it took 5 years to leave my abuser pt.2 / Ramble #8

This is absolutely a part two to my last blog.. If you haven’t read it, i recommend you do before reading this one. Once again, for YEARS i didn’t realize i was being abused at all, and I hope explaining my story will help other people out of situations like mine before it gets BAD.. 

in short: I was emotionally abused by my bestfriend for 5 years.

anyways. It’s been a day or two since me and my abuser, Anon (not their real name.. short for anonymous) have parted ways and i’ve actually taken time to look back at old receipts from the last 5 years and realized it has always been THAT bad. Even now i still doubt myself for everything. It’s really hard to believe that someone that i loved with everything i could, was actually tearing me apart like totally, or better words, emotionally abusing me.

 A lot of people who haven’t been in abuse always seem to think “if they were hurting you, why didn’t you leave?”, but it’s really not that simple at all. I can’t speak for all victims, but for me at least, I always was attached to all the “highs” and good times where everything was “good”. Then times where they’d hurt me, I’d be terrified to leave because what if there’s a chance it’ll get better again? or what if i’m just crazy and delusional like they say i am? Or how much i’ll miss how sweet they are to me. It goes on and on. It became this cycle til i got to a point where i genuinely did not trust myself at all, i could barely even make decisions myself because my abuser had gaslit me and kept me in this cycle and convinced me that i’m a crazy person who just gets delusional. 

I went back through my old diaries recently, and i realized just how many times i tried to leave but convinced myself i just didn’t understand. I thought it was only recently how my bestfriend had “completely changed” but i have journal entries from 3-4 years ago complaining about that exact same issues. Each and every entry repeated itself verbatim every single time, and somehow, i stayed. When my abuser crashed out on me, they explained how “I only hold onto nostalgia from when we were REAL friends” (first of all.. they never said this until i complained to THEM directly that THEY held onto nostalgia.. sorry besides the point), but looking back at entries from that point in time, I was CONSTANTLY hanging by a thread, one entry would consist of how horrible i was feeling and how i felt like everything still had to be about Anon, and how i felt like i had been “baby sitting them constantly so they wouldn’t hurt themselves” (softening my language ofc..), how much it felt like Anon just didn’t care at all how i felt. But then the next entry would be about how much i LOVED Anon, and how i love them so much that i “physically dont have enough love to love anyone else”, and that i “only needed Anon in my life to be happy”. It was back and forth nearly every entry. I even had letters drafted from times i tried to break off our friendship, but i never had the guts to give. I didn’t trust myself enough to think i was doing the right thing.

It’s not like all these issues were ever unknown. I brought them up all the time, posted angsty things, been VISIBLY upset. and, when i did throw a big enough fit about how much Anon was upsetting me, then i’d finally be acknowledged. I’d get this same old response every time, just text book soulless bs. “I love you so much, hurting yourself is never the answer. I care about you so much and no one else understands me like you do. You know i’ll always love you.” And then nothing changes. The cycle kept GOING. One thing my abuser said to me as we parted ways was that i was always “guilt tripping them” by posting all these things and being VISIBLY hurt by their actions. but really looking back, they literally trained me to believe if i had an issue or i didn’t like something they did to me, id have to make a whole scene about it or nothing changes or even gets acknowledged. I was never originally like this.. when me and my abuser first met, they always posted these angsty “vents” and such all the time, or angsty statuses like “i’m gonna kms rn” or sum bs like that.. and i remember at the time, it would scare the absolute shit out of me. I would immediately be messaging them and panicking and trying to make sure whatever was going to happen wasn’t happening. I guess subconsciously i kinda picked up on the behavior… 

which brings up another point. I noticed something very interesting in my entries as well, when i was upset, they also had to be going through something. If i complained about something, suddenly they’d be complaining about the same thing. I guess sort’ve what what people call the “trauma olympics” except i was being abused and my abuser always had to have it worse.. Which is ANOTHER hindsight thing i’ve never really picked up on until now. Anon pulled the trauma card like NO OTHER.. if anything it became some sort of “flex” in group conversations, or some winning card, or a pity-me card. After the “friendship breakup” i tried to get my stuff back, and i had my boyfriend contact Anon and their girlfriend, inwhich Anon instead fought and deflected entirely, and justified keeping all my stuff because they “even kept stuff from people who mol3sted them” (idk if i have to censor that word.).. like what. 

There was a point in time where i used to eat lunch with Anon’s friends, and it was EXTREMELY uncomfortable every single times, it was trauma dump central constantly, and who has it the worst, and then encouraging eachother to DO WORSE. I actually told Anon about how uncomfortable it made me feel, and i got the same soulless response. Guess what? NOTHING CHANGED. so it was lovely getting very badly emotionally triggered every day without being able to say anything about it. it got to a point where it was genuinely driving me nuts, and i wrote to Anon 5 whole pages about how not only uncomfortable this group was, but also how it literally can’t be good for your mental state to be in this environment constantly (and of course i was worried Anon would hurt themselves again.. cuz when was i not..). Ever since those 5 pages were written i was harassed for literally months on end about it. harrassing me, my boyfriend like everything.. And then when my abuser crashed out on me, this was what “fucked” both Anon’s and their girlfriend’s mental health. I’d hate to be that guy but i genuinely don’t think it did. Not a single word i wrote was mean or with ill intent. I remember trying to be nice about it (although the copy of the pages don’t exist anymore.. i was literally gaslit into destroying them.) All i did was tell the truth and expressed my concern and got bashed for it for no reason. The second Anon read what i wrote, it went basically all around the globe. Everyone knew about it and everyone hated me for being a “narcissistic psychotic weirdo who just wants to keep Anon for themselves”.. but that’s NOT what i was saying at all, but to this day they still are dying on that hill. 

