I once read a story about a woman who lived in a house with a fire alarm. Every night, A man would come inside and quietly light a match. At first, she calmly blew it out. And asked. Please don't do that again. He smiled. It was only a match. So, she wondered if perhaps she was making too much of it. Come. The next night, he lit another. Then another. Each time she noticed the smoke, he told her there was no fire. That she was worrying too much. That she was always looking for problems. So, she tried to become calmer. She stopped mentioning the smell of the smoke. Stop asking why he kept bringing matches into the House. Stop trusting what her own body was telling her. Until one night, the alarm finally went off. It was loud. Chaotic, Impossible to ignore. And suddenly he wasn't talking about the matches anymore. He was pointing at the alarm. "Look how loud you are." "Look how crazy this is." "Why do you always react like this?" And that's the part people outside the house heard. The alarm. Not the hundreds of tiny matches that came before it. So, they saw her reaction without ever seeing what she had been reacting to. Eventually, she started believing it too. She stopped asking. Why does he keep lighting matches? And started asking. Why can't I control my alarm? So, she worked harder at becoming quieter while he kept creating smoke. And this is why context matters. Sometimes the behavior everyone notices isn't where the story began. A nervous system can tolerate, suppress, explain, and accommodate for a very long time before it finally screams that something isn't safe here. Accountability without context can become another way of hiding the pattern. As if you could take responsibility for your reaction without taking responsibility for what repeatedly provoked it. So, before you spend your whole life trying to silence the alarm, ask yourself something else: who keeps lighting the matches? Because sometimes healing isn't becoming better at tolerating the smoke. It's finally walking out of the burning house.
Thank you, Instagram reels algorithm for bringing me this nugget.
"And she'll continue to smile, no matter how hurt she is." Today, writing this, is the kind of day that leaves me wishing that tequila came out of my shower. Leave it up to me to find medication that will completely quit me if I consume even a drop of it.
I've sat on talking about this for the better part of seven months. But I think it's going to be a big moment for me to have the courage to actually hit the POST button. Apparently, when an undiagnosed Autistic/ADHD Pisces suffers long-term emotional abuse from childhood, they ask their abuser(s) repeatedly to tell them and keep track of the things that are wrong with them, so that they can learn how to become more lovable. This story is hard for me to share because the powerful, take-no-shit girl you see on here got so manipulated and brainwashed that she eventually got to this point. I was unrecognizable to myself and my close friends, a shell of myself. One friend even described the relationship as "hostage negotiations with kissing." I was alone for 4 years before he crossed my path. And I somehow made myself believe that it was fate. The one before that, my best friend and I of ten years attempted to date after a catastrophic breakup, only to open social media on Christmas morning to find him engaged to someone else that I didn't even know that he was seeing. It's been seven months since the end; I have been "B-free", as one of the loves of my life in the form of my best friend put it. And I can say that these past two months in my new place, for the first time, I truly feel like me again. I know that I've said it in a previous post, but every single day that I GET TO wake up is a day that my 14-year-old self never believed that I would have. I hope I live to see the day when the universe stops blaming someone for picking the wrong partner and starts blaming them for pretending to be someone that they aren't in order to get what they want.
The only karma I wish on anyone is that they receive themselves in another person.
Once you leave an abusive relationship, you think to yourself, like, "Good God. I really got out of that." But what you don't realize- I mean, I don't think that anyone really realizes it fully until they're out- is that there are all of the moments where you realize that it was way worse than you let yourself believe, and you let yourself believe it wasn't that bad because you were determined to make it work no matter what. What was I failing at? I was failing at not being a people-pleasing pain in the ass who completely abandoned herself in order to be liked, per usual. Like, self-abandonment on full send, all while gaslighting myself into believing that I wasn't. So, I'm out of that survival mode, and I feel safe, finally. Did I have another crash out of my nervous system? Absolutely. It quit on itself after being out of my mentally, financially, and emotionally abusive dynamic. Days after I processed what was really happening and completely ended it, my entire system crashed. And once it crashed, I was able to understand, "Hey, I've got to do a lot more for myself than just some talk therapy." I finished my degree and graduated on the same weekend that I moved. I know, sort of psychotic of me, but I managed, even when I didn't think I could. I got back into yoga. I got into gratitude journaling. I got more into meditation. I have a cocktail of medication that is helping me be the most emotionally regulated person I have ever been in my entire life. I recognized that with them in the picture, I only published two pieces last year because they were so critical of me and anything that made me happy that they would make me never want to write again; while simultaneously forcing me into the mindfuck that was gloating about how proud they are of me, and how they knew that by that time last year that I was going to be a best-selling author. Everything had to be about them and what they wanted, or it was a fight. Now, I connected back with my spiritual sense of self, and I really focused on: What do I need to eat differently? How do I need to live differently? All of these things came up that said, I have to take my health so seriously because I already lost so many years of my life to someone (many, but that will come later) who was just sucking me energetically dry day in and day out. How do I make sure that I get to show up for me, so that I get to show up for my life, so that I get to show up for other people and show them that this is the way that we get to live?
