Dianne Bustillo

Prologue



When I was younger, I used to lie awake at night, staring into the dark, hoping I would wake up the next day with amnesia.
It wasn’t my past or myself I wanted to forget.
I only wanted to forget every memory that led back to him.

At the time, remembering him came with a heaviness I couldn’t explain.
He was still out there, living and breathing, going about his life as if I had never been a part of it.

My mind clung to the good memories: those rare moments of kindness, the occasional warmth, while blurring out how cruelly he treated me in between.
The contrast was disorienting. But that was the point all along.
Confusion was his mechanism of control.

And so I began to romanticize the idea of waking up one day with amnesia.
I just wanted stillness.
I wanted the part of my mind that remembered him to stop, just enough for me to focus on my own thoughts again.

At the time, I didn’t know that this wish was a trauma response.
I didn’t yet understand that the desire to forget is often the psyche’s last attempt at protection, when the pain becomes too loud to bear.
Dissociative amnesia is the brain’s way of erasing what the heart isn’t ready to hold.

In retrospect, forgetting him was a form of dissociative amnesia.
It was the brain’s way of protecting itself from something psychologically harmful, a connection he insisted was just friendship, though it was clearly more, and never had a clear label, even in the absence of physical violence.



One late night towards the end of May 2025, desperate for answers, I turned to Google.
That’s when I found it.
This wasn’t ordinary forgetting.

According to the Mayo Clinic, the hallmark of dissociative amnesia isn’t just forgetfulness.
It’s a profound memory loss tied to periods of shock, distress, or pain.

Reading on, I found the Cleveland Clinic echoed the same truth.
This kind of forgetting isn’t accidental.
It’s strategic.
It’s a form of defense: an unconscious strategy the mind uses to shield itself from memories too overwhelming to face.

Looking back, sometime between 2022 and May 2025, I slipped into that defense mechanism without even realizing it.
For 3 years, I didn’t just forget.
My mind redacted.
It erased one person from my consciousness entirely, with surgical precision.



To understand why my mind erased him, you’d have to know who he was to me.
I met him in 2007, when I was 14 and he was 15 or 16.
We went to the same high school.
I was a sophomore, and he was a junior.

There was something strangely familiar about him, as if we recognized each other before we had the language to understand what it meant.
The connection was emotional, intellectual, and psychological.
The only thing it wasn’t was physical.
It felt inevitable, the kind of bond that doesn’t build over time but arrives all at once, fully formed.

On the surface, we were just teenagers.
But underneath that, we were reenacting something much older: our childhood trauma.
We carried matching fractures in our nervous systems.
He lost his biological father at a young age and carried unresolved wounds from his mother.
Those wounds showed up in the way he treated women.
I was raised by a narcissistic, psychopathic mother who abused and neglected me.
We recognized each other’s pain and folded ourselves into it.

What formed between us wasn’t love.
It was a trauma bond.

He didn’t value me as a person.
He assigned me various roles in his internal narrative.

Without realizing it, I stepped into the role he had already assigned me: the emotional surrogate mother to his wounded inner child.
It was a dynamic I knew all too well.
My mother parentified me, forcing me to meet her emotional needs at the expense of my own.
And he, in turn, reenacted the emotional abandonment and cruelty I had already survived at home, again and again.

He didn’t need to lay a hand on me.
Like my mother, he knew how to wound without leaving a single mark.
He used silence as punishment, distance as power, and confusion as control.

What we had lasted from 2007 to 2013.
Then, unexpectedly and without my consent, he re-entered my life between 2018 and 2022 through mutual friends.
Each time, he disguised what we had as “just friendship.”
But looking back, it was never just that.

He made me his mirror, not a person but a reflection.
Someone to admire him, soothe him, agree with him.
I wasn’t seen for who I was.
I was only useful when I reinforced the image he needed to see.

