Who were you before?

This module asks you to do something that sounds simple and is not: describe yourself without reference to your partner. If you have been in a hard relationship for a long time, you may find the description comes out thin, or in the past tense, or not at all. The thinness is the finding, and it is why this module comes before any of the ones about deciding.

Why this comes first

Every decision about a relationship is a comparison. Stay, and this is the life. Leave, and that is the life. People get stuck not because the comparison is hard but because one side of it has gone blank. They can describe the relationship in detail, with its good days and bad, and when they try to picture the alternative they see a flat, a bank balance, an empty evening. Nothing to weigh.

The blankness comes from years spent inside one frame, and says nothing about the alternative. If your attention has been on another person's moods, needs and reactions for a long time, the part of you that used to have its own plans has simply been out of use. It is still there. This module is for getting it back into view, not so that you will leave, but so that whatever you decide, you are deciding between two real things.

What tends to go missing

People in your position describe losing roughly the same set of things, usually without noticing the loss as it happened.

People. Not a dramatic falling-out. A friend who got a mood from your partner, so you saw her less. A brother you stopped ringing because it caused a scene. Colleagues you no longer go for a drink with. Each one reasonable at the time. Together, a life with fewer witnesses in it.

Places. The gym, the pub quiz, the choir, your mum's kitchen. Places you went on your own, where you were known as yourself.

Work. Perhaps literally: hours cut, a promotion not pursued, a job left because of what it did to things at home. Perhaps more quietly: ambition that stopped being mentioned because it was never well received.

Interests. The thing you did on Sundays. The thing you were going to get back into. The thing your partner found a bit much.

Reputation. What you were known for. Being the funny one, the organised one, the one who always turned up. People who have been made small over years often say that the strangest loss is this one: they cannot remember what they were like.

The writing below takes each of these in turn. Write freely. If you are signed in, it saves encrypted and only you can read it. If you are not, copy it somewhere that is yours. Nobody is marking this.

Reading what you wrote

Look back at the three pieces and notice a few things.

Notice the tense. If almost all of it is in the past, that tells you something about how much of you is currently in use. It does not tell you the relationship is to blame. People change and lives narrow for many reasons. But it does tell you that the alternative you have been failing to picture has material in it.

Notice who is still reachable. Of the people you named, who could you ring this week? Not to talk about the relationship, necessarily. Just to be the person they knew. One of the assessment questions asks whether you have a single person outside the relationship you can be fully honest with. If you have just written down three or four, you may have answered that question too quickly.

Notice what cost nothing. Some of what went missing will have been given up for reasons you still stand by: you had children, you moved, you grew out of it. Some will have been given up because of a reaction, a mood, a cost. Only the second kind is the subject of the next module.

For the person reading over your shoulder

A few readers of this module are not the partner whose life has narrowed. They are the other one, reading what their partner has been reading. If that is you: notice what happened in you as you read it. If the thought was something like "they have never been stopped from doing anything", ask yourself whether they have been free to, or merely not forbidden. There is a module written for you: Am I part of the problem?

What this is not

This is not an instruction to go back to who you were. Nobody can, and you may not want to. The person you were before had less experience and may have made the choices that led here. Nor is it a claim that the relationship took these things from you. Some were given, some were traded for things you value, some just went. The point is only that you have them in view again, and so you can choose what to do about them.

Update your profile

Answer for how things are now.

This exercise updates your profile (Self). You can change your answers later.

Where to go next

• What this has cost you: the inventory, now that you have something to measure against.
• Getting back to centre: fourteen days of small things that put some of this back in use, whatever you decide.
• Is this danger?: if, writing about the people you lost, you noticed that each of them went because of a reaction.