportunity for growth, for you.
And: I was under the impression in 1998 that you had no way of knowing how Steve had treated me for the previous three and a half years.
My responses to you were, in part, influenced by past experiences with men in my life. Due to various experiences in my early childhood, I was vulnerable to predatory behavior.
My vulnerability, however, is in no way a reflection of who I am or my determination to seek out good in the world. Nor is my desire to I see some good in everyone I meet in any way a weakness, at all.
Choosing to seek out the good in the world— the love in the world— is who I am and that is my superpower. It is not some weakness, as the negative association of the term “naive” might suggest.
Furthermore: even with the knowledge that you engaged in predatory behaviors toward me…
Bill, I do not regret a single minute I spent with you, or a single moment of the time and energy I directed toward trying to cultivate a relationship with you. I do not even regret the years I spent depressed in the aftermath of our relationship, or the terror I felt due to being afraid of men each time I gave birth to three male children in part due to my experiences with you, or whatever detours in my professional and academic lives that might have happened due to your previous presence in my life.
I am grateful to know you, Bill. I am grateful for the role you have played in my life.
I am no longer afraid of men. I am no longer afraid of much of anything in my life. I am focused on my self-care. I am focused on nurturing my precious marriage with Jared. I am focused on caring for my beautiful, wondeful, intelligent, kind, funny, and curious children. I will continue the writing practice I began when I was eight years old. I am a fantastic photographer. I am focused on building the legacy I was always meant to build: a legacy of trying to leave the world a little bit of a better place than the way it was when I came into this world in 1979.
In summation: while I did not deserve the suffering I have experienced at your hands, I did receive the gift of compassion for others— and myself— out of the experiences that I have shared with you.
Even with all that has transpired between us, Bill, I am so very grateful to know you. I am grateful for every minute that we spent together. I am grateful for what I learned from you. I am grateful for what little bit I absorbed by osmosis about the law from being around you during your last two years of law school. I am even grateful for the coerced intimacy over those five years we were intimate because I learned to understand what feels good to me. Most of what happened with you did not feel good to me.
And, through it all, I do love you. There will never be a day that passes in my lifetime that the thought of you won’t pass through my brain in some capacity. I meant it with my whole heart when I told you in that last text to you on January 4 of this year that I wish love for you, and that I wish you all the best with regard to your health issues.
And, our relationship in the future will be exclusively on my terms, now.
And finally: thank you, Bill. Thank you for these experiences. I credit my experiences with you for my own ability to cultivate my inner strength enough to find my true voice in this world.