He made me his emotional surrogate mother, casting me as the one who would nurture his wounded inner child, absorb his pain, and ask for nothing in return.

He called me a friend but never treated me like one.
Instead, he treated me like an emotional fill-in-the-blanks: someone he could project onto, assigning whatever role he needed me to play.
The script was always his, and my role changed depending on what he needed me to reflect.
He called it friendship.
I called it “roles I never agreed to play.”

What made the bond even more intense was that it was never physical.
He placed me on a pedestal: his Madonna.
I believe now that he has a Madonna-whore complex, a psychological split in which women are either idealized or degraded.
I was the one he idealized, which meant he never touched me.
That protected my body, but left everything else exposed.
He dismantled each part of me slowly: my heart, my mind, my spirit.

I think the reason the forgetting was so complete is because remembering him would have meant reliving everything.
Not just our story, but my own childhood trauma, repeated with a different face.

My mind didn’t simply erase a boy.
It erased a pattern: the way pain looped through my nervous system.
It silenced the collapse.

The girl who once wished to forget was finally answered.
Not with silence, but with mercy.
And in that mercy, the forgetting rooted itself, slow and unyielding.





I: The Forgetting



“I used to pray for times like this.”



The forgetting didn’t feel like loss.
It didn’t feel like anything at all.
There was no sudden realization, no rupture.
It arrived quietly, without ceremony, like a light slowly dimming, until I could no longer see what had once been illuminated.

Then one day, without warning, it was as if he had never existed at all.
For 3 years, from sometime in 2022 until late May 2025, I didn’t remember his name.

I couldn’t recall his face, the sound of his voice, or the details of our history.
I didn’t remember vaguely, or in fragments.
Not even with confusion.
He wasn’t blurred or faded. He was gone.

It wasn’t ordinary forgetting.
It was trauma-induced, dissociative amnesia: a complete blackout.
It was a clean, surgical removal of someone who had once taken up so much space inside me that I had shaped my inner world around him.

He had been central: first in my teenage years, then again in my mid to late 20s, when the pull of familiarity drew me back into a dynamic I hadn’t yet learned to name.
One I now recognize as a trauma reenactment.

And yet, during those 3 years, I lived as if he had never existed.
What disturbed me most wasn’t the forgetting itself.
It was the fact that I didn’t even notice he was gone.

That’s the paradox of trauma-induced forgetting: you can’t miss what you don’t remember, but your body remembers anyway.

Consciously, I was fine.
I didn’t think about him.
His first name was pretty common.
But when others occasionally said it, it meant almost nothing to me.
It elicited only a vague sense of detachment, like hearing about a minor character from a story I’d once read but didn’t care to revisit.
Songs that should have stirred something passed through like static.

My mind had quietly rewritten my life without him.
The new version was clean and seemed to functioned well enough to pass as stable.

But my body was telling a different story.
There was a tension I couldn’t explain.
A restless undercurrent I couldn’t name.

Now and then, I felt off: emotionally flat, somewhat adrift, without knowing why.
I began to sense a strange duality.
I felt lighter, freer, perhaps even more composed.

But beneath that perceived stability was a sense of detachment I hadn’t yet identified.
A part of my life had been edited out, and I had accepted the revised script without question.
It felt normal.

But beneath my awareness, something in me recognized the absence.
And that omission wasn’t a flaw.
It was a form of defense. It was mercy, masquerading as absence.

What many people don’t understand about dissociative amnesia, a type of dissociation, is that it isn’t weakness.
It’s the mind’s final line of defense when the emotional charge of a memory becomes too overwhelming to coexist with the act of living.

It’s not forgetting as failure. It’s forgetting as survival.
For 3 years, I lived inside that defense mechanism.

There were no flashbacks, no longing, no heartbreak.
There was only quiet, peace, and absence.
And for a while, that absence saved me.

Because my conscious mind couldn’t do what needed to be done, my subconscious intervened to protect me from what I wasn’t yet ready to process.

