When I started thinking about what I had lost through everything that happened with Jerry, the losses were pretty easy to name. Trust in him. A relationship that mattered to me. Some memories that mean something different now. The confidence that what I knew about him was enough to make informed choices about my own life.
What I have not lost is harder to put into a list, mostly because the important things were already there long before Jerry ever was.
By the time I met him, I had spent years figuring out who I was, what mattered to me, what belonged to me and what did not. I did this in many ways: through therapy, recovery, complicated family relationships, grief, friendship, community, mistakes, repair, and a lot of ordinary life. Healing has been far from an easy or predictable process, and it certainly hasn’t been linear. I also spent plenty of years angry, resentful, hurt, frustrated, grieving, and carrying things I did not yet know what to do with. For much of my life, I believed that I would carry some resentments for the rest of my life. I do not think any of that means I was doing life badly. It means I was living it.
A lot of the work was learning that pain, even the hurt that lives deep inside, does not have to make me smaller.
I knew that before Jerry. I knew I could be disappointed by another person without turning their choices into a judgment about my worth. I knew I could love or care about someone and still have boundaries. I knew I could be wrong about something without being wrong as a person. I knew I could survive a relationship changing or ending and still recognize that it had mattered.
That was part of why I was willing to take risks with Jerry in the first place. I was not operating under some illusion that another person could never hurt me. Letting people matter always carries that possibility. I just knew that if I got hurt, I would still be me.
And I already knew that I had not gotten there by myself. So much of the ways I came to know myself happened through other people. People have loved me, trusted me, challenged me, disappointed me, been disappointed in me, forgiven me, gotten angry with me, laughed with me, encouraged me, and told me things about myself I did not necessarily want to hear. Some people have known me for decades. Others were part of my life for a much shorter time. Some probably knew they were giving me something important. Others may have no idea that something about knowing them still stays with me.
I have received an enormous amount of generosity in my life, and I have always tried to remain aware of that. I have been fortunate to have people who helped me see things in myself that I could not have seen alone. Some reflected back things I was proud of. Some helped me see things I needed to change. Both matter in both similar and different ways.
Knowing the good has made it easier to face the bad. If someone tells me I hurt them, I do not have to immediately decide either that I am terrible or that they must be wrong. I can listen and I can reflect and think about it. I can figure out what belongs to me and what does not. I can make amends, apologize or change something when I need to. I can also disagree without needing to make the other person ridiculous, malicious, or less worthy in order to protect myself. I won’t pretend these are easy things to do or that I do them perfectly all the time. Of course they aren’t and of course I don’t, which is the point. I will always keep trying.
That ability to hold a fuller picture of myself was already there when I met Jerry, and so was my ability to hold a fuller picture of other people. I can be furious with someone and still care about them. I can think something they did was unacceptable without deciding that everything about them is bad. I can want accountability and still hope their life gets better. I can decide someone cannot be part of my life and still recognize that they matter as a person. I am very glad I have not lost that.
I also have not lost my willingness to give people the benefit of the doubt. I did that with Jerry quite a few times and was very honest with him that this idea is important to me. When there was more than one reasonable way to understand something, I often chose the more generous interpretation. I do not regret it.
I have more information now and there are things I now understand differently. With the information I have now I would ask different questions and evaluate risk much differently.
But I do not want being deceived to teach me that suspicion is wisdom.
I still want to approach people in good faith. I still want to leave room for someone to be imperfect, inconsistent, confused, forgetful, struggling, or simply human without immediately assuming the worst possible explanation. If someone uses that room to deceive me, that tells me something about what they did. It does not make generosity itself a mistake.
I have not lost my curiosity either. I still want new experiences. I still want intimacy and adventure. I still want to know people deeply and let them know me. I still want to be surprised.
And I definitely have not lost my sexuality. Jerry did not ruin sex for me. He did not ruin kink. He did not make me afraid of desire or afraid of my body. There are things I discovered through experiences with him that I am genuinely glad to know about myself, and I have continued exploring them with more knowledge, more communication, and more choice.
Jerry gets to be part of that story because he was there. He mattered. Some things happened because we knew each other, and I do not need to erase that in order to be honest about everything else. But he was never the source of the person who was open enough to explore those things in the first place.
He did not give me my compassion or my curiosity. He did not give me my capacity to care deeply, my willingness to trust, my sense of autonomy, or my ability to ask for help. He did not give me the ability to hear hard things about myself without collapsing into shame. He did not teach me that I could let another person matter without making that person responsible for who I was.
Those things were already part of the life I brought to him.
That does not mean nothing changed. Of course things changed. I learned things. I had experiences I had never had before. I met people I would not otherwise have met. There are things in my life now that were not there before Jerry, and I am glad for some of them. But that is different from saying the experience created the things that have allowed me to live through it.
The important things were already there. That is why, when I eventually learned how much Jerry had kept from me, I could question a great deal about him without having to question everything about myself. I could be deeply hurt without deciding that caring made me foolish. I could be angry without needing anger to become my entire relationship to him. I could grieve without believing grief meant I wanted him back. I could learn that I had trusted someone who had not given me all the information I needed without deciding that trusting people had been a mistake.
None of that made the experience easy. It still hurt. I am still processing parts of it. There are things I circle back to and things that still make me angry or sad or completely baffled. But being hurt is not the same thing as being diminished. I still care deeply. I still trust myself, and I am still willing to trust other people. I still want intimacy, sex, adventure, curiosity, friendship, community, and connection. I still believe people can change. I still know how to ask for help. I still know that I became who I am through years of work and through being loved, challenged, supported, corrected, and known by other people.
I have gained things since knowing Jerry and I would not deny that. That belongs in another journal.
What matters here is that the things I needed in order to live through this without becoming smaller were not things Jerry gave me, and they were not things I discovered because he hurt me.
I’ve known the whole time I already had them.