I wasn't always this composed.
People look at me now—Manager of a major Canadian telecom company, dressed in confidence and perfectly tailored suits—and they assume I've had it easy. That everything fell into place. That I must've come from privilege, with connections and a paved path toward success.
But the truth is: I was raised in a war zone disguised as a home. And my first battle wasn't with love. It was with expectations.
My name is Jaimie, and I was my mother's project long before I became my own person. She was the kind of woman who sharpened words like knives and carved her love into us by the inch. To her, being anything less than number one was a disgrace. Second place? Unacceptable. Third? Embarrassment. I learned early on that rest was weakness and emotions were distractions.
I graduated from college with Latin honors. That day, the applause felt like a whisper compared to the silence I received from her. "Why not summa cum laude?" she said. I smiled anyway. I'd learned to do that, too.
After college, I took the pension money I inherited from my grandfather—God bless the only man who ever told me I didn't have to be perfect—and invested it in the stock market. Everyone thought I was reckless, but I knew better. Psychology taught me to read patterns, and markets, surprisingly, were full of them. Within three years, I turned modest capital into financial independence.
Still, success was never enough. Not when the ghosts of old demands whispered that I needed to be more.
But here's the thing: being good at life doesn't mean you're good at love.
I was 28 when I first realized that despite my achievements, I was crumbling inside. It started with EJ. Then Anthony. And then... well, the rest will follow. They weren't just lovers. They were mirrors. Each one showed me a version of myself I either hated, denied, or hadn't even met yet.
This story isn't about them. It's about how I survived them.
And maybe, just maybe, how I began to finally see myself as more than who I was trained to be.
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