Realize

You are not confused because something is wrong with you. You are confused because you are holding two things that cannot both be true, and you have been holding them for a long time.

The doubt is going to come back. That is not a relapse. That is what this movement is.

Let me tell you where I was standing

He told me he needed space, that he was going out to the garage to work, and that I was to stay inside. By then I had heard versions of this before, and the clues had been stacking up for a long time, so even as he said it I felt the familiar wrongness move through my body; the headache blooming behind my eyes, my stomach turning over on itself, the adrenaline rising like I was about to be hunted, standing there in my own kitchen, in my own house, being told to stay put like a child.

So I didn't stay. I slipped out the back and took the long way around, up the hill across the road where I could look down and see the garage, the driveway, and him. It took about twenty minutes. A car pulled up, he got in, and then he was gone for days.

Here is what I need you to understand about that moment on the hill. I did not end up there because of one betrayal. I ended up there because of a hundred small ones I had spent months, maybe years, teaching myself to explain away.

Why you keep taking it back

Every time I got close to naming it, he would reach for me. A song would arrive after he had hurt me, something meaningful, and he would become loving and affectionate and find all the right words, and they would make me melt, and I would fold the suspicion back up and put it away.

That is not weakness, and I need you to underline that. That is the trap working exactly as it was built to work.

The cold knowing, then the warm reassurance. Over and over, until you cannot tell anymore which of the two to trust.

That is why the doubt returns. It was installed. It fires hardest at the exact moment you get closest to the truth, and it will fire again this week.

What helps right now

Write one sentence. Not a list. Not a case. One sentence of what happened, in plain language, for nobody but you. You are practicing the act of saying a true thing without immediately taking it back.

Name one tactic you survived. Just one. The one that made your stomach drop when you read it. Naming is not about cataloguing his cruelty. It is how you get your reality back.

Believe your body before you believe your mind. While my mind was being talked in circles, my body was keeping a steady, honest record the whole time. I did not decide any of that. It happened in me, underneath the level where he could argue with me.

What does not help

Waiting for him to admit it. You think the admission is what will let you stop doubting. It is not coming, and it would not work. Your certainty cannot be issued by the person who took it.

Reading everything. There is a point where research becomes another way of asking permission to believe yourself.

Where to go next

You are not paranoid. You are not crazy. You are not too much.

Chapters 1 through 3 of It Was Never You are this movement, all the way through. The body, the machine, and why it was never your fault. Read the book.

And I write letters most weeks for women in exactly this fog. Read the letters.