In Pursuit of Freedom - Chapter 4: When the Mirror Breaks

A Ballet Dancer's Story of Love, Loss, and Liberation

This chapter explores themes of pregnancy loss, coercive dynamics, emotional manipulation, and complex grief. It is my lived experience — shared in my own words, with as much care and truth as I can offer. Please take care while reading, and honour your emotional needs.

I met my husband at 21, and there was never any question that having children was part of our plan. I fell pregnant the same year we got married, but I sensed from the very beginning that something wasn’t right.

When the doctors confirmed that the pregnancy had stopped progressing around the 8-week mark, I was utterly devastated. The sound of the tiny heartbeat I heard during an earlier scan endlessly reverberated in my mind — echoes of loss reminding me of the life I once held inside me.

I didn’t know how to hold the weight of that grief, or how to put voice to the pain that I felt. And the people closest to me didn’t know how to meet me in it either. There was this unspoken silence, like none of us could allow ourselves to sink into the sadness. So we coped in the only way we knew how — by sweeping it aside and covering over the cracks with small talk, distractions, and the quiet hope that time alone would make it all disappear.

My sister-in-law fell pregnant around the same time, and watching her bump grow was excruciating. I wanted to be happy for her — I tried to be — but every change in her body, every dinner table conversation that circled around her pregnancy, was a reminder of what mine had lost

When I lost my baby, something in me began to unravel. The mask I’d worn for so long began to slip. The part that had accepted performance and numbness as normal began to waver.

It was the first time I remember feeling true anger at the pressure to pretend. To smile, to carry on, to fix the pain with another purchase, another maxed-out credit card — as if that could fill the space where grief now lived.

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The part of my journey that followed is still difficult to write about, even after all this time. I’ve questioned whether to include it, but I believe it’s important to honour the fullness of my story.

It was a chapter woven with many threads — grief, disconnection, low self-esteem, admiration, manipulation, coercion, control, and a desperate hunger to feel seen.

It’s still hard to sit with. Hard to reconcile who I had become — how I lost myself so completely in something so dark, so twisted, that I barely recognised the reflection looking back at me.

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In the aftermath of the miscarriage, I coped the only way I knew how. I threw myself into work. If I couldn’t be a mother, I told myself, then I would become the kind of woman who was “successful.” Driven. In control.

What I didn’t realise then was that I was trying to outrun my grief — and the deeper wounds that had been quietly shaping me for years. I equated achievement with worth, productivity with purpose, and within that mindset, I became vulnerable to a dynamic that started out feeling like being truly seen — the kind of attention that lights you up and makes you feel special.

But slowly, the admiration turned. What began as flattery and affirmation gave way to something far more insidious.

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So many of my old patterns were unconsciously playing out — patterns shaped long before this chapter even began. The deep need for validation. To be seen. To be recognised by someone in power. And over time, the boundary between admiration and manipulation began to blur.

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment things began to shift, but one interaction stands out. I’d gone to meet him for what was meant to be a mentoring session, set in the outdoor surroundings of a beautiful hotel. At one point, he asked if my husband knew I was there with him. I said yes. Then I asked if his wife knew.

He smirked and said,

“What, tell her I’m here with a drop-dead gorgeous ex-ballerina?”

I wasn’t sure how to respond. I laughed — more out of discomfort than amusement, but something about it landed uneasily. And yet, alongside that discomfort, I felt a flicker of something else: a thrill. That someone with his power and status could find me desirable. That I could be seen in that way. It was confusing — unsettling and quietly intoxicating all at once.

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He always made time for me. Even when he was busy, he’d drop everything, and it made me feel important. A part of me began to rise — the part that had long been buried beneath self-doubt and silence. His attention became like a mirror, reflecting back a version of me I wanted to believe in.

And with that newfound confidence, I got the promotion I’d been chasing. I was finally succeeding at something beyond ballet… and it felt electrifying.

But beneath the high, something else stirred — a quiet knowing that this confidence wasn’t entirely mine. It had been fed, fuelled, shaped by someone else’s gaze, and I didn’t yet see the cost of tying my worth to that reflection.

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That’s how it often begins.

That’s the nature of certain kinds of harm — subtle, slippery, and hard to name. Sometimes called “covert abuse,” it rarely starts with red flags. It creeps in quietly, cloaked in flattery and attention, until suddenly you’re deep in something that no longer feels safe…

And yet, when it’s feeding something so deeply ingrained — the old hunger to be chosen, to be seen — it can feel almost impossible to walk away.

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A visceral unease rises in me when I use the word abuse — because it’s been excruciating, not only to reconcile what happened, but to accept the non-linearity of how it all unfolded.

Part of what’s made it so confusing is that I participated in it. And more than that — a part of me enjoyed it. That’s the hardest element to explain, and sometimes the hardest to live with. How do you name something that hurt you, while also holding the complexity of the role you played in it?

There’s a part of me that still longs to place it neatly into a box with a clear name on it — as if that would make it easier to understand, to speak about, to validate.

But it’s not that simple, and maybe that’s part of what’s been so hard: the ambiguity, the slow erosion, the moments that didn’t fit the definitions I thought I needed in order to trust my own pain.

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When I left ballet, I carried a quiet belief that I had failed — that I had missed my one shot, and that because of that, I might never truly succeed at anything.