A version of myself not too long ago would have rather counted a swimming pool filled with glitter than work through that thought process. Be proud, damn it.
After abuse and coercive control being the only thing that existed from the moment you open your eyes that day until you lay your head down, for 22 months, the world looks very different. Sleeping with them without protection WHILE they were cheating on me, shaming me for wanting to have sex with them if I initiated it - so that I would hate myself and not seek out other attention, forcing me to unfriend and unfollow any and all accounts that they didn't like on my social media while on theirs following around all things inappropriate by their standards and reasoning for yours, lying to me about all of the things they could do if only they had a truck - and I could help them get that and never pay me back the thousands of dollars owed to me for it because the second they had it they became an entirely different person. That is abuse. The silent treatment is abuse. Any time he flipped a switch and wanted to, I would be blocked with no means of communicating with him otherwise until he was over it and came back. One time, in July of last year, shortly after being diagnosed with diabetes, I had one of the most terrifying episodes where my sugars were over 400, and I couldn't stay awake. I was supposed to be helping him with an upcoming court case with one of his ex-wives. His response? To get mad at me for being sick. I was not aware of how high my sugars were; I was just terrified that I couldn't stay awake if I sat down. I had him drive me home, where he took off with my car (without a license that was taken away because he refused to pay child support, btw) and blocked me so I couldn't call him for help, and when I woke up hours later feeling the same way and checked my glucose, I had to call an ambulance to get to the hospital three minutes from my house. I also had to order an Uber to get home. Withholding finances is abuse - and he was a master manipulator at that. His exes were the devil, not moms raising children that he also needed to help pay for. He acted as if they were subhuman for wanting their children to be safe with an alcoholic. He would refuse to work because he didn't want to claim it. To this day, he owes me $2,000 for his truck, never mind that I paid for everything the entire time we were together. Boundaries of any kind ended with him acting like Rumpelstiltskin. After a fight, telling him to not come over to my home would never be enough to keep him away. It was bone-chilling to see him on the security camera. All masks fall eventually. After a year of listening to the narrative that he had a key to get into his ex-wife's house after she filed a protection order, he admitted to keying the door. Gaslighting is abuse. I was met with accusations of control and abuse if I even asked him if he had a good time when he would tell me that he was out with friends. I could never ask him about what he was doing when we weren't together, or I was controlling. Yet, if I wanted alone time, or time with my friends, I would be punished with silence. Hell, there was even one time that we were planning our day, and I was taking a mental inventory of things, and as a joke, I asked him what he was planning to do with the 12-pack of ginger ale that he had put on his side of MY bed back in June. It was September. He flipped a switch, going from my amazing partner that I was looking forward to spending a perfect Sunday with to a troll who screamed at me the entire time that he was collecting his things in my home about what a control freak I am, and left. And yet, I am certain that I would have received the same exact response if I had just moved them myself. And I wasn't the only one that he treated that way. Listening to conversations with his mom made me want to body slam him; he was so terrible verbally and emotionally to her. She also has paid for his every whim and bailed him out of his own mistakes for decades. I saw in his phone text messages that were volumes of nothing but lies to get money out of her. And she would do it, while he complained that she was working to support him at nearly 70, because all of the things that "his ex-wives did to him caused him to be mentally ill so he couldn't work." Infidelity is abuse. He attempted repeatedly to tell me that the condoms that he kept in his coat pocket and in his car were old and he just carried them around for no reason. Multiple times over, he was on dating sites posting photos that I had taken of him during moments that I believed were my dream relationship. Sent to me by people who knew me and were also begging me to leave.
