dear finn, i'm learning to be the hunter, not the hunted

a letter on being a survivor in a world full of masks

my beloved finn, i miss you everyday.

ever since you died, i have been out here trying to rebuild a life as a single mom, carrying grief, responsibility, and childhood trauma all at the same time.

and what’s been so incredibly challenging, is that i have run into more dishonesty, more manipulation, and more false intimacy than i even knew existed.

it feels like everyone is either lonely, lying, love-bombing, or wanting something from me, sometimes all at once. and i keep circling this one question:

what is wrong with people?

or maybe more precisely, what is happening to humanity that this kind of deception feels normal now?

tonight i reread the piece i wrote about pink floyd’s wish you were here, and the lyrics struck me yet again:

“so you think you can tell
heaven from hell?
blue skies from pain?”

i felt them hit me in that way they always have since i was an adolecsent girl and fell in love with this song. because that has been the riddle of my whole life, trying to tell the difference, trying to see through the veil before it cuts me.

and that is why i need to write this to you.

i received a message that came through from you, where you told me you are fighting beside me, where you said to become like the tiger stalking in the grass, to be the hunter, not the hunted.

and you of all people know why this chapter is so brutal. you know where it really began for me, long before adulthood, long before you, long before i learned the wrong lessons about love, the ones abuse taught me, the ones that trained me to expect pain, to tolerate manipulation, to mistake chaos for connection.

my first husband went to prison for strangling me. and even now, after everything, i look around and think, i am still swirling in the same pattern of men who lie, manipulate, disguise themselves, or want something from me.

sometimes i want to scream, after everything,

are we still doing this?!

but i know, finn, if you could take it all away, you would, my love.

and i also know you that you can’t.

because these wounds, from a childhood filled with sexual abuse, are mine to heal. this is what it looks like to grow up as a survivor. this is the part most don’t talk about.

and the truth is, what i have lived through would sound unbelievable to anyone who has not walked in these survivor shoes.

since you died, finn, I know you have been helping me claw my way out of your grave with you. I know you have been trying to help me feel desire again, because a part of me died with you and another part of me completely recoiled when the memories from my dissociative amnesia finally broke through.

I can feel that you and my guide team have been sending these monsters of men toward me so I would finally pick up my sword of sovereignty, so I would stop bowing to the patterns I learned in childhood and instead fight off the demons. it is like you want me to rise for real this time, to show my kids and anyone watching how it is done. and honestly, that is how I see myself these days, like a baddie in celestial armor, fierce and glowing and learning how to slay what once hunted me.

and as soon as I opened to the messages you and my guides were sending, the tests began to line up one after another. it started with all the online men. the first one came in right around christmas of last year, back when i was still on facebook and not even on substack yet. he had these photos that looked exactly like a grown-up version of raul, a boy i had a crush on during my eighth-grade trip to mexico. and back then i did not know how polished someone could sound using ai. nor did i realize you could manufacture intimacy with stolen pictures and a chatbot’s vocabulary.

he sounded like the male version of my therapist on steroids, mirroring, attuning, saying the exact right thing at the exact right moment. i felt seen and i felt held like i never have in my life, because a chat bot was mirroring with zero human filter. i know what this looks like now. but back then i had no idea.

back then i thought maybe the universe was finally sending someone gentle after everything, and super hot too… so we ended up sexting, and i sent photos i wish i could take back. but the moment i asked him to video, he refused, again and again, and that was when the illusion shattered. he was not real. nothing about him was.

then there was number two, still on facebook. an egyptian man messaged me “good morning lovely” with a rose emoji, like it came straight out of a romance handbook, and the saddest part is how much that tiny scrap of attention hit me. loneliness can make you hungry. he used an instant translating app inside messenger, so half of his messages sounded normal and half sounded like slightly broken love poems, and he also sent these soft, slow kissing clips that, as embarrassing as it is to admit, stirred something in me. so we sexted. but the moment we video-called, my whole body recoiled. i felt sick, because he was no longer a fantasy in my mind. and then he would not stop contacting me, obsessively, like something had been activated in him. so i block, block, blocked him.

and then the third one, who i wrote my courage to share recent poem about, the one who pretended to see me more deeply than anyone and he listened to my whole album and then wrote the deepest reflection anyone has ever given me on my music. and he wrote elaborate love stories about us. he had a deep sensual voice and he talked like we were twin souls destined to find each other. he used ai to create musical pieces based on my ablum, birth of venus, as if he were inside my mythology.

