My ex-fiancé dropped an album about us after ending our engagement via email; available on Spotify, Apple Music, and everywhere else a man’s “my ex is toxic” soundtrack gets plays. Nearly two years into my recovery from our breakup, I opened my apps to see it waiting like a consolation prize, titled after a saying my estranged father used to tell me — his final breach of my trust. Our story culminated in 12 songs, with 7 indirectly directed at me. Jarring, yes. 

I’m never dating another creative again. It requires humility to admit the person whose heart you broke inspired you to the point of defining your art. My ex constructed his album around confronting me and erasing me in the same breath: a narrative that indicts you and denies you is harder to stop hearing. His lines felt inescapable, even in my MFA literature seminar. 

We were reading Jamie Hood’s criticism of Molly by Blake Butler, a memoir in which Butler unravels his marriage to poet Molly Brodak, who died by suicide. I considered how only one person can tell this story, and thought — who controls the version that’s deemed real?

Hood critiques Butler’s portrait of a vindictive, explosive Brodak. Until the final pages, the author leaves out that he believes himself to be a victim of his wife’s abuse, but no one questions how Butler arrives at this framing. 

Men are permitted to expose narratives about women that women are condemned for divulging about men. The former is processing heartbreak and trauma. The latter is seeking revenge, as women do. Code for melodramatic liars. Drake fills his albums with lines about every woman he has ever romantically encountered and he’s sensitive and complex. Beyoncé grieves her husband’s infidelity and she’s a cold-hearted bitch exposing his flaws to the world.

That day in seminar unearthed a secret. I’d written my own account, a window into my pandemic-era loneliness, my non-existent relationship with my troubled parents, and how my ex-lover and I were so desperately lonely we clung to anyone or anything. Desperation tethers you in ways that make clarity harder to reach.

The essay began as a thought exercise. I submitted one for peer review on the rise of Labubus instead. Talking about plastic tchotchkes, I could do. Him? No, thank you. A classmate — a woman — maybe sensed this resistance when she ended her feedback with, “I love your work, but I still feel like you’re holding back.” She was right. Ouch.

A man no longer relevant to my life stirred such fear of judgement in me, it limited my ability to process with myself honestly. What would his parents, whose opinions once held weight, say if I published an unflinching version of my ordeal with their son? Grappling with inauthenticity felt safer than facing the imagined fallout.

Women are expected to dismiss their perceptions as emotion, to practice unwavering empathy, to live through someone else’s lens.

I had explored my relationship in my work before, mostly writing to a nebulous “you” with vague faults, keeping my ex unnamed. I blurred him because excavating directly felt like a vulnerability hangover. I vilified myself how the manosphere might. “Of course, I’m the vindictive ex writing about her past relationship because she can’t let go, calling it toxic because she’s a woman scorned. Just like any other woman with nothing more interesting to say, nothing more interesting to write about.” My classmate knew. 

Battling internalized misogyny is an invisible tax of womanhood. Women are expected to dismiss their perceptions as emotion, to practice unwavering empathy, to live through someone else’s lens. I refused myself the right to my version of the truth long enough. So I went for it, and it felt like air, like grasping for honesty from a liar and finally getting it. From the essay sprouted a book outline and, slowly but surely, a manuscript is forming. 

I still feel guilty for handing over a narrative that’s already out there. I wrestle with that unwavering empathy — the intuitive reaction to consider how my ex might feel reading my rendition of our life together. Hell, I wonder what emotions would come up if he stumbled across even this essay while stalking my Instagram. (Of course he stalks my Instagram. It’s breakup 101.)

Women are conditioned to maintain narratives that strip us of agency, to allow ourselves to be background. We’re deterred from accusation, confrontation, and anything that resembles standing up for ourselves. I was only permitted to inspire the lyrics, not sing the song. Writing this memoir terrifies me and publishing this essay feels dangerous. But he got to release his version. I’ll be damned if I’m struck from the record.