And I hope this helps, because if you're googling or asking chat or even just crowdsourcing an opinion, "Hey, does this constitute abuse?" And if you're truly asking those questions, you're already in a bad situation. You're in an even worse situation when you're sending your friends secret emails with videos, screenshots, and recordings of the account that just happened to make sure you remember the terror you were feeling in that moment, titled, "IN CASE I'M DEAD." Yes. That happened. Once would have been enough, but there were four of them. Months apart from each other, by the way, because he knew which screw to turn, but again, all masks fall eventually. He needed my help. Then it is time to seriously reevaluate what is going on, listen to the tiny screaming voice saying, "GET THE FUCK OUT," and for the love of Pete, get a fucking therapist. The funny thing is that I have had one for the past ten years. Somehow, this person infiltrated themselves into my life to the point where he insisted on having the same doctor and convinced me to convince my therapist to take him on as a patient also. Nothing was allowed to be just mine. Par for the course in my life. I have never truly had anything that is just mine. Ever. Listen to your bestie, listen to your family. Listen to the first sign of disrespect. The first attempt to control. It is huge that you take the time to reevaluate where you are and to start working on every aspect of your life as something that needs to heal, because the lens that you saw the world through before was tainted by a person who wanted you to see it from their extremely narrow scope so that you would not ever leave them, or so that they could maintain their control over you.
Sometimes healing looks like replaying the things you wish you'd said, or finally saying the things you never could. But the truth is, you're not really talking to them; you're talking to the parts of you that still ache to be understood, the version of yourself that stayed, the one who kept hoping, and the one who believed love could fix it this time. That's what makes it so hard to let go; you're not holding on to the person; you're holding on to the story of who you thought they were. Healing isn't about forgiving them first; it's about forgiving yourself for not leaving sooner, for betraying your own feelings, for not trusting your instincts when your body already knew the truth. Perhaps it was the constant anxiety attacks, or the visions that I would have of me packing all of his stuff and dropping it off at his mother's house almost daily. Surely, I couldn't have listened to the fact that with every fight, I was suicidal, because I had no idea how I was going to be rid of him otherwise. I don't know if I'll ever be a wife or even a girlfriend again in this lifetime. I healed to get myself ready, but somehow. I just can't see it anymore. Every time I've tried, I realize my peace is too expensive.
And if they knew what it cost to become this version of me,
the first date wouldn't even happen because they wouldn't even attempt it.
I have done a lot of healing work. Mostly starting with my childhood. Talking over the darkest, most programmed parts of oneself is never easy. Remembering, as a toddler, my mother slapping me until I stopped crying is the most likely reason that I still, to this day, have no idea what an appropriate emotional reaction to anything really is. I was settling for crumbs when I was serving feasts - to everyone. I was programmed to fear being left, because everyone did. I was programmed to perform for love. I finally had to come to terms with realizing that some of what I had excused in the most sacred inner sanctum of my life was not a badge of honor for my ability to compromise. It was betraying myself and taking less and less in return. Every. Damn. Time. For what I consistently chose to give, I wasn't being mature. I wasn't doing the grown-up thing. I wasn't settling down. Yeah, I was settling for crumbs when I was serving feasts; I was broken and drowning completely alone, and when I wasn't, I was ridiculed and judged, and one day, I went, "I'm done." Sure, it took a catastrophic loss of three of my grandparents to realize just how alone I really have been this entire time. Yes. Everybody's going to have something to say. Yes. Everybody's going to think they know why, while not a single one has asked me. Yes. And everybody will do the thing that people love to do to women, especially ones that are different than them. Blame is their favorite game. Not one time did anyone ask why or look at themselves. I am the only person in my entire family that is in therapy. I am the only person in my entire family taking any responsibility for what they did to me. I know what's real; I know what's true. And I have finally learned to stop the Sisyphean task of pushing the boulder up the hill all day, every day, like it's my life sentence. I dropped the rock, and then I jumped in the river, and I became whatever this is. I like her more.