So when he saw me — really saw me — and spoke to my potential, my passion, my promise… it reignited something I hadn’t felt in years. It felt like being chosen. Like being rescued from a long, aching obscurity.

And that made it even harder to see when the lines began to blur.
Because I so desperately wanted it to be real. I needed it to be. I needed this successful version of me to be real.

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Sometimes I still wonder — did he truly see potential in me, or was I just a distraction? Something to toy with in the quiet spaces between board meetings and power plays?

It’s hard not to spiral into questions that cut deep: why couldn’t I walk away? Why did I start dressing differently, hoping he’d notice me more? Was it all my fault? I remember the first time he hinted that something was growing,

“Don’t you agree that there’s something between us?”

That’s when the tone of our conversations really began to shift. He started slipping sexual comments into his messages, little by little, as if testing the waters — and when I didn’t reciprocate, he’d complain, like I was letting him down.

And I remember, distinctly, the first time he told me to delete our messages. Until then, it hadn’t even occurred to me. That was the moment something in me paused — the first sign that maybe he was protecting himself.

He would make me call him, rather than the other way around, so I wouldn’t show up on his phone bill. Looking back, it’s so clear. But at the time, I was already too far in. I pushed it aside, just like I’d always done with discomfort. After all, he still made me feel seen. And I still needed to be seen.

There were times I tried to leave, but each time, he reeled me back in — cloaking manipulation in flattery, lacing control with declarations of a love he claimed was beginning to grow.

In the end, he became like an addiction. I found myself utterly and terrifyingly dependent on him, as if my sense of self had fused with his attention.

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There are still moments I’m swallowed by unbearable guilt and shame — for the attention I craved, for the validation that felt like oxygen, for betraying my own values, and most of all, for betraying my husband.

And beneath it all sits the most painful question:
How could I let this happen?

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It’s so incredibly confusing when, in everyone’s eyes, you’re the perpetrator.

In the immediate aftermath, once everything had come to the surface — I had no language, no framework for the grooming and manipulation that had taken place.

All I knew was that I was the bad person who had done a very bad thing, and witnessing the pain of those around me — pain that traced back to my choices — was more than I could comprehend.

And once it was all out in the open, he disappeared. No reckoning, no accountability, no trace, just silence. I was left holding the aftermath alone — carrying the unbearable weight of a story I couldn’t explain.

Not to them.
Not to myself.

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I couldn’t reconcile their heartbreak with the emptiness inside me.

I wasn’t grieving in the way they thought I should. I was just… gone. Like I’d vanished somewhere inside myself.

I did the only thing I knew how to do: I turned it all inward.

The guilt.
The shame.
The confusion.
The heartbreak.

I let it bury me — because to feel it, name it, make sense of it… would have meant surfacing in a world where I was unrecognisable, even to myself.

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Looking back, I can see that I didn’t know how to hold the contradictions. How to hold the reality that I had caused harm — and that I had also been harmed.

So I disappeared into numbness.

I reached for alcohol in a desperate attempt to quieten the screams inside me. My doctor adjusted my medication — upping the dosage of my anti-depressants so much that I drifted through my days in a thick black fog, barely there. Sometimes, rage would rip through the haze — fierce and unfamiliar, erupting in ways I couldn’t control.

Eventually, the darkness became so suffocating, I found myself wondering what it might be like to let it take me completely — to stop gasping for breath, to stop fighting.

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When the word “grooming,” was first suggested to me, I dismissed it immediately.
It felt absurd — something terrible that happened to children, not to a 33-year-old woman like me. I defended him, because I truly believed he was a good man.

It took a long time to even begin questioning that.
To consider that maybe his intentions weren’t as genuine as I’d told myself they were. That maybe I wasn’t entirely complicit after all — just conditioned in ways I hadn’t yet begun to understand.

Sometimes I wonder:
Did he know what his plan was from the very beginning?
Was there a clear strategy in his mind — to gently chip away at me, piece by piece?
Did he see the gaps I couldn’t yet see in myself?
Does he feel any remorse for what happened?

I’ve come to accept that these are questions I will never fully answer.

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At first, my OCD and bulimia spiralled beyond recognition — frantic attempts to reclaim some semblance of control. But eventually, even those compulsions lost their grip.

There was nothing left to grip onto — nothing left to manage or perfect or fix.

I remember this stark, hollow realisation: the behaviours I had clung to for so long — the rituals, the control — they didn’t work here.

Because everything in my life had fallen away — and in this place, there was simply… nothing left to control.

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In that barren space where everything had collapsed — the identities, the stories, the roles I’d clung to — I found myself face-to-face with someone I didn’t recognise: myself.

There was no map. No quick return. Just a slow, almost childlike process of learning how to live again.

Allowing myself to feel was painfully slow and tender. First came the realisation that I’d never truly allowed myself to feel anything at all. The medication, the controlling behaviours, my body’s protective responses to trauma — they had all taught me to pull back, to run in the opposite direction, as far from pain as possible.

Movement would eventually become the place where I could begin to peel back the layers — gently, quietly. It was the first time I’d truly returned to movement since ballet, where every shape had once been about precision, discipline, control. But now, it was something else.

This was no longer about performance — it was about presence.

A place to feel what had been buried for so long.
To let my body speak what my mind couldn’t yet name.
To soften into sensation.
To listen.
To slowly begin pulling back the veil and meeting myself — not as I had been taught to be, but as I truly was.