I felt like a princess trapped in a cage of my own creation.

My obsession with wanting to be perfect pushing everyone away.

I had gone to prom alone, never had an official boyfriend, was rarely asked out.

I was painfully shy with a growing suspicion that I was somehow defective. I saw the girls around me flirting and was puzzled at how they could talk to guys so casually, how they were in relationships even if they were a little insecure…

There was something about me that kept men at bay…

I always wondered, why was I so repulsive to the masculine?
I was pretty, I was smart, I was adventurous. Was that not enough?

And then I met him. I was 20. He was 12 years older.

A relationship laced with lies and fueled by cocaine and poetry.

The only man that every pursued me. I lived behind an energetic stone wall, he was the only one who dared to pierce it.

Tall, well-read, tattooed, with a flair for theatrics that tantalizingly contrasted my uptight & controlled upbringing.

A wild, abused and abandoned Aquarius who had a way with words and a generosity with drugs.

A soon to be dad with multiple exes and womanizing ways.

Our first night he disclosed he had slept with over 200 women. Somehow this did not turn me away… his honesty and rawness was alluring.

I felt something for the first time with him. Like a princess escaped from her castle, i finally got a taste of all that I had been warned against.

Like Jasmine but with a drug dealing Aladdin.

Adventures into the early hours of the morning, white nights and blackouts, cigarettes and alcohol and dance parties and drug deals.

The thrill and anxiety i feel is the only clue I that I’m alive. I never knew where he would take us. Although I could expect we’d be journeying through the underbelly of the city.

The first time we have sex… I make it a point to wait til he officially breaks up with his then girlfriend, the one he said he’d been ending things with for months. A dirty cheap motel. I feel so ashamed and lost, I don’t dare say anything.

Me, coming from an ocd home, pristine and perfect, hiding the mental illness that lurked beneath the surface.

What was I doing here within these moldy walls and scratchy sheets? Did I not deserve better?

A straight A student, an introverted shy girl, a lover of fashion and dance and literature and philosophy, albeit I was too socially anxious to pursue my passions, weighed down by expectations that I would end up with a respectable high paying job and husband.

And here I was. At an Econolodge motel.

Fast forward a few weeks. I’m waiting in the cab outside his last drug delivery of the night. I text him on my pink flip phone. He says to wait, he’ll be 5 minutes. This goes on for 90 as the meter keeps rising. I have no cash to pay the driver and these were the days where credit cards weren’t a thing in taxis yet.

Infuriated and ashamed, I run out of the cab in the twilight at 5am on Avenue Du Parc, determined to make the 40 minute trek home before my parents wake up.

The cab driver following me, offering to drive me free of charge… my unworthiness and pride not able to receive help from the masculine even in my lowest moment. I stomp and cry the whole way home, feeling defeated and vowing to never speak to him again.

No word for a week, and then a text. He has no recollection. I tell him the story, he laughs and half apologizes. He has a way to make things light when he’s sober, to convince me he is the victim in all this, highlighting that growing up I had everything he didn’t, namely parents and security, and that it wasn’t his fault he was this way.

It’s like he got off on destroying all that was pure and bright. Like I symbolized all he resented in the world and that by hurting me he was getting payback at the universe.

I left the convo confused and somehow feeling guilty, like I had done something wrong.

This was how it went on. And on and on.

I felt locked in, unable to leave. Not that I wanted to. He had me hooked. The highs were so high and the lows? The lows felt familiar.

My first addiction.

And my initiation to meeting the deepest darkest parts of myself, these parts that would later become my superpowers…

& how I have become this free, multifaceted woman you see over on my IG today, capable of deep love and embodied feminine expression, capable of asking for support and receiving from the masculine, capable of guiding and holding women in their transformation and liberation, capable of loving ALL of me and all of you.

xo

Sabrina

Ps. Part 2 coming soon…
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Part 1: I tried to be perfect but ended up dead inside instead.