He has a new supply, and they are engaged. I was told by the mother during a dinner get-together that she had rescheduled repeatedly, as if she was trying to avoid me. I had a panic attack because I had zero interest in knowing anything about him or what he was doing. I made an excuse to leave, and I didn't apologize for it. It actually sickened me to know that the engagement that I experienced three weeks into knowing him was just another pattern he's holding onto like Thor's hammer. The text that I sent her a few days after, falling on the sword, apologizing for leaving and explaining why, went ignored. Yes, the same woman that I had to cut out of my life because, as the male-centered bitch she has always been, she would much rather continue to label me as the dramatic and crazy one that I have been since birth than an actual person having an appropriate response to being disrespected to their core. Again, for another time.
What I've learned from dealing with people like that, and seeing what they have now, is that for a man, losing an incredible woman can feel like freedom. Not because she was the problem. But because now he doesn't have to face himself. He can go back to his old habits. His half-efforts, his emotional immaturity. And call it peace. And I used to think if I was just easier to love, he would have stayed. What I've learned: a man who runs from a good woman isn't running from her. He's running from everything she reflects back at him. My standards made his comfort zone feel small; my growth made his stagnation visible. The weekend before I restarted my classes that I had put off in 2024 because, well, frankly, everyone kept dying, so I needed a minute, was one of the emails my friends got. He really tried his damnedest to keep everything about him and me, making him my top priority. My standards made his comfort zone feel small. My self-respect made his patterns impossible to maintain. So, he left and called it peace. But peace and avoidance are not the same thing. One day he'll understand the difference, and by then I'll be someone else's peace. Even if it's only my own.
Someone said, "Stop comparing yourself to people who have support systems." And that struck deep. People really assume I never went through anything just because I stayed levelheaded, not miserable. At least on the outside. At least.
ANSWER ME THIS:
If someone you give an iota of a fuck about at all came to you and said, "Hey parent/friend, this person that I have been dating had me so terrified of them this morning that I spent two hours after I made them leave crying in the bottom of my shower." Would you continue to have anything to do with that person they were dating? Because that is precisely what happened.
My grandfather had a horrible freak accident after one of the best family bonfires I think my family has had in decades and was in the hospital fighting for his life. That Monday, October 27, was this person's birthday. Upon waking, I was baited into a fight over nothing, as usual, and I was already spent in every way they can be when they're processing a metric fuckton of grief. He knew that I was programmed since childhood not to turn on the shower water until I was ready to get in, so the moment that he heard the shower running, he knew that I would be naked and vulnerable, and he burst through the door playing the recording, and I didn't know that he took of what we were discussing during the argument, with a look on their face that showed them to be a completely different, terrifying person, screaming at me until my only recourse was to scream at them between sobs to leave. The fight had already made it so that I was hours late to meet my family at the hospital before work. What did that son of a bitch do? He went to his own place (he was renting a room from his friend) and got my mom a really nice fuzzy blanket and brought my family coffee and donuts while I was sobbing and terrified in my own home. Before I left, I called my mom to ask if he was at the hospital because I did not want to be near him, and I didn't want him to be anywhere near them, and I told her some of what happened, including the fact that multiple times over he has brought me to the brink of suicide at that point, and her response was to laugh at me. I felt like I was insane.
What followed was three weeks of him acting one minute like a knight in shining armor who held me while I sobbed, and the next day drinking to the point of passing out, and then screaming at me the next day for coming up with ideas of fun things to do with his kids to make myself feel superior. You know, because it wasn't because I cared and loved his children like they were my own, as one should. He was too busy making me cut ties with my own kids to form a bond with anyone that I knew. My papa passed on my nanny's birthday. November 12. That morning, I woke up from a lucid dream about the two of them dancing to their wedding song, and less than twenty minutes later I got the call to get to the hospital. A piece about that time and about my family more in depth is for another time. It was, and still is, hell. I know that I have said the sentiment that it's not a place you go to but rather something you carry around with you, and I have felt it even more since that day.
This isn't about proving him to be the way that he is. It isn't about proving that I was abused, because obviously my nervous system is healing and proving it to be so. What I realized, seemingly way too late, is that his behavior of Five-alarm distress signals that were allegedly "brand new" since things happened with the mothers of his children "teaming up on him" was actually a very sick, calculated, perfected set of behaviors that he had curated over decades, because he kept getting away with it.
