My first love: It takes two to tango

Dear beautiful, awesome peeps!

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This is the story of my first love. Even though I knew this story was long dormant within me, I had the most resistance in tackling it, because I was dreading going back to the… underworld. My body even physically reacted as it was hard to get some sleep this month, normally sleeping like a baby, and got a couple of zits, revisiting all of this. Ahh, just like old times!

Quite frankly, this is some real low-vibrational shit.

It is 28 pages, as it spans over almost a decade of: dysfunction, trauma, healing, and personal reflections and insights. (I also finally learned that you can actually attach a PDF, so instead of breaking my newsletter into parts, please find the complete story attached below, premium subscribers!)

Had I written this story 7 years ago— I wouldn’t have. I would’ve been too embarrassed and ashamed to even speak about it, which is why it took me almost three years to do so, in therapy. My belief was that I deserved everything, as all my journal entries from this time state. I deserved all of it. I also felt wildly alone in my experience.

Had I written this 4 years ago— I would’ve been fucking pissed, vengeful, and out for blood, finally having gone to therapy. Realizing what I experienced would later be classified as psychological, emotional, and physical abuse, it would’ve been easy to just point all the fingers at one person. Absolutely annihilate this person’s reputation, and publicly, too.

Today, 9 years later, I’m waving my white flag, it takes two to tango. It was important for me to write about this in the way that I have: I’m calling myself out, exposing my own past dysfunction, toxicity, as well as the other parties involved. This past version of myself was ugly. I am lucky to have outgrown her, but also lucky to finally to look back with compassion. She was hurting. He was hurting. We were all hurting. But let me be clear: no one deserves abuse.

It is very scary to let you see my ugliness, but it’s the truth. And what am I, if not a truth-teller?

Please email me, I’d love to hear from you!

Enjoy,
Amy Lee

P.S. If you or anyone you know is experiencing an abusive relationship, please check out joinonelove.org for resources.

Word count: 19,633
Pages: 28

 Glowin’ Reviews from Glowin’ Readers

Free excerpt from Hell on Hobart Blvd.

“All lives matter!” He shouted. Another tempestuous fight breaking out in my favorite place, the car.

“If you say that, you’re a part of the PROBLEM!” I was blowing up like a volcano. We were discussing recent events of the shooting deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile in July and the movement of #BlackLivesMatter as a response. Having just graduated from UCLA with the freedom to have studied whatever I pleased, I took the liberty to take many political and social science classes on the intersections of race, social justice, disability, feminism, and LGBTQ+ history. While I’d always been passionate about human rights and social causes even as a little kid, the social justice warrior, a pejorative Internet term, in me was more impassioned than ever before.

I was not only “woke” but I was also very, very angry at 22 years old. 

Vladimir*, on the other hand, detesting school and the institution of education as a whole, had studied hospitality at a local Ukrainian college, solely under the wishes of his father, who was a well-known chef. Therefore, he was uneducated in that traditional sense, but especially in regards to American politics. I often spent a lot of time explaining the systemic issues in our country, while he often regarded America as this progressive utopia, compared to the dysfunction of his home country.

He often had a massive chip on his shoulder. It fucking pissed me off! And it pissed him off— that I didn’t sympathize.

“You’re 6’3”, white, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, what fucking struggles could you possibly have! Stop feeling so sorry for yourself!” I’d scold him. “Get a JOB!”

He’d often threaten to walk out of the car when I drove, but never actually did it. This time, he furiously ripped off his seat belt, picked up his backpack off the ground, and unlocked the door and walked right out of the car— in the middle of a highway during late afternoon.

Luckily, we were in pretty heavy traffic, most cars not going faster than 30mph, but it scared the shit out of me. As he weaved in between moving cars, I started screaming for him to get back inside. We were indubitably causing a scene. Eventually, I changed lanes to follow him off the highway ramp, where I convinced him to get back in.

Any time he would bring up the violence of Ukrainian history, I didn't want to hear it. “What could Ukrainians be going through that’s as bad as a history of slavery and systematic incarceration! They’re white! You’re not black or [any other person-of-color] in America, Vladimir!” I was also pissed because my parents were Korean immigrants and worked their asses off and never walked around with a “woe-is-me” mentality. We put our heads down, trying our best to be motivated by the opportunities and possibilities America offered us.

You came all this way, now let’s get to building this damn “American Dream” (Horatio Alger myth) and stop watching Netflix, spoke my inner just-another-cog-in-the-capitalist-machine “Girl Boss” raging self.

Slowly but surely, he’d sit me down to watch Ukrainian documentaries and videos on its history. He opened my eyes up to its atrocious long battles and struggles with Russian imperialism. I would end up crying at the end of the documentaries like Winter on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom. As a shallow consolation, we went to Traktir in West Hollywood to eat his favorite Ukrainian food. Unfortunately, as a huge lover of culture and food, it wasn’t my cup of tea, either, which didn’t help to ameliorate much.

He always said in Ukraine, life was short, you grew up fast, so that’s why you had to hold on tight. He was here in the States under political asylum, his parents toiling away in his homeland to give him a better life. He told me he wouldn’t be able to physically see his parents for an indefinite amount of time, and most likely would never live with them, again. The pain of being so far away from home and his family often ate away at him— I felt it during his daily FaceTime calls with them, the only connection to be made, oceans apart. But instead of sympathizing, I weaponized my own toxic political beliefs and ideologies as a way to cruelly invalidate him. I argued that just because of the way he looked, he had far more opportunities than most in America. That he was not allowed to feel the way he did. Though the former claim may not have been false, the latter claim was. 

I’ll be the first to say it— I was an ignorant, dumb bitch. 

In 2022, six years later, when the full scale Russian invasion of Ukraine occurred and took global precedence, I’d eat my own fucking words.

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