A personal account of love, grief, and ambition during an incredibly formative period of my life. Part 1 is about the heartbreak that set everything in motion.
Looking back now, I don’t know how obvious it was to the people around me, to the strangers who met me, or to those who followed what I shared online. Maybe they could see it. Maybe they couldn’t. But when I look back, the internal chaos is impossible to miss.
I was suffering in ways I can barely put into words while simultaneously beginning my journey to becoming a doctor.
When it happened, I was beginning a post-baccalaureate program to complete the coursework I needed to apply to medical school, navigating COVID, juggling 4 different jobs, and trying to make sense of my complicated relationships with my mother and father.
Then my boyfriend abruptly unraveled.
In the weeks leading up to his breakdown, I was buried in organic chemistry, calculus, endless assignments, and taking my first serious steps toward a career in medicine, yet he routinely complained that I wasn’t giving him enough attention. At the same time, he was posting photos with another woman that blurred the line between friendship and something more, prompting friends to ask whether we had broken up.
Then things became even stranger.
After a night of drinking, he walked an hour from the bar to my house at two in the morning, attempting to break in. He repeatedly called and texted, shined lights through my windows, yelled from outside, searched for a spare key, and demanded that I let him sleep on my porch. I refused and told him to leave.
The next day, his father called me and said he had checked himself into a psychiatric hospital.
Despite everything, I would have stayed in his life. Not necessarily as a romantic partner, but as someone who cared about him. I would have kept my distance, if necessary, but I would have remained close by. I genuinely loved him, and, at that point, I really needed him too.
Instead, he ended it all with a bland text message and disappeared.
I went to therapy. I started dating someone new. My therapist reassured me that I would be okay and discharged me after only a few sessions. On the surface, it looked like I was moving forward.
Months later, he sent me a long email. Eventually I called him, and we met in person. During that conversation, he detailed his sexual experiences with various women after our breakup. He boasted that one of them had even sketched a nude portrait of him.
One evening while I was out, 2 years after the initial breakup, I unexpectedly ran into another woman he had been involved with. Somehow he came up in a drunk-girl bathroom conversation, and her reaction to meeting me was immediate.
“Oh my God. You’re THE ex.”
I remember thinking: Why am I still being discussed years after he ended our relationship? Why was he talking about me to women he was casually sleeping with?
I expressed that I still cared for him and she encouraged me to reach out, so I did.
He moved on. I never heard from him again.
The truth is, there is nothing extraordinary about him. But he was my best friend.
We laughed constantly. We understood each other’s humor. We shared a friendship that felt genuine and timeless, and that is the part I will always miss. Some friendships are irreplaceable, even when the relationship surrounding them fails.
Over time, though, my attraction to him faded. His emotional immaturity, poor hygiene, and inability to provide stability slowly eroded any sexual desire I had for him.
When I think back to the beginning, there are things I understand differently now.
Our first date lasted over 8 hours. It unfolded across a perfect July day in Connecticut. Boats, beaches, greens, and gardens. As we were driving, he spotted a piano and instructed me to pull over. I laid down and he played. Being in his presence felt magical.
I liked him. I was attracted to him. But I wanted to take things slowly and be intentional. I was not interested in pursuing a romantic relationship yet because I was still getting to know him.
Instead, he kept pushing me sexually.
As the day shifted into night, he repeatedly exposed his genitals and complained about how uncomfortable his prolonged erection was. I was younger then and less sure of myself. But all my no’s and stop’s never landed. Eventually the pressure became too much, and we had sex.
I remember feeling like I didn’t want to. I still carry shame about that.
As the relationship continued, there were other moments that made me uncomfortable. One memory stands out vividly. We were at his family’s house, upstairs in his bedroom, and he kept demanding that I perform oral sex on him. I became so uncomfortable that I left entirely. Later he apologized and admitted he had crossed a line.
At another point he confessed to me that he had been accused of raping a female classmate in high school, but that the case went nowhere because the DNA evidence was inconclusive.
Toward the end of our relationship, he became interested in restraints and other forms of sexual experimentation. While I was open-minded, I remember one experience where I was physically restrained and suddenly felt panicked. I made him stop.
Looking back, I don’t think I ever truly felt safe with him.
What strikes me most now is how naive I was during that relationship. I never questioned his loyalty. I never looked through his phone. I never felt the need to investigate him.
Meanwhile, he was constantly jealous and monitoring me.
After the breakup, I started connecting dots I had previously ignored. His Instagram following was filled with women whose photos he consistently liked while we were supposedly in a committed relationship. It embarrasses me now. Not because of what it says about me, but because of what it revealed about him.
The friendship was real. The affection was real. But I was carrying too much to see everything clearly.
Most painful of all is realizing that he never truly respected me.
His lack of respect became undeniable in the way he ended the relationship. That is the part that still makes me sick when I think about it. Not the breakup itself, but the cruelty and disregard with which it was handled.
He was comfortable hiding enormous parts of himself. The depression. The suicidal thoughts. The diagnosis of intermittent explosive disorder. Sometimes I wonder whether he was simply very skilled at concealing who he really was, or whether I was too consumed by everything else in my life to fully grasp the gravity of his declining mental health.
There are questions I will never get answers to. There are gaps in the story that I’ve had to make peace with.
While we were together, I had gotten him a remote marketing job through one of my closest friends. After the breakup, he fizzled out from that job and then began working at my other friend’s restaurant, without my knowledge. It felt bizarre. He claimed he didn’t want to be with me, yet he kept positioning himself within my orbit.
After I ran into him at his new restaurant job for the first time, I started working with another therapist and told her about all of this. She was concerned enough to suggest that some of his behavior resembled stalking. She offered to help me file a police report and obtain a restraining order if necessary. She instructed me to check my car for tracking devices and make sure my phone and location services hadn’t been compromised.
I never pursued any of it.
At the time, I told myself everything was fine.
The entire period after the breakup was profoundly confusing. Nothing seemed to make sense. The mixed signals, the strange reappearances, the lingering presence, the lack of accountability.
What I wish most is that he had handled the ending differently.
I wish he had shown empathy. I wish he had shown respect. I wish he had honored the love and friendship we shared.
Instead, he chose a path that left me questioning reality, questioning myself, and navigating the aftermath on my own.
The breakup itself was survivable. A painful but welcome liberation.
It was the cruelty of its execution and the psychological whiplash that followed that left the deepest scars.
