Looking back, it’s hard to believe I stayed as long as I did. I lost so much of myself along the way, so much of who I was before he came into my life. Maybe It was how in love with him I was or how attached to him I was; I was so wrapped up in him, in trying to make things work, that by the end of the relationship, I didn’t even recognize who I had become.
We were long-distance, but somehow, that didn’t matter. He used it as his excuse to make me feel like I was always at fault like I was the one who had abandoned him. He’d say I “left” him, twisting my decision to chase my dreams, to focus on my future, into a betrayal. He’d make me feel like my degree didn’t matter, that my goals weren’t important, all because he was consumed by his own. He resented me for not being physically close to him, and the more he pulled away, the more I tried to convince myself that I was the one who needed to try harder. But in my head he was right. Yeah, I did leave. He just feels abandoned. I blamed myself for this.
And then there were the times he would slut shame me. accuse me of only going to Wales to sleep around, as if my ambitions were just a cover for something dirty, something shameful. It didn’t matter how much I loved him, how much I tried to prove my loyalty. In his eyes, my independence was a threat, my success an insult, and my absence a personal attack.
When I dropped out of university, at one of the lowest points in my life, instead of offering support or understanding, he shamed me for it. I was already lost, unsure of my next steps, and desperately trying to figure out who I was. But rather than lifting me up, he made it worse. “It’s embarrassing,” he said bluntly, adding that everyone thought so too, but no one wanted to tell me. Those words echoed in my mind, reinforcing every insecurity I already felt. Instead of being my partner, someone I could lean on, he turned my vulnerability into a weapon to belittle me. I blamed myself for this.
When I started painting my nails, he accused me of doing it for other guys. Like I couldn’t possibly just enjoy it for myself. Every little thing I did had to have some ulterior motive, some hidden agenda to seek male attention. I’d try to reassure him, to tell him it wasn’t like that, but he’d just reply with a cold, dismissive “sure.” Then he’d ask for space, so I’d give it to him, only for him to turn around and get mad that I wasn’t chasing after him, that I wasn’t constantly proving my love. It was a game I could never win. If I held on too tight, I was suffocating him. If I let go, I was abandoning him.
And those girls? You know which girls. They became his emotional crutch. The more far away I was, the more he surrounded himself with them, getting validation from their attention while I felt more and more invisible. It was like my life didn’t matter anymore, like I was just an afterthought to him, a side character in his story. I sacrificed so much of myself for him, for the relationship, trying to fit into a role that I was never meant to play. He would never say one bad thing about them, but he would say bad things about me. Anytime I would bring this up, he would call me crazy. He would accuse me of trying to control his life and his friendships. I would ask myself, “What do they have that I don’t?” "How could he be so nice to them and so mean to me?" "Why does he love them and not me?" I became desperate for his approval and his attention. I became desperate for his loyalty. I became desperate for his effort. I became desperate for the love he would give his girl friends. And again, I blamed myself for this.
One of the worst things was how he used my feelings against me. Like the time I told him I was frustrated because my long-distance friends weren’t reaching out to me as much as I was reaching out to them. I was just venting, but he turned it into a weapon. “What do you think they’d say if they knew what you told me?” he’d ask, his voice all twisted, making me feel guilty for simply expressing how I felt. “You talk shit about your friends all the time,” he’d say, and I’d be left confused, questioning myself. I didn’t know how to make sense of it, how to defend myself when he turned everything I said into something wrong. “All your friends hate you too.” He was so manipulative, I knew my friends would believe him without proof. Eventually, I got scared to even mention my grievances, because I knew he would twist them into something else. I blamed myself for this.
He had a knack of ruining everything I loved, as if it gave him some twisted sense of control. This website, which I poured my heart and creativity into, was nothing more than a joke to him. “You don’t know how to code, you know how to make websites,” he’d say, diminishing something that I was so proud of. When it came to the romance shows and books I enjoyed, he didn’t just dislike them, He’d whine and complain the entire time if we ever watched something I suggested until I was forced to shut it down. We always ended up watching One Piece, his favorite show, even though I hated anime. He was convinced I loved it too and I never had the heart to tell him that I didn't. I compromised, because I wanted to make him happy, even though he never met me halfway. He never missed a chance to mock what I loved. If I admired an artist, he’d make inappropriate comments about them just to make me jealous. During his best friend’s goodbye party, they started screaming inappropriate things at the SZA music video playing on the TV, my favorite artist. I had to excuse myself to the bathroom to cry in private so his beloved friends wouldn’t see. It wasn’t enough for him to not like the things I loved; he had to tear them down, to make sure I couldn’t enjoy them without hearing his ridicule. I blamed myself for the fact that he never truly liked something I like. How could he like me?
