Finding My Rhythm: Healing, Leading, Becoming

We were young. Exhausted. Dreaming.

The nights were long — paging through endless patient lists, rushing from one code blue to another. My husband and I were both interns, living in the hospital dorms, surviving on cafeteria food and sheer adrenaline. There were nights when I would pass him in the hallway at 2 A.M., both of us too tired to speak, just offering a brief, hollow smile before disappearing back into the fluorescent-lit chaos.

After two years, we had saved enough for a down payment on a small house, just a few miles from the hospital. It wasn’t easy. We both picked up extra shifts, worked late hours, and scrounged every bonus and tax refund we could find. But even then, we needed help — a loan to cover part of the down payment.

His parents agreed to co-sign the loan. I was grateful. At the time, I thought it was a gesture of love and support.

But when they told the story to their friends, something changed.
“We gave them the money,” they would say, smiling proudly, as if recounting a generous gift.
I would sit there silently, confused, the lie thick in the air between us.

We hadn’t been given anything. We had taken out a loan — a loan we would pay off ourselves, without a penny of help from anyone.

I didn’t know what to make of it. Was it just pride? A need to look good in front of others?
I remember feeling a small knot of discomfort then — a flicker of something I couldn’t name — but I brushed it aside. We had our house. We had our future. I told myself that small lies didn’t matter.

And in those early days, there was still so much hope.

I would come to understand, much later, that the small moments — the subtle re-writing of truth, the careful claiming of our hard work as theirs — were not isolated oddities.
They were the first cracks in the foundation.
The beginning of a slow, relentless erosion.

But back then, standing on the worn carpet of our first home, boxes piled around me, I still believed that love — and hard work — were enough to build a life.

I hadn’t yet learned how power can dress itself up as generosity.
Or how control can creep in, disguised as family.