A year ago today, I was sitting in Legally Blonde: the Musical with 14 of my closest friends and family celebrating my last few days of being single.  Little did any of my girls know that I was silently questioning whether or not this was what I wanted.  I was lost.  I had a blog that I updated constantly, and because no one really read it, no one could see that I was slowly losing the motivation to move to the next part of my life.

For those of you who don’t know, I was supposed to be married on September 12, 2009.  He and I were together for 9 years, and our wedding day would have been 10 years of being together.  On August 20, 2009, after all of the invitations were sent and RSVPs were already flooding in, I walked out of my dream of having 5 kids and a family, and broke up with him for good. 

In July 2008, I feel like I forced him to marry me, and I never forgave myself for that.  I confronted him, gave him an ultimatum, and in a month we were engaged.  By March 2009, my cold feet had become a serious cause for concern.  It’s funny because people still wonder and ask me why we broke up.  I would give really superficial answers because I couldn’t even accept for myself why I did it.  But for the past year, I have been dealing with the real reason why I broke up with him.  I spent nine years of my life enduring physical and mental abuse that no one should ever have to endure.  I realized much later after the break up that I lived in fear of his reactions.  I picked my battles because I was afraid of the battle.  I spent good years of my life thinking that I couldn’t leave this relationship because I was ugly and no one but he could love me.  I spent more good years believing in my heart that he didn’t want to marry me, and that he was waiting for a better, more beautiful, less crazy woman to come along. 

But because I hadn’t realized this until much later, for months after the break up, I was riddled with guilt and shame.  I drowned my feelings of anger and sadness with alcohol and went into an unhealthy state of denial.  It wasn’t until I began to reconnect with old friends, particularly those who had also gone through break ups, that I began to regain my footing. 

So here it is.  That’s why I am the way I am.  Even if he is completely out of my life, I am still not comfortable telling people about what happened to me, and that has caused a little bit of an implosion.  This infection surfaces as a need for attention:  ridiculous Tweets/ status updates, garish behavior, and impulsivity.  Layer that on top of a lifetime of abuse by men in romantic relationships, and you have a concoction that is the makeup of Christina Chun.  The last person that I fell for (and coincidentally the first date I ever had), I told him that I was afraid of the way I was feeling, and now I understand why: I know that I was afraid because I did not completely trust myself to protect my heart.  After spending nine years of your life not protecting your heart, it is difficult to allow anyone in without fear.  

And I won’t deny that these next few weeks are going to be tough.  In the past year, I went from self destructive to reconstructive; I began to redefine who I was and what I believed.  People are noticing a sparkle in my eye and a genuine smile.  When people notice that I lost weight, I count it as a victory not because of standards of beauty, but I know that I am shedding years of pain.  I am working on myself from the inside out.  But in retrospect, I realize that this process is going to take much more than a year of reflection and organic foods to heal completely.  My band aids are becoming less frequent, and I’m at the point of my life where I am beginning to get comfortable with exposing the wounds and allowing them to heal appropriately.  However, the wounds are clearly still fresh, and without proper care, they will begin to fester and infect me permanently.  I’m done… I’m sure that I will have more to say as we get closer to September.  Thank you to those of you who have been a part of my journey encouraging me to heal.