⚠️ Trigger / Trauma Disclaimer: This post includes themes of infidelity, trauma, risky behavior, and emotionally complex relationships. Read with care, pause if you need to, and know you’re never alone in these chapters. 🕊️

Bismillāh ir-Raḥmān ir-Raḥīm 🌿

Some chapters aren’t pretty, but they’re necessary.

Episode 5 is the season where I thought I was “choosing me,” when really I was choosing anything that felt like escape.

I had left one chaotic man behind and was living like a half-feral 20-something trying to outrun every wound I hadn’t healed. Whitney and I were club-hopping, working at T-Mobile, and pretending our messes didn’t exist. That’s the headspace I was in… when he entered the picture.

What started as a simple work call turned into chemistry I wasn’t prepared for — the kind that knocks the wind out of you and convinces your trauma that chaos is connection. Moving to College Station didn’t quiet the storm, it just relocated it ten minutes from his store.

That first night with him rewired my life in a way I couldn’t undo. And the weeks that followed were a mix of comfort, danger, intimacy, and consequences — everything a broken girl mistakes for love.

He stepped up when my car got repossessed. He helped with the kids. He showed up when Nate wouldn’t. And in the middle of all that, the world reminded us exactly who it hates: two people crossing a color line that small towns still pretend they don’t enforce.

I lost my job over it.

He almost lost his.

And still, we pretended it was “worth it.”

But this chapter wasn’t about romance. It was about pattern. About the version of me who kept choosing chaos because she didn’t yet know what peace felt like. About the woman who kept calling survival “love” because she hadn’t met Allah’s definition of it yet.

College Station wasn’t healing — it was a mirror.

And sometimes the mirror is the lesson.

With endless duʿāʾ and gratitude,

RebekahAnn 🌿

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