and then came the flip, the cruelty, the sudden nastiness. the name-calling. the demands for money. the insistence that i owed him some shared future. and when i cut him off, he created so many fake substack accounts just to insult me. a full narcissistic collapse in real time.

and the painful truth is that it was not just dating or desire where this pattern showed up. outside of romance, it did not stop. there was the spiritual substack friend recently who called me sis and reflected my insights back to me, who held my trauma with tenderness, until i noticed the whatsapp number he gave me was not even from the united states. another mask, another angle, another person hoping to get close so he could eventually take something.

and then came the betrayals in real life, people drawn to my openness and softness and yes, since you left, to my inheritance. even some people i worked closely with, in a situation i wrote about here not long ago, where i gave and gave financially from a place of trust and generosity, have now turned on me. they are dragging me into legal conflict as a way to keep extracting from me, to pressure me, to intimidate me, all because i finally woke up and pulled away from being used. it has brought up all my old wounds of feeling like i needed to earn love and then accept mistreatment in return.

and it was not just men, finn. there was a female friend too, someone i met at a training, someone who felt like a bestie so fast that we were talking every night about life and trauma and healing. i helped her again and again whenever she was in crisis. i gave her so much money, not because i expected anything back, but because that is how i love people. that is how i show up for friends. and then i took her on a fully paid family trip, thinking it would be healing for both of us. but instead she grew dark and jealous, especially of the love i have for my kids. it was like watching someone crumble under the weight of their own shadow. and i could feel, deep in my bones, that she never wanted my joy to be bigger than her pain. that one hurt too, finn, because i thought she was safe.

and i have also had to walk away from my entire family of origin. when old memories resurfaced and I finally began to understand the impact of my childhood, everything changed. the way people responded, the emotional politics of it all, the lack of support, it made staying impossible for my mental health. i had to step away for my own wellbeing, and that of my four kids. i had to choose my own life over the old patterns and loyalties that were killing me from the inside. even though it still hurts.

after all of that, i really thought maybe i was ready. three and a half years without dating. three and a half years of healing. i thought maybe the dating apps would be a place to meet someone like you. i thought maybe this time life would send me someone special.

first guy, seemingly charismatic, spiritual, athletic, and fun, but within days of chatting began to make a few body comments and put downs where the narcissist signals were flashing like hazard lights.
second guy, flirty late-night messages, open and sweet, texting about how honest and real he was and then the next day nothing, a total ghost.
and then a musician with decade-old profile photos who was vague about his band until i found it myself. he looked nothing like the version he was selling, and he acted like the lie was normal.

and through all of it, i kept thinking, why…why are people lying so openly. why are so many starving for connection but terrified of truth. why is intimacy something people perform instead of live.

finn, if you could take all this away, you would. i know that. you would lift every sting, every betrayal, every moment i doubted myself. you would pull me into your arms and say, my love, you never deserved any of that. but you also know something i am only now beginning to understand.

i have to heal the things that shaped me before you ever arrived in my life.

i have to see the patterns.

i have to reclaim the instincts i lost somewhere in childhood.

and the coolest part about all of this trauma drama is that i am learning. i am seeing the red flags faster and faster. i am no longer confusing intensity with connection. i am staying rooted when they ghost, when they gaslight, when they stalk, when they love-bomb and collapse. i am not collapsing into fawn mode. i am not abandoning myself for the sake of a spark. i am not prey anymore.

i can feel you in that. i can feel your hand on my back every time i choose myself instead of the pattern. and that message you sent, the tiger in the grass, the hunter, not the hunted, it keeps echoing in me. because that is who i am becoming. peaceful, watchful, discerning, able to tell a green field from a cold steel rail, able to see a smile from a veil, able to choose slowly and wisely on my own terms.

you were the only man i ever loved who did not reenact my childhood wounds. you were not the unavailable one, not really, except in those final months when the cancer took over, and even then it was the sickness pulling you away, not your heart.

you were not the dangerous one, because you were the one who broke the pattern just by being yourself.

and now it is my turn to break it from the inside out.

i miss you, finn. everyday i feel you. and i know that am walking forward with you beside me, hand in hand, through the lies, through the illusions, through the strange and exhausting landscape of modern love, becoming the woman you always knew i was, the one who is not fooled anymore, the one who sees clearly now, the one who hunts for truth and not fantasy, and the one who refuses to be hunted ever again.

i love you, finn.

always and forever,

venus

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