On Saturday I’m going to a party hosted by two of my best friends. My ex-boyfriend who broke up with me 20 months ago will be there. I haven’t seen him in over a year. I hear he’s doing well though, and it’s possible he’s bringing someone with him.

And I am absolutely terrified.

After the break-up, I was in a severe depression for 12 months. I emerged this summer after a lot of work, and found my trust mechanisms smashed, unable to emote in front of any other person or feel things that I used to feel. I have panic attacks and flashbacks of bad parts of our relationship. I avoided everything that reminded me of him, and if I inadvertently saw or heard something that did, it could stop me cold. And the reason I’m scared is not because I still have feelings for him. I do, but I’ve made peace with that. If I could have stopped loving him, I would have done it by now (and believe me, I DID TRY.) It’s not the love. And I don’t want to be with him anymore, that feeling stopped about two months after we broke up for the last time. It’s the shame of what happened.

When our relationship was bottoming out and I KNEW I should have walked away, I clung even tighter. When we were first dating, I felt like I was the best version of myself, I felt peaceful, I had no desire to spend all my time with him or know things about him that he wasn’t ready to tell me. I thought I understood him back to front and I felt confident that he would always be honest with me. But then he cheated on me with my best friend. He broke up with me then, saying things like “I needed him too much” and he felt like I couldn’t manage without him. I loved him completely for who he was and it was like he didn’t even know me. But then, after I had moved on, he wanted me back. I took him back, but of course I was now totally insecure, trying to everything in my power to please him so he wouldn’t hurt me again, acting out like a teenager when my emotions flared up because I didn’t know what else to do. I basically became everything he accused me of being. I just thought if he sticks with me, if he stays through this awful period, then it’ll mean he really loves me.

At my lowest point, I called him drunk and crying and wanting to be reassured that everything was okay, that we were gonna work through this. He yelled at me. I see why he did it, but it hurt. I said something like “I should just walk into traffic right now.” I didn’t mean it and I never would have done it. But I know how it sounded, like I told him he had to stay with me or I would commit suicide.

I’m not proud of any of this. In fact, the reason I was depressed for so long was because I was so darkly ashamed of it, I couldn’t even begin to process it. I hated that I turned into that weak, pathetic person, when I knew my intuition was pointing me firmly the other way, when it was clear from his behavior that he did not really want to be with me. I regretted it so much.

I don’t want to go because I think I’ll be humiliated. I think he’ll be there with a new girlfriend, and he’ll still see me as that awful, cringing stereotype of a crazy ex-girlfriend. I don’t like knowing that I’m capable of that. And I feel like I’d rather die than have him look at me that way again.

But I’m going anyway. I’m going to go because he’s friends with my friends, and the longer I wait, the worse it’ll be. And because there’s a possibility that it just isn’t that serious. Maybe I’ll go and just have fun with my friends any realize that I was afraid of nothing. I feel like I’m risking all the work I did on myself (if I go and it’s as awful as I fear, I might lose those parts of myself I worked so hard to recover), but it will be worth it if this fear goes away. If I stop having panic attacks and imaginary health problems. If I can finally stop rejecting myself. Because I really feel that that was the ugliest part of me that I have ever seen and I want so badly for it not to be there, but it is. Maybe if I can be okay with that, be aware of that for next time, if I can ever open myself up enough for there to be a next time, then it will be worth it.