I never realized how much in hindsight i was gaslit. I had no idea i was so susceptible to being gaslit at all. Every time i spoke up about something it was ignored until it became explosive and damaging and then flipped and twisted onto me and I became the evil problem. Either that or it was just brushed off kindly with some empty positive words.. I was always convinced i was crazy and delusional. Partly because i was always told that, and other partly because even when i did get genuinely delusional, it was fed into. So by the time id realize i was delusional, the damage would literally be 2x worse. looking back, for some reason everything seems more deliberate. It was really hard to believe myself, and it still is. I’m still questioning if what happened to me even was bad enough to even be allowed to use the word abuse. i coped a lot by telling myself we were both abusive to eachother. That i was just as evil as Anon or even that Anon was a sweet soul i was tainting. It was not good either when even Anon’s girlfriend took part in gaslighting me as well. Really disappointing on my end, since me and her were decent friends before that whole thing with Anon happened. It’s so strange to look back and realized if i was never pushed by Anon, me and their girlfriend would literally be friends still.

I also want to further elaborate on another thing. In my full story i explained how Anon genuinely victim blamed me for what one of their friends did to me. I’ll use the name John for him. Long story short, John had always been horrible to me, and for some reason, exclusively me. We had been friends years back, and suddenly the next year, He was talking shit about me to everyone. He was for some reason hell bent on this idea that i was some crazy mental bitch.. even though the year before i showed no signs of that and was just nice to him. This cycle then repeated tons, he’d be cool with me and then suddenly he’d treat me like low hanging fruit, like i was ALWAYS one of the first people he’d talk shit about. i never did a THING. I even went out of my way to be KIND always to him, i really wanted to be his friend. Although, he was always agressive in a way.. and allegedly treated one of my friends really bad when they dated.. don’t quote me. Anyways, the next year after that, I was in a REALLY bad spot in life, i was extremely delusional and when my bpd was definitely most severe (and very undiagnosed..), and he was bestfriends with this dude i was OBESSED with.. it was very unhealthy and that obsession really took over my life..(limerence, look it up..) And not only did he treat me like shit for it, he was playin GAMES with it. He once wrote me this whole paragraph about how he was “so worried for my mental health, and how he really believed” in me, only to find out he didn’t even mean it. He wrote in on behalf of the dude i had crush on and even made fun of me while he wrote it. Then there was an infamous day, where he told Amon over text that the guy i was obsessed with hated me and “wanted him to get me off his hands.” which is a screenshot forever burned into my brain.. i cried nonstop for like the whole day. Come to find out he purposely put it out of context to stir up the pot i guess. He also then continued to PURPOSELY feed into my delusions and genuinely convinced me that my crush was leading me on and seeing and other girl. Being that crazy and that depressed at that point of time, genuinely, GENUINELY affected me so deeply and i would even say affected me permanently. I would’ve been in such a better state if he hadn’t just fucked with me. All this to say, no one believes me. No one believes that John did any of this to me and no one wanted to fully listen to me. Still to this day no one believes me.

Anon was there went it all went down, they knew EVERY little detail and was there when it happened. but suddenly when the time came around.. they “forgot” everything and became bestfriends with John. They always addressed it after that by saying “oh i forgot what happened that one summer”, and i’d always corrected them being like “It wasn’t the summer, it was MULTIPLE YEARS”.  I believed that my “bestfriend” would understand and listen to me and hear me out. I believed they would atleast have my back. But nope, they turned around and victim blamed me, and told me “john was right about you, you’re a just a crazy delusion hypocrite piece of shit”. It really did upset me. I told Anon my story and they lived through it with me in real time, and it became really clear how much they brushed me off and didn’t listen to me. It made me wonder what else i had said that just got brushed off and purposely ignored. btw, John admitted doing all that he did. He didn’t care. his response was “oh yeah i guess i did do that”, and then even going on to say that my delusions were real.. even though he denied them and my crush denied them as well before then. Still no matter what, no one believes me.

honestly i wish i still had a lot of receipts.. i deleted all my old messages with most of these people, but have it known if i could, i’d put all these people on blast so hard……. :,)

I saw this acronym online and it was actually crazy how it pertained to everything…

it’s DARVO

deflect, attack, reverse, victim, offender

which in simpler words, they flip it right back onto you and make you feel like what they did to you is what you did.. so yeah look out for that i guess because for some reason only now the internet wants to show me all these signs of abuse that probably would’ve helped me if i know about it.. 

anyways i’ve lost my train of thought and i’ve been writing this for 3 hours and there’s probably still more i haven’t even gotten to talk about yet. I thank you whoever read til the end of this hectic story and i hope if this resonates with you know that you’re not alone and you’re not crazy. Not only that, but having other people that resonate with my story genuinely helps me feel less like i’m crazy for sure and that this did actually happen to me..