He genuinely believed he was better than me in everyway, he always had to be the smarter and nicer one and no one around him knows that it's all not true. It was never just dismissive, it was cruel. He’d take the things that made me happy and ruin them, turning my sadness into his joy. Upsetting me made him happy for some reason. He would purposefully say shitty things around his friends to embarass me, so I can keep up the "angry girlfriend" facade that he loved. He would tell everyone that he loved "the crazy ones" but little did anybody know that he made them crazy. "I would've hit if it wasn't for the chlamydia," He said once, in the car with his friends on the way to the beach. He was referring to one of my old friends. I was holding my tears and truly trying to understand why he would say something like that. I was so embarassed and angry and sad that I wanted to scream. How could he had been so cruel? What did I do to deserve such words from the guy that is supposed to love me more than anyone? At the beach, he would try to hug me in front of everyone, he thought that was a sufficient apology like he didn't just say one of the most hurtful things 30 minutes prior in the car. I think it was his attempt to embarass me even more. I blamed myself. How could I not? If I never made him mad he would've never said those things.
Remember how I told you about those girls? I read a text that he sent one of them saying he was “walking on eggshells” around me. Walking on eggshells? Walking on eggshells?? He didn’t tiptoe—he stomped on the eggshells, crushed them into dust without a second thought. “Walking on eggshells” isn’t slut-shaming your girlfriend or throwing insults at her like it’s a sport. It's not laughing with her and then starting a fight out of nowhere and blaming her for the fight that you just started. It's not ruining her character and slandering her name for all those who can hear. It’s not planting seeds of doubt where trust should have been. If anything, he was the eggshells and he would break them himself. He was fragile, messy, and impossible to avoid breaking. He didn’t tread carefully; he threw the eggs on the wall just to watch them shatter. He thrived in the chaos, liked to argue, liked to twist every fight until he riled me up. Maybe I was crazy, I was going crazy. "Walking on eggshells" was just another lie, a convenient story to make himself look innocent while he shattered and ruined me. And he succeeded because he managed to convince everyone around him and he ruined me deeply.
The name-calling, the ridicule for things everything that I loved, the constant shaming of my passions and interests. Ultimately, it all piled up. I never kept quiet though. I became this angry person. I would scream and yell in a desperate attempt to be heard by him. I stopped recognizing myself. "Why are you yelling at me?" He would ask. "I'm not going to speak to you if you're going to yell at me." No matter the volume of my voice I was still unheard. He’d use my vulnerability against me, make me feel like I wasn’t worthy of my own boundaries. I was just the girlfriend that was always mad. No one understood why he was still with me. I blamed myself for this.
And I kept staying. Because the only way to end it was for him to break up with me. I couldn’t get out on my own. Every time I tried, he made me feel like it was my fault, like I wasn’t doing enough, like I was the one who wasn’t trying hard enough. I became afraid of my own feelings. I was scared of what he might say next. I stayed, even when I knew I was losing myself, even when I knew it wasn’t right because I was so in love with him and I believed it was all my fault.
Three months in, I ruined our relationship. When I was asked about the craziest place I’d ever had sex, I answered honestly. It was something I didn’t think twice about at the time. I told them it was in a public bathroom with my ex. To me, it was a harmless response, something that felt normal, but little did I know. Looking back, I shouldn't had said anything. It was senseless and innapropiate. It was also no one's business and I didn't consider his feelings, I was just trying to impress his friends who are a very important and big part of his life. This was also around the time where our relationship wasn't toxic, and he after he would say this is how I ruined us. A full year after this happened, he’d throw it in my face, using it against me at every opportunity. He painted me as this evil, reckless person, convincing me I was an awful bitch and a slut for something that had happened before him. “YES I SLUTSHAME YOU BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT SLUTS DO.” I would sob. I’d plead for him to stop. “I’m just keeping you accountable,” He would say, after calling me the nastiest names. It didn't matter how many times I held myself accountable and apologized for this incident. He would use his words like a knife, cutting and stabbing me so deep that the damage still lingers. And somehow, I started to believe everything he would say. I was a slut. I was a cunt. I was a bitch. I was ashamed. It was my fault that he was calling me all those names. I blamed myself for everything.
His friends only made it worse. They encouraged him, fed into his paranoia, made me out to be some villain in his story. Once, one of them even said I was “fucked for a Pub Sub,” like I was nothing more than a cheap, meaningless exchange. Like my love, my sacrifices, everything I did to make it work meant nothing. I would get yelled at for making him a "cuck". It was isolating, debilitating. I felt like I was constantly trying to defend myself, not just to him, but to an entire crowd of people who had already decided I was guilty. Maybe they don’t know how he treated me, but I do genuinely believe that if they knew, they wouldn’t care. No matter how much I loved him, no matter how much I tried to prove I was in this for the right reasons, it was never enough.
