Not A Second Time: Learning Where The Line Is
Series: What the Songs Told Me After the Damage Was Done
Music doesn’t usually shape the way I think.
But sometimes it names what’s already happening inside me before I can.
Anyone who knew me before knows I’ve always been a Beatles fan. That part of me survived everything else. Their music doesn’t beg for relevance—it just stays. And every now and then, a song I’ve heard a hundred times stops being background noise and starts feeling like a diagnosis.
Right now, there are three of those songs. This is the first.
“Not a Second Time.”
Quick note before I go further: I’m quoting short excerpts of the lyrics for commentary and personal reflection, and I’ll link to the official, authorized version of the song. This isn’t about reproducing it. It’s about what it exposed.
The first verse wastes no time:
“You know you made me cry.
I see no use in wondering why I cry for you.”
That’s the whole thing, right there. No drama. No speeches. Just acknowledgment.
The end of a marriage hurts. That’s obvious. What caught me off guard wasn’t the pain—it was the confusion layered on top of it. I knew I’d been hurt. I knew she knew. And still, I found myself grieving the marriage anyway. Mourning something that had already crossed into unsafe territory.
My therapist says that’s normal.
I don’t care.
Normal doesn’t make it easier to live with.
Where the song really started pressing on me was what followed. The next verses blur together emotionally, even if the music separates them. This doesn’t feel like a story about someone changing their mind. It feels like a story about mixed signals—and the damage they do.
“You’re giving me the same old line, I’m wondering why?”
That line landed hard. There were moments of warmth. Moments of apparent concern. Moments where I let myself be honest about what was happening in my head. And then—without warning—the tone would flip.
The line that finally stopped me was this:
“You hurt me then, you’re back again.
No, no, no, not a second time.”
That wasn’t about resentment.
That was about recognition.
For a long time, I thought the pain was the problem. It wasn’t. The real damage came from letting someone keep access to me after they’d already shown me how they’d use it. I was vulnerable in good faith. Those words were later thrown back at me—used to justify decisions about my children, and to rationalize the misuse of authority I had entrusted her with.
That’s when it clicked.
“Not a second time” stopped sounding like anger and started sounding like a boundary. Not cruelty. Not punishment. A line I should have drawn earlier, but didn’t know how.
Compassion without boundaries isn’t kindness. It’s self-erasure.
The song repeats itself and then ends. That feels right. Grief doesn’t resolve cleanly. Lessons don’t stick the first time they’re taught. Repetition doesn’t mean failure—but it does mean responsibility.
This isn’t about blame. It isn’t about rewriting the past. It’s about the moment I understood that protecting myself wasn’t optional—and it wasn’t wrong.
This is Part One.
The next songs surface different truths: avoidance, distance, and the kind of acceptance that still hurts even when it’s necessary. For now, this one marks the first time I could say it honestly and mean it:
I see the pattern.
And I won’t step back into it.
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