If I had remembered him back then, remembered him fully, it would’ve broken me.





II: The Remembering



Between 2022 and May 2025, my world was quiet, but it was the kind of quiet that echoes.
Like a museum closed for the night, everything remained intact, but hollow.

I was there, but not fully living.
On the surface, I functioned.
I moved through the days.
But inside, something felt wrong.
I just didn’t know what.

There was a sense of detachment I couldn’t name.
I often felt like I was watching myself from outside my own body, performing the role of someone who was holding it together.

I wasn’t sad or angry. I wasn’t anything.
My emotional range had collapsed into a flatline.
The highs and lows that once gave my life color had dulled into gray.

What no one tells you about trauma-induced dissociative amnesia is that it doesn’t always feel like crisis.
Sometimes, it feels like stability, like numbness masquerading as peace.

But there’s a difference between being calm and being vacant, and I was vacant. There was an ache I couldn’t place.
There was a low-level grief that pulsed underneath everything.

It felt like I was mourning something I couldn’t name.
There was no one I missed, nothing I consciously longed for, just a quiet vacancy where something significant should’ve been.

It reminded me of the anime film "Your Name", where the main characters feel
the ache of losing something they once knew mattered, even when they can’t remember what it was.

And then, one day, it happened.
I still don’t know what the trigger was.
Maybe it was Withered by d4vd, an album that felt like our story set to melody.
Or maybe it was something more subtle, like sensory triggers: a scent, a phrase, or the tone in a stranger’s voice.
Things that bypass logic and go straight to the body.
Trauma doesn’t need permission to return.
It waits, then reenters when it’s ready.

The remembering didn’t happen gradually.
It struck like a lightning bolt.
One moment I was fine.
The next, I wasn’t.

Something cracked open inside me, and everything I had forgotten came rushing back.
Not as scattered fragments, but as a flood: intact, disorienting, and absolute.

My brain began reintegrating everything that had once been severed.
It was like opening a long-forgotten file folder, only to have its contents dumped out all at once.

The memories didn’t return gently.
They crashed like an avalanche: sudden, merciless, flattening everything I had rebuilt in their absence.

It wasn’t just memory. It was sensation.
My body remembered before my mind could catch up.
I felt panic. I felt disoriented.

Because suddenly, there he was.
He appeared fully formed in my mind, as if no time had passed.
His voice, his face, the gravitational pull of our connection.
And it hit me, not just his return but also the weight of the absence I hadn’t even realized I had been carrying.

The most disorienting part wasn’t just the memories themselves.
It was the realization that I had forgotten them.
That I had forgotten him completely, for 3 years.

I hadn’t just repressed a few details. I had erased an entire person, someone who had once shaped the emotional architecture of my life.
And yet, for 3 years, I had lived as if he never existed.

The life I built during those years didn’t feel false, but it suddenly felt incomplete. It was as if I had authored a book and unknowingly ripped out one of its formative chapters.

My memory of those 3 years remained intact, but it felt like they had been lived by someone else: a version of me who carried the absence without even knowing what she had lost.

That’s what dissociative amnesia does.
It buries the pain so deep, you forget it was ever there.
But when the memories return, they don’t just bring the person back or the events.
They bring back not just the past, but the ache I wasn’t allowed to carry.


That kind of remembering changes you.
There’s no going back to who you were before it.

When the full truth returns, it doesn’t knock. It breaks the lock.
And once it’s inside, nothing stays the same.





III: The Awakening



When the memories came back, my first instinct wasn’t rational or even emotional. It was instinctive.
Before I could make sense of what was happening, my body moved on its own.

I opened Facebook Messenger and typed his name.
My fingers knew the rhythm of it before my brain had even formed a reason.
I wasn’t seeking connection. It was automatic, a loop deeply wired into me.
The kind of muscle memory I didn’t even realize I still carried until it had already acted for me.

