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I was fourteen when my father ran away because of his debts. My mother cried, my eldest brother was nowhere to be found, and my other elder brother still expected the family to support his studies and living expenses because he was a boy.
My mother could not read or write, and my younger sister had special needs. I remember taking my school bag, still filled with books, and throwing it into the rubbish bin. Somehow, the decision felt obvious: someone had to earn money, and I had already decided that person would be me.
At that age, life outside the family was almost unfamiliar. I knew few people beyond relatives and those my parents associated with. Growing up in a traditional family where girls were treated as less important, even ordinary childhood experiences were limited. School outings, Children's Day activities and many of the things other children probably took for granted were mostly absent from my life.
Eventually, through neighbours and people they knew, I found my first factory job. I was underage and earning about $300 a month. The employer did not even pay me properly, but what stayed with me more was the excitement of being outside the house for half a day, sometimes almost the whole day. Everything around me felt new, as though another world had suddenly opened.
One recommendation led to another. By seventeen, I was working in a restaurant during the day and as a waitress in a small local discotheque at night, focused on earning enough to support my mother and younger sister and help my elder brother continue his studies.
That was where I met the man who became my first husband. He was the bouncer and only two years older than me. Something about his lifestyle felt familiar, while other parts of him and the world around him were completely different from what I had known. At seventeen, I did not really understand why that combination attracted me. I only knew I wanted to be close to him.
He was involved with gangs, gambling and ways of making money that I did not agree with. My way of living was very different. Work, responsibility, loyalty and taking care of others were things I understood well. Nobody had ever taught me what a healthy relationship was supposed to look like, so even after years of carrying much of the burden and disagreeing with his choices, loving someone still meant staying beside him.
For many years, he was my everything. The future I imagined was built around him. We did not have children because he was certain he could not provide the kind of normal life a child deserved, and I respected his honesty about that.
There were good parts of our life together too. I sometimes saw a young and innocent side of him when we were alone, and I know we loved each other in our own way. When my parents and younger sister passed away, he was there through some of the hardest years of my life, and I have never forgotten that.
In my late twenties, almost out of nowhere, I signed up for a computer course. The decision surprised him because he had never realised how much I enjoyed learning. I cannot remember exactly why I enrolled, only that I loved it. For once, something in my life was not about supporting the family, earning money for someone else or solving another person's problem. It was something I had chosen because I wanted to learn.
That small decision opened something in me. A different life no longer felt impossible.
Around that period, he was serving prison time in Switzerland. I flew there alone using what remained of my savings. During the final visits I was allowed that week, I tried to convince him that it was time to leave his old life and the people around it behind.
The hope was still to start again together. He could find an ordinary job, we could work as a team, begin from nothing and build a quieter life.
He did not want that future.
Before I returned home, he encouraged me to travel. For the first time, I travelled alone, visiting Amsterdam, Hong Kong and Thailand. Almost all of my savings were gone by the end of it, but something had become clearer. So much of my life had been spent thinking about what everyone else needed that I had barely considered what I wanted for myself.
Back home, I found another job, continued with computer courses and started setting goals of my own. Once the decision to leave was made, I knew I could not go back to the life we had been living.
I would never deny that I truly loved him. I still wish him well today and value the good moments we shared, especially the ways he was there while I watched my family members pass away one after another. I am also thankful that, despite the kind of life he was involved in, my own experiences with him did not end in far more serious harm.
Looking at those years now, I can see how early responsibility became part of who I was. At fourteen, throwing my school bag into the rubbish bin felt like the obvious thing to do. My family needed money, so I would earn it. Years later, much of the same thinking followed me into marriage. Sacrificing, providing, remaining loyal and taking care of someone else came naturally. What never came naturally was believing that my own life deserved some care too.
I am grateful to God for the courage I somehow had as a teenager, for the love that was real even inside an imperfect marriage, and for bringing me through experiences that could easily have ended very differently.
Choosing to leave did not mean everything before it had been a mistake, or that the love was not real. It simply meant that, for the first time, I was willing to ask what kind of life I wanted too.