“Gaslighting isn’t just confusion. It’s erosion.”
They never liked me.
Not really.
His mother blamed me for everything. Every mood, every mistake, every crack in the picture-perfect family she wanted to see.
He was never held accountable. Not once.
He could lie, cheat, disappear, and somehow, I still became the villain. The bad influence. The problem.
All I ever wanted was to love him and build a family. A normal, quiet life.
Sunday dinners.
School plays.
Birthdays that didn’t end in shouting.
But he couldn’t stay faithful or committed.
He never gave straight answers to anything.
Everything somehow turned back on me.
At first, I tried to defend myself.
Then I started defending him.
And somewhere in between, I stopped recognizing myself.
Gaslighting isn’t just confusion.
It’s erosion.
It’s waking up one day and realizing you don’t trust your own memories, your own thoughts, your own eyes.
He would break a promise, then insist I misunderstood.
He would do something in private, then act like it never happened in public.
Worse, sometimes he would do things on purpose — small, sharp provocations — just to make me react.
When my anger spilled out, he stayed calm.
Collected.
He looked like the reasonable one.
I looked like the unstable one.
In everyone else’s eyes, he was the calm, patient man trying to manage his dramatic girlfriend.
And I was the angry, unstable woman who couldn’t control herself.
Even I didn’t like myself in those moments.
I hated the sharpness in my own voice.
The way I felt completely out of control.
But those reactions weren’t who I was.
They were the result of what he was doing.
It was like he was pulling invisible strings, turning me into a version of myself I didn’t even recognize, just to prove his point.
Over time, I stopped asking if he was lying.
And started asking if I was crazy.
Maybe I’m too sensitive.
Maybe I imagined it.
Maybe I’m the problem.
I learned to scan his face before speaking.
I edited my words before they left my mouth.
I walked on eggshells in my own home.
And then came the hardest part, mothering through it.
I would stand at Finn’s school concerts with a smile fixed on my face, clapping until my hands stung, while inside I felt hollow.
I would braid Harlow’s hair for picture day, whispering encouragement I didn’t believe for myself.
But I showed up.
I kept showing up.
And every night I collapsed onto the couch, convinced I wasn’t enough.
Not as a woman.
Not even as a mother.
Some days I thought about disappearing.
And still, somehow, I clawed my way back from that edge.
Over and over.
It started small.
I began writing down what happened.
Not just the words he said, but the way I felt when he said them.
I began reading old entries and seeing the patterns.
I began naming the gaslighting for what it was.
Little by little, I built a ladder out of my own words.
And one day, I reached a rung high enough to see over the fog.
It didn’t make the shame disappear overnight.
It didn’t heal the wounds.
But it gave me a foothold.
It gave me a way to tell myself something I had almost forgotten how to believe.
This isn’t my fault.
(NEXT – CHAPTER 8: ECHOES)