That’s the strange power of trauma bonds.
Even after years of silence, the pull can feel as natural as breath.
The conscious mind may forget, but the nervous system remembers.

And sometimes it acts before you even know what you’re doing, because some part of you still believes it’s survival.

So I sent the message.
He didn’t respond.
And to my surprise, I didn’t spiral.
I didn’t feel humiliated or rejected.
What I felt, overwhelmingly, was relief.

I stared at the empty chat for several minutes, then closed the window and blocked him.
It wasn't out of spite or anger.
But out of a quiet kind of self-protection, the kind born of wisdom, not fear.

In that moment, I finally accepted something I hadn’t wanted to admit, even after all the therapy, all the reflection, all the growth: I still couldn’t trust myself around him.

Because some part of me, the most primal part, still recognized him as the first trauma reenactment: the familiar danger.
He was my mother’s cruelty disguised as intimacy.
He was my childhood neglect, repackaged as nervous system recognition.
He was the ache I had been trained to endure.

Blocking him wasn’t punishment.
It was protection. From him, yes.
But also from the part of me that still forgets what it cost to survive him.

But the relief of that boundary was quickly followed by something harder to hold: the realization that I had completely and unconsciously erased him from my life for 3 years.

Now that the memories had returned, I wasn’t just reckoning with what happened.
I was reckoning with the fact that it had ever been gone.

What followed was a complicated mix of grief, guilt, and deep disorientation.
Not guilt for the forgetting itself, but for what it had cost me to survive, and for what my mind had been forced to do just to keep me functioning.

I hadn’t abandoned him. I had abandoned a version of myself.
It was the version who had stayed, who had endured, and who had carried the weight of both of us.
And that, somehow, was harder to mourn.

It felt like I was re-inhabiting a timeline I’d abandoned without consent.
I could recall the facts: attending classes, holding conversations.
But everything felt distant, flattened, as if I’d watched my life unfold from behind glass.
That’s what derealization does.
It turns memory into film. It separates you from yourself.

Meanwhile, the memories of him returned with such clarity, so vivid and alive, that they felt hyperreal.
They were almost too real to hold.

My body was trying to process 3 years of repressed emotions, all at once.
But the hardest part wasn’t the panic.
It was the mourning.

I mourned the lost years.
I mourned the version of me who had lived in absence.
The woman I might have become had I not been forced to dissociate from myself just to keep going.
I grieved for the girl who stayed too long, who believed that healing him would somehow heal her.
I mourned my own body: for everything it held in silence, for everything it endured while I moved through the world dissociated, performing the illusion of being fine.

But beneath the grief, something else began to take root.
It was something steadier and sharper. It was a bitter kind of clarity.
My body protected me when my mind could not.
That was the real awakening. Not just the remembering of him, but the remembering of me.
The self who had once disappeared to survive.
The self who now chooses, consciously and fiercely, not to disappear again.

This time, the forgetting is over.
This time, I stay awake.





Epilogue



For a little while, I truly believed the miracle was in the forgetting.
Dissociative amnesia, this involuntary blackout of memory, felt like one of the most surreal things that had ever happened to me.
And in many ways, it was.

It gave me space. It gave me silence.
It protected me in the only way I could be protected at the time: by erasing what I couldn’t yet bear to remember.

But looking back now, I understand that the real miracle wasn’t the forgetting.
The real miracle was the remembering, and still choosing to walk away.
Because forgetting was never the goal. It was survival.

When love became indistinguishable from harm, my nervous system did what my conscious mind could not.
It removed the threat, not through logic or language, but through absence.
There were no goodbyes, no explanations, just a clean, silent severing.

When I couldn’t leave him, my body left him for me.
And when the memories finally returned, I didn’t fall apart.
I didn’t beg for answers.
Instead, I faced it all: what happened, what it meant, who I had been.
And I made a different choice, one I wasn’t capable of making back then.