I was too scared to reach out to my friends about this incident because I was embarrassed. I thought they’d judge me for it too, like he was. He already had stolen friends from me before. So I stayed silent. I kept it all inside, while he twisted the narrative, making me feel like the villain. And the more I tried to fight back, the more I started to question if maybe I really was the problem.
Exes would be a big topic of issue throughout our relationship. I had my own insecurities about his exes, but for him it was different. He would obsess over my ex, picking apart every detail he could find, and while I tried to understand (because I’ve struggled with retroactive jealousy too), he took it to a place I could never imagine going. I regretted so much ever telling him anything, and I wished and I prayed that I could turn back time just so I could erase everything that I've said. He would use the fact that my ex cheated on me as a way to cut me down. “I’m starting to understand why he did,” he said to me once, and I felt devastation wash over my body in waves. That one sentence stayed with me, replaying over and over, a cruel reminder of how deeply he could hurt me when he wanted to. It wasn’t just jealousy; it was something uglier, designed to leave scars. And yet, after all of this, he still expected me to trust him. He’d blame me for not trusting him, as if it was my fault, as if his actions hadn’t shattered the foundation of any trust I had left. His words cut me so deep, and they echoed in my head long after they were spoken. Suddenly, doubts and all these insecurities that I didn't have appeared in my mind. Getting cheated on hurt so much the first time, I was deathly scared that the guy that I loved most in the world would do the same. How was I supposed to trust him when he weaponized my pain, used my past against me, and made me feel unworthy of love? Trust wasn’t something I withheld, it was something he destroyed.
At the end, he stopped caring completely. He told me he was “mature” now, like he’d magically healed himself in two weeks, as if years of his behavior had suddenly disappeared with a snap of his fingers. He left me to carry the weight of being the “toxic one,” rewriting the narrative to make himself the victim. He lied and lied and lied, and then, just to twist the knife, he announced to his friends that he was going to break up with me—humiliating me even further, like all his promises meant nothing. He made me the crazy one. I yelled and yelled and yelled because none of it was fair. He broke me down, turned me into someone I didn’t even recognize, and now he was “mature”? It was all bullshit. He didn’t grow or change. When we broke up, he convinced me it wasn’t really the end. He told me we’d get back together in a year when I came back to Tallahassee, that he wasn’t interested in anyone else. He even came all the way to Panama to see me, and I believed him. I believed him because, at the time, I thought having a little piece of him was better than having none of him at all. I was scared because it seemed like my life revolved around him and his feelings. I was still trapped in this delusion that he loved me, that we loved each other, and that it wasn’t really over. I clung desperately to the idea that he wasn’t gone, that this wasn’t goodbye. But it was all a lie to soften the blow, which is ironic because he never cared about softening the blow before. And it hurt. Even though I was suffering in our relationship, it hurt. That shows the amount of love that I had for him.
Even though I believed it then, now I know I was never the problem. I didn’t deserve any of it. I didn’t deserve to be made to feel small, to lose myself, to lose my friends, to have this all happen to me. I was just trying to love someone who couldn’t see me for who I was. Perhaps him breaking up with me was the only way I could begin to remember who I am. The process of finding myself again is pending. I had to walk away from a relationship that didn’t value me, from someone who made me feel like I was nothing without him.
But I am something. And I am worthy of so much.
I am not a victim and I am not blameless in contributing to the toxicity of our relationship. I was in a verbally abusive, toxic cycle. I was delusional and I genuinely thought that he loved me back. I learned to manipulate and gaslight like him. I started to mirror his words and his reactions so he can know what it feels like. I started getting really angry over stupid things. I yearned for revenge, I yearned to make him feel like he made me feel, I yearned to make him understand, I yearned for validation, I yearned to show the world the truth. I would try to hurt him like he would hurt me. I've made wrong decisions and said the wrong things. He has his own side of the story. But on my side, I was unheard, unvalidated, and stuck in this story that didn't belong to me, all because I believed it was my fault and I had to make it up to the man I was in love with. This is my truth.
I’m writing my own story now. It’s not perfect, but it’s mine. I’m still trying to put together the pieces I lost. No more silencing myself. No more questioning my own worth. And I’m no longer willing to sacrifice who I am for anyone. Not for him, not for anyone.
Like Emma Chamberlain said, this guy had his fingers on every nook and cranny of my brain. I don't know how much time it'll take me to fully heal or to move on, but I'm getting to know myself. I shower myself with the patience and the love that he was unable to give me.
Before you get stuck, recognize the toxic pattern. Realize your own worth or you'll turn into someone you don't even recognize. There is so much happiness being alone. You don't ever need a partner to be fulfilled and happy, all you need is yourself. Learn to forgive youself. Learn to choose yourself. Learn to recognize your mistakes. Learn how to apologize for them. Learn to love the little things.
To those who are suffering the same I did, you are not alone and you are not what he makes you think you are.
All the love, Gabiroba <3