Truth Bombs is a creative space where storytelling becomes a form of healing. Here, we shape memory into meaning. Shanna Shock-A-Rama is a moniker, loosely inspired by an ex-girlfriend, Anna. Anna was the final chapter in a long pattern I acquired to fit in and convince myself I was likable. Anna was the third relationship I would qualify as being in love, and the ending to a lesson I did not yet know I was living.

Before Anna, I was tender without caution. I was generous, trusting, and forgiving to a fault. Love came easily to me, and I believed the best in people even when evidence suggested otherwise. After Anna, I was still those things, but something in me had been reforged. I learned to love myself with a fierceness that could not be taken from me. I learned to see clearly. I learned what the word love actually meant and how to give it to myself in ways that would reshape the rest of my life.

Lessons do not have to be painful, but this is how Anna chose to arrive in my story. I accept that was her choice. And I accept that I not only survived it but thrived beyond to become a version of myself I had no idea to even dream of. My found success later in life told me everything I needed to know about what I left behind.

Love is patient and kind, yes, but it is also accountable. It respects boundaries. It nurtures growth. It is honest and humble and full of joy. It was only through the harm Anna inflicted on me that I understood how profoundly someone can stand apart from what love is meant to be.

Some things Anna said to me:

• We hurt the ones we love the most

• She is not even my roommate anymore, she lives in Texas now

• I just want to have my cake and eat it, too

• She did not mean anything to me

• Too bad, life is unfair

• You blow everything out of proportion

• You are the love of my life

• You are my soulmate

• She does not want children, we are just having fun

• Can’t you just wait for me?

• I don’t view them as affairs, I think I am just polyamorous

Anna and I shared a deep love for drama and theatre. We both grew up in the art world and found a commonality with Shakespeare who wrote almost every poem in Iambic Pentameter. His most famous sonnet, Sonnet 18, was something that Anna learned how to sing to a tune.

“Should I compare thee to a Summer’s Day? Art thou more temperate and more lovely?” I remember how loving it felt in that moment to have someone recite a sonnet to me using iambic pentameter. One day in therapy, years after the last time I spoke to Anna, I was put under hyponsis. It was there that I remembered Anna sang that sonnet to me every time I would confront her about her affairs or manipulation of me—it was actually her way of calming me down.

We all carry moments like these. Words that shift the air in a room forever. For me, that shift did not arrive in a flash of realization. It unfolded gradually, over seven years. I believed I was in love, but I was entwined with someone living in a world built to protect their ego at any cost.

I did not yet know the language of narcissism. I did not know about supply or entitlement. I did not understand how someone could construct an entire reality where they are perpetually innocent, adored, and affirmed, even as they harm others. I did not know how they gather admirers who shield them from truth and help them avoid accountability.

For a long time, I believed the version of myself that Anna reflected back to me. I did not see the slow erosion of my own identity. I did not see how my world was being narrowed, my light dimmed, my voice softened into silence.

Then one day, after seven years of trying to be seen, a therapist looked at me and said:

“You are in an abusive relationship and you are not safe there.”

I rejected it. I fired her. I found another therapist. Two weeks later, the same truth rose to the surface again.

I had already entered grief and I was in denial stage.

I was not prepared for my anger stage. My anger was not a shapeless grief. It had a face. A voice. A name. It was directed at the person who manipulated the most sacred thing we have as human beings: the desire to love and be loved. It was directed at Anna. It was nasty, aggressive, and frighteningly loud. The more Anna clung to me, the more aggressive my anger grew. My body wouldn’t let me go back to her no matter what my heart said. My desire to protect myself had finally outgrown my desire to understand and love Anna.

There was no going back. Every phone call from Anna, every email, every text was a trigger to a volcano of rage that was boiling within. I finally took extreme measures to get away from her, and so too did Anna to maintain our connection. I forced silence, so she went to online stalking. For years, I took screen shots of all of it until I realized I was obsessed with “catching her.” She still looks me up online (even as recent as June and September of 2025) and I still take snapshots, but I have never posted my decades-long artifacts online. Some part of me still hopes that someday she can just respect my boundary for complete and absolute No Contact—something I have been committed to since 2009.

My body knew before my mind did. It began to pull me out. Anna tried to hold on, desperate to maintain the emotional sustenance I provided. I pushed back with a force I did not know I possessed. I wanted freedom from the pain she had caused me more than I wanted the fantasy of her.

In time, with support and quiet reflection, I reclaimed myself. I learned to draw boundaries where she had none. And when I finally walked away, I walked toward something. Myself.

If I found my way out, you can too.

Louise DeSalvo writes in Writing as a Way of Healing:
A healing narrative renders our experience concretely, authentically, explicitly, and with a richness of detail.

That is my purpose here.

This is not written to shame.
Not to expose.
Not to punish.

This is simply the truth, spoken plainly and with open hands, inviting you to see, and to feel, and to understand what transformation sometimes requires.

This is not only my view.
It is the resonance of every voice that has ever loved someone who could not love in return, and in mine case, couldn’t let me go.