Real Life With Katie Marie

There is a document stored on my computer that I never imagined I would share publicly.

It is eighteen pages long.

It isn’t a journal. It isn’t something I wrote for a blog. It wasn’t written to inspire anyone, teach anyone, or tell a compelling story.

It was written because I was asked to prove what happened to me.

Years after my marriage ended, in the middle of yet another court battle, my ex-husband’s attorney sent discovery asking me to provide specific instances of domestic violence I claimed had occurred during our relationship.

So I started writing.

I worked with my counselor to document everything I could remember. I went back through years of memories, police reports, CPS records, crisis calls, medical records, text messages, emails, and other pieces of a life I had spent years trying to survive—and trying desperately to forget.

Then I put them in chronological order.

I don’t think anyone realized what those eighteen pages would become.

Certainly not me.

What emerged was a painfully colorful story.

Except it wasn’t a story at all.

It was my life.

And there was evidence after evidence that these weren’t simply distorted memories from a bitter divorce or allegations manufactured during a custody battle.

These things happened.

I wrote them down because I had to defend myself.

But somewhere in the process of defending myself, something else began happening.

I began healing.

My mind remembered the facts before I was ready to feel them

There were things I remembered almost clinically.

I knew they happened. I could tell you where we lived, who was there, when the police were called, when we left the house, or when another crisis began.

But remembering that something happened and allowing yourself to feel what happened are two very different things.

For years, I needed to survive.

I had children to raise. Bills to pay. Decisions to make. Crises to manage. A life to rebuild.

There wasn’t always room to fall apart over what had happened.

As I worked through that document with my counselor, I began to understand something about myself:

My mind had been protecting me.

Some things had been filed away as facts because facts were manageable.

Facts could be listed.

Facts could be dated.

Facts could be handed to an attorney.

Feelings were different.

Fear. Grief. Anger. Shame. Confusion.

The realization of how dangerous some moments actually were.

The realization of what my children and I had lived through.

The realization that things I had dismissed as just another bad night were not normal at all.

Those things required safety.

Perhaps my mind knew something I didn’t yet understand:

There would be time to feel it when we were finally safe.

So I wrote.

I remembered.

I cried.

I processed.

And I healed another layer.

But healing didn’t begin with those eighteen pages

It had already been happening.

Slowly. Unevenly. One layer at a time.

Leaving my marriage hadn’t ended the abuse. In many ways, it simply changed form. There were still accusations, conflict, fear, court battles, and circumstances that kept me connected to a cycle I desperately wanted to be free from.

But I was healing anyway.

God was already rebuilding things in me while parts of my life were still being torn apart.

And that matters to this story.

Because I don’t want to tell my story as though there was one moment when everything suddenly became okay.

There wasn’t.

Healing has looked more like God meeting me in one place, and then another, and then another.

Sometimes healing meant understanding something.

Sometimes it meant grieving something.

Sometimes it meant learning a boundary I should have learned years before.

Sometimes it meant recognizing something I had called normal wasn’t normal at all.

And sometimes healing meant finally being safe enough to feel what my mind had once needed to tuck away.

The document showed me something else

When I was living through those years, I rarely experienced them as one continuous story.

There was an incident.

Then an apology.

A crisis.

Then a period of calm.

Drinking.

Sobriety.

Fear.

Hope.

Another incident.

Another explanation.

Another promise that maybe this time would be different.

There was always a reason.

Addiction.

Mental illness.

Stress.

Grief.

Trauma.

A difficult season.

And there were good times too.

That’s important.

The person I loved wasn’t horrible every moment of every day. There were reasons I loved him. There were reasons I hoped. There were reasons I stayed.

So I kept looking at individual moments.

But when I was forced to put those moments beside one another—year after year, incident after incident—something changed.

I could see what I hadn’t been able to see while standing inside of it.

The pattern.

And that’s one of the reasons I have decided to share this.

Maybe you’re standing inside a pattern you can’t see yet

Maybe you keep explaining things away.

Maybe every incident has a reason.

Maybe the person you love is wonderful most of the time.

Maybe there are apologies and promises and really good days between the terrible ones.

Maybe the word abuse feels too big for what you’re experiencing.

Maybe you think someone else’s story is worse.

Maybe you’re spending so much time trying to understand why someone behaves the way they do that you’ve stopped asking what their behavior is doing to you.

I understand.

For years, I couldn’t see the whole thing because I was standing too close to it.

And I don’t share that with shame anymore.

I share it because maybe someone else needs permission to step back and look at the whole picture.

For years, I had to tell this story as evidence

Police reports.

CPS investigations.

Counseling offices.

Courtrooms.

Legal filings.

Discovery.

Again and again, the question seemed to be some version of:

Can you prove it?

I don’t want to spend the rest of my life proving that something terrible happened to me.

I want to understand what happened.

I want to understand what it did to me.

I want to understand why I overlooked things that seem so obvious when I read them now.

I want to understand what trauma did to my brain, my body, my relationships, my parenting, my decisions, and my faith.

And I want to talk about what happened after survival.

Because those eighteen pages tell you what happened to me.

They don’t tell you what God did with it.

They don’t tell you about the woman He began uncovering beneath years of survival.

They don’t tell you about forgiveness.

Boundaries.

Purpose.

Community.

Calling.

The things He taught me in places I never would have chosen to go.

Or the ways some of the experiences I once desperately wanted to erase have become the very experiences God has used to help me see and understand someone else.

Those are the parts of the story I want to tell now.

Soon, I’m going to share those eighteen pages.

But before I do, there are two things I want you to understand.

Healing didn’t wait until everything was over.

And forgiveness didn’t mean everything was restored.

Those are stories of their own.

For years, I had to tell this story as evidence.

Now I’m ready to tell it as testimony.