I Didn’t Lose Myself. I Abandoned Myself

I Didn’t Lose Myself. I Abandoned Myself

By Sherita Jones | The Anointing Grace

For years, I said I “lost myself.” That sounds softer. It sounds accidental. Like something slipped through my fingers. But that isn’t the truth. I didn’t lose myself. I abandoned myself. And if I’m honest, I was abandoning myself long before my first relationship. 

Self abandonment didn’t begin in love. It began in survival. My life was unstable long before I entered foster care. I attended five elementary schools, four middle schools, three high schools. Nothing stayed consistent. Not homes. Not environments. Not relationships. When your world constantly shifts, you learn to shift with it. You become adaptable. You become guarded. You don’t trust easily. You don’t attach quickly. You learn how to read rooms. You learn how to survive.

Self abandonment is a learned survival strategy. You had to perform, over-give, or behave a certain way to survive. Your nervous system learns before your heart does. You silence your needs because instability teaches you that your needs are secondary to survival. And when you do that long enough, abandoning yourself stops feeling like loss. It feels like strength.

By the time I met him at 15, I was guarded. He had to prove himself. And in the beginning, he did. He was patient. He was attentive. He wrote me love letters. He took me out. He bought my first diamond ring and made me a promise. He made me feel safe. His parents, sister, cousins welcomed me. 

And for a girl who grew up unstable, safety is powerful.

A child who isn’t properly nurtured will attach to whoever feels like safety. Safety does not have to be perfect. It just has to feel steady. And he felt steady.

When we separated, he chose not to be tied down. That was the fracture. During that time, he encountered someone else. And when he eventually came back into my life, he didn’t just reappear casually, he pursued me for a year and a half before I agreed to let him back in. A year and a half of consistency. A year and a half of effort. I didn’t rush. I watched. I weighed. I guarded my heart.

But when I finally said yes, the man I received was not the man I remembered.

He was different. Guarded. Selfish. Almost cold at times, yet still charming. Still magnetic. Still fun to be around, conversations were deep, his ambition was very present. But it was like loving someone who refused to allow himself to love fully. Whatever he experienced in that other relationship, he brought back with him, and I paid the cost of wounds I did not create. I learned very expensive lessons to say the least. 

But here’s where self abandonment deepened.

The hardest part wasn’t that he changed. The hardest part was that I kept loving the version of him that no longer existed. I was holding on to a man from memory, not the man standing in front of me. I was feeding a delusion built from who he used to be, not the evidence he was showing me in real time. I allowed myself to be blinded by the good parts, the undeniable chemistry, the memories. 

And memory is powerful.

The brain attaches to the first version of safety it experiences. It stores it. It protects it. It fights to restore it. So when reality shifts, your nervous system says, “Just get him back to who he was.” You start negotiating with truth. You minimize what you see. You reinterpret behavior. You spiritualize red flags.

Not because you’re foolish. Because of survival attachment and trauma bonding. This is not covenant love.

Covenant love grows from wholeness. Survival attachment or trauma bond clings to what once felt safe. And when your identity was formed around instability, losing safety feels like losing oxygen.

We attract what matches our perceived internal identity. You will tolerate people who confirm that belief. If somewhere deep inside you believe you must fight to keep love, you will overextend. If you believe love can leave at any moment, you will shrink to prevent it.

Discernment whispered. But attachment was louder.

I wasn’t blind. I was bonded to history. And that’s when I realized something painful. I wasn’t just loving him. I was trying to resurrect a version of him that no longer existed. Every time I chose memory over evidence, I abandoned myself.

You cannot build a stable identity on human approval. It will collapse every time. When he was affectionate, which was often, I was hypnotized. I felt secure. This fed my self abandonment and illusion. That wasn’t love stabilizing. That was identity shaking.

The enemy’s strategy has always been identity distortion. If he convinces you early that you are unstable, unwanted, unworthy, you will spend your life trying to secure externally what was fractured internally.

I didn’t lose myself in love. I gave myself away trying to preserve attachment, trying to preserve a trauma bond. That wasn’t love. That was survival. Here is the shift, the one that changed everything:

You cannot heal what you’re still blaming on loss.

If you say you “lost yourself,” you stay powerless. But when you admit you abandoned yourself you reclaim authority. Because abandonment is a choice. If you choose to abandon yourself for someone else, you can also choose to return. That’s the prophetic truth.

I didn’t lose myself.

I abandoned myself.

But I’m not abandoning her anymore.

I was never too much. I was just too willing to leave myself for less. And this time, I am choosing me, not from pride, but from wholeness.

If you see yourself in this, hear me clearly, it is okay to choose you. It is okay to set boundaries. It is okay to say, “This no longer aligns with who I am, and who I’m becoming.” You are not losing when someone walks away, you are loving yourself the way you should. Sometimes what leaves is not punishment, it’s protection. Give yourself grace to grieve, don’t suppress it. For me, breaking this pattern was impossible without God. I could not unsee what only Jesus revealed. He exposed the identity distortion. He showed me where I was abandoning myself, and when it came down to it, I had a choice to make, God or my relationship. I chose God, although the truth is, He chose me first. And once you see yourself through His eyes, you can never go back to negotiating your worth again.