I’ve learned that I no longer need to erase the past in order to heal from it.
I can remember and still move forward.
I can hold the truth of what happened without letting it define who I am.
I can recall his face, his voice, and everything he once meant to me, and still choose myself.
I can feel the ache, sit with it, and still say with calm certainty: not again, never again.

There was a moment, early in the remembering, when I slipped.
I messaged him, just once. It wasn’t longing; it was reflex.
My body, still catching up to what my heart was beginning to understand, reached for what once felt like home. But the moment I hit send, I realized I wasn’t trying to reconnect.
I was trying to close a loop. And when that loop reopened, I knew exactly what I had to do.

I blocked him, not in anger, not to punish, but to protect both myself and the version of me still vulnerable to forgetting.

For a moment, I almost slipped.
But I didn’t.
That’s part of healing, too: the stumble, the pause, the moment you catch yourself reaching for the past, and choose, for the first time, not to stay there.

Healing isn’t linear.
It isn’t a final destination you reach once and for all.
It’s a decision you keep making, every time you lean toward peace instead of chaos, clarity instead of confusion, safety instead of longing.
Every time you choose not to go back.

In the end, I remembered everything, but I didn’t reattach.
I didn’t try to rewrite the story.
Instead, I chose myself over him.

That’s what recovery looks like: not perfection, not closure, but clarity.
It’s the quiet triumph of choosing yourself, again and again, even when it’s hard.

This isn’t just healing; it’s reclamation.
I am no longer a footnote in someone else’s story, no longer the girl waiting to be chosen, understood, or redeemed.

And maybe that’s all I ever needed, not to forget, but to finally be free.
Forgetting him interrupted the loop my mother had started.
Remembering, and still choosing to walk away, ended the cycle.


In the end, forgetting wasn’t failure.
It wasn’t dysfunction. It wasn’t weakness.
It was mercy.

My nervous system walked away when I couldn’t, quietly, without drama or explanation.
It left through dissociation, the body’s last, most sacred defense.
They’ll call it amnesia, a trauma response, a clinical symptom.
But I call it intervention. I call it self—preservation.
I call it the moment my body saved my life without waiting for permission.

Sometimes healing doesn’t come through remembering.
Sometimes it arrives in the stillness, in the quiet, in the forgetting, when your mind, exhausted from harm, chooses absence as shelter.

And what an act of love that is, to forget someone who kept breaking you.
To leave, not through the door, but through the mind.
To disappear, not as defeat, but as survival.

I didn’t abandon myself. I abandoned the pain.
And that, too, was an act of survival.

I’m not just healing. I’m whole enough now to choose myself.
And I do so loudly, repeatedly, and with full awareness of what it cost me.
I’m someone who knows her worth now, not just in theory, but in practice.
I have a sense of self, an identity, I fought so hard to build from the moment I left my abusive mother’s house at 19.

I have been working ever since to know myself, slowly, painfully, and deliberately,
after years of being denied that right by a narcissistic parent who saw autonomy as betrayal.

And now, I write, not to be heard by him, but to hear myself clearly.
I’m no longer searching for someone to validate my pain.
I’m naming it myself.
This isn’t about changing the story.
It’s about telling it without distortion for the first time.

I will never abandon myself again, not for love, not for the comfort of the familiar, and not to keep someone else at ease.
I won’t shrink, silence, or erase myself just to be tolerated, wanted, or kept.

I know what I want, what I need, and I know my worth.
And if any connection, romantic or otherwise, requires me to forget who I am, neglect my needs, or abandon myself, I’ll walk away without apology.

I am someone who stays, but I am also someone who can leave.
And if I ever have to choose between love and myself, I will always choose me.

The girl who once wished to forget is gone.
The woman who woke up in her place will never forget herself again.

This isn't just a story about amnesia, it is also a story of memory, of choice, and of authorship.
He disappeared from my memory.

I returned to myself.