The Surface I Fought For

How I learned to breathe again beneath the weight of him.

He had expressed a desire for me to do a boudoir shoot for years.
However, due to deeply internalized body dysmorphia shaped by evangelical teachings around modesty and purity, I lacked the capacity to view myself through a lens of self-acceptance or autonomy.

At a deeper level, I held rigid beliefs about sexuality, specifically, that using sex toys was infidelity. These beliefs were rooted in religious conditioning and a limited framework around consent and pleasure.

In retrospect, I recognize that my former partner exhibited patterns consistent with sex addiction: compulsive, secretive, and high-risk behaviors that repeatedly placed me in unsafe situations, without my informed consent or awareness.

I worked hard and managed to save $1,500, enough to finally book a boudoir session. It was meant to be his birthday gift.
In my mind, it wasn’t just a present; it was the golden ticket, the thing that might finally heal him, fix the frayed wires between us.

I needed him to drive me. That’s all. Just a ride to the session.
But it meant he had to shut down his video game, rally five kids, and sit in the van for forty-five minutes.
And that was enough to unleash his unholy portal of demons.

The yelling. The weaponized silence. The disgusted looks. The “how dare you”s.
Inside, I could feel myself folding. Shame rising, fast and familiar.
My body tightened the way it always did when I sensed the mood shift, like I had summoned his monsters by simply existing.

I opened the passenger door to step out, the sound of toddlers crying echoing from the backseat.
I knew what would follow.
The kids wouldn’t be fed. The ones still in diapers wouldn’t be changed.
They’d stay in their pajamas, or end up naked, while he stayed locked in front of Apex Legends, disappearing into respawns and kill counts.

I was disappearing too. Not in a game, but in real life.

When an individual lives in a constant state of survival, the nervous system adapts by entering autopilot, prioritizing safety through appeasement of the perceived threat, often the abuser.

In this state, personal needs, boundaries, and core values are routinely suppressed, as the focus shifts entirely to minimizing harm and ensuring short-term survival.

I was trying to uncover the person beneath the shell of the ghost I had become, haunted within my own home and marriage.

I didn’t just wear lingerie in those photos.
I stripped down, physically, trying to offer something raw enough, real enough, to be worthy of his love. Each frozen frame captured the hunger I carried, the ache to please him, to be enough.

I left my phone on silent in the waiting area of the studio.
During breaks between poses, I checked it.

The screen was flooded with notifications, an escalating stream of texts and missed calls from the person who was supposed to love me for life.

His messages were a mix of hostility, blame, and logistical demands:

“You fucking selfish bitch.”
“I don’t know what to do with your kids.”
“You don’t clean enough.”
“You’re not allowed to do this ever again.”
“What’s for supper?”
“I can’t find their clothes.”
“What am I supposed to feed them?”

Eventually, a final message appeared:
“I am NOT coming to pick you up. You can find your own way home!”

My makeup, professionally applied that morning, began to smear as I read his words.

This kind of messaging is a textbook example of emotional abuse, more specifically, coercive control.
It’s not just about being mean or reactive; it’s about domination through psychological warfare.
The mix of verbal assaults (“selfish bitch”) with manipulative panic (“What am I supposed to feed them?”) is meant to disorient me, to keep me tethered to his emotional volatility.

When you live in survival mode long enough, your nervous system adapts.
It learns to brace for impact, and when messages like this come flooding in, it doesn’t matter if you’re in lingerie at a photoshoot or trying to reclaim your sense of self, your body still reads it as danger.
Your heart races. Your jaw tightens. You freeze, fawn, shut down.

The shame rushes in fast, like a reflex.
Suddenly, you're not a woman in control of her story.
You’re back to being the problem.

The selfish one.

The bad mom.

The burden.

This is what emotional abuse does: it trains you to believe that wanting something for yourself is criminal activity.
It teaches you that your autonomy comes with consequences.
Even when you try to reclaim it, even when you're doing something brave and healing, it finds a way to punish you for it.

I was caught in a perfect storm, seeing my body through a new lens for the first time, captured in photographs I barely recognized as me, while internally unraveling.
Beneath the surface, I was trembling with fear over what consequences the evening might hold, panicking as I scrambled to find a way home.

It was all colliding at once: transformation, terror, and isolation.
And once again, I had to hold it all together, manage the chaos without a single misstep, without letting it show.

An acquaintance drove from Fort Saskatchewan with their kids in tow, crossing nearly an hour of city to reach me on the west end.
I broke down as they kept the van steady, driving me straight into the heat of his waiting wrath.
My phone was already burning in my lap, scorched by the messages he kept sending.

“Does he have his medication?” they asked gently.

I didn’t know. Maybe? It was his responsibility, but I was the one who handed them to him every morning - like his mother.

They told me to call the pharmacy where his prescription was on file, to beg for a week’s supply, not because it was my duty, but because without it, the fallout would land on me.

It was another quiet form of coercion: manage his needs, anticipate his demons, and absorb the cost.

As we curved off the highway and neared the city limits, I found my voice through the rising panic.
I told the pharmacist what I was walking into - the danger, the unpredictability, the possibility of the end.

“We don’t typically do this,” they said,
“But to keep you safe, we’ll have a week’s worth ready in thirty minutes.”

I don’t remember what happened after I opened the front door at home.
That’s the thing about trauma - the brain steps in like a bodyguard, blacking out what it knows would break you.

And that’s both miraculous… and unspeakably cruel.
Because what kind of life was I living that my own mind had to erase just to keep me alive?

What kind of love demands forgetting to survive it?

It was never love; just a shadow of what I chased while losing myself.

I handed him the photos like a fragile offering for his 29th birthday.

But instead of holding them close, he unleashed them - casting my body into the wild, a piece of meat hung for strangers to feast on and grasp in shadows.

I wasn’t a woman he loved.

I was the unlocked door to his dark playground, feeding the beast of his desire at my expense.

When reflecting on a clear turning point toward self-preservation and the initiation of personal change, I consistently identify the day I completed the boudoir session as pivotal.
It was the moment I began to reclaim my autonomy - rising through the tide of his monsters that had long tried to drown me, refusing to be devoured any longer.