Some of you have never been told repeatedly that you're crazy or that you are doing things that you know you're not doing or saying things that you know that you haven't said, to the point where you start to believe it. Where you are so convinced that maybe I could do these things. Maybe I did say these things; you confess to things that you know you didn't do. Can you start to accept this version of the truth that you know doesn't exist? But then you start to wonder what does exist? And it really shows, and I love that for you. So anyways, hope this helps. I won't say the name of the nationally known court case all over social media right now where a mother is being accused of trying to kill her three children and then attempting to kill herself. And yet, every single piece of evidence is pointing to her husband being the one who actually did it and, at bare minimum, caused her psychosis. And honestly, an entire army of women knows he did. Not because we were there, but because we've all been there. We survived that kind of man. Here I am. We are the mothers who know just how dark things can get behind closed doors. We know the charm, the performance, the carefully constructed version everyone else gets to see. And we know the version that comes out when no one is watching. We know what it feels like to tell the truth and have people question you because he seems so believable. We know how abuse can exist without leaving a bruise anyone else can see. We know how a woman can slowly disappear inside a relationship while the world continues to call him a good man. So, when something feels familiar, we recognize it with every atom we're made of. Gone are the days when we no longer call it out, keep it close to the chest, and writhe in pain on the inside. Once you've lived behind that curtain, you never look at the performance the same way ever again.
Portraying someone as unstable to cover up your own harmful or criminal actions against them is generally described as character assassination and psychological manipulation.
I used to think being a 10 out of 10 child meant always being available. I've listened to everything, shown up no matter what, forgiven quickly, and put everyone's needs before my own. I thought that's what it meant to be a good child. Until I realized I was giving so much of myself that there was barely anything left for me. The breaking point wasn't one betrayal. It was realizing how often I ignored my own feelings just to keep the peace. How often I accepted the bare minimum because I was scared of losing people. How many times I tasted blood in the name of biting my tongue to remain looking like I belonged. Now I'm learning that being a good child doesn't mean abandoning yourself to be there for someone else. You can love people deeply and still have boundaries. You can care and still say no. You could show up for others without constantly putting yourself last.
Maybe I'm not the same kind of friend I used to be. But I'm finally a friend to myself.
"We were both choosing you, so who was going to choose me?" That quote wrecked me, because that is what happens when you love someone so much that the entire relationship slowly becomes about keeping them. Unfortunately, it took me until I started to process that relationship before I realized that I was being treated like that by the majority of people I met up to that point. It was easy to do; the twenty fires I was overwhelmed with trying to put out meant that the stuff that I was already used to dealing with was just an ant at my picnic.
You're considering their feelings, giving them another chance, trying to understand why they hurt you. You're making excuses for what they're going through; you change the way that you communicate so that they don't shut down; or swallowing things that you shouldn't have to swallow just to keep the peace. And then even you start calling your own needs too much, because asking for the bare minimum keeps ending in an argument. When I met him, my proverbial "bar" was already on the ground, and I was quickly programmed to keep it buried so far near the Earth's core that it was nearly incinerated. You stop bringing things up because you already know how exhausted you were going to feel afterward. So, you cry and recover quietly, and you wake up the next morning like your heart didn't just break the night before. Meanwhile, they're thinking about themselves too: what they want, what they need, what they can get away with, and how much you are going to forgive. Somehow, there are two people in that relationship, and both of them are taking care of the same person- them! Meanwhile, you're getting smaller and smaller to make enough room for somebody who was never worried about how much space they were taking from you, and that part hurts so much when you see it. You were fighting for the relationship, but nobody was fighting for you. You were making sure that they felt loved, while quietly wondering why being loved by you never seemed to make them want to protect your heart. You're so afraid of losing them that you don't even notice how much of yourself you have already lost trying to keep them. I kept asking, "Why don't you choose me?" when I should have been asking, "Why did I stop choosing myself?"
So, I stopped waiting for someone who had every opportunity to choose me and kept choosing themselves. I stopped calling it love when I had to disappear inside of it just to make it work, and for the first time in a long time, I chose me- not because I stopped loving him, but because I finally understood that if loving anyone required losing me, then losing them was the only way I was ever going to get myself back. One extremely Horse pill-sized thing I didn't want to swallow is that true relationships require mutual effort. I used to invest in relationships where the other person only appeared when it started to hurt them. Now, I make sure to dedicate my time and energy to those who generally reciprocate. It's made my friendships feel more authentic than ever.
No matter how I want to and choose to grieve this,
the conclusion is and will remain the same:
I will bleed for better reasons, from here on in.
