Narcissists will insult, belittle, or criticize you, sometimes dressed up as teasing, and keep pushing until you finally speak up.
Then your reaction becomes the topic, and you're made to feel unstable for having one. In a matter of weeks, someone who used to feel easygoing can start to feel like a mess of insecurity and self-doubt.
You are allowed to miss them and know leaving was right simultaneously. You are allowed to cry and still not go back. You are allowed to love someone and accept that loving them is no longer something you can safely do in their presence. All of those things can be true at the same time. You are not confused. You are just human. Give yourself the permission everyone else forgot to give you.
The crying is not weakness. The missing is not regression. The days when it hits out of nowhere and you cannot account for why today is a hard day when yesterday was fine are not evidence that you have gone backwards. They are just grief finishing its work in the nonlinear way grief has always worked in every human being who has ever lost something real.
The love you gave was real. The hope you invested was real. The future you planned was real to you. Those things deserve to be grieved regardless of what the person who received them turned out to be. You are not grieving them specifically. You are grieving the version of your life that existed while you still believed in them. That is a real and significant loss and it does not have an expiration date.
Here is what nobody is telling you. Missing someone who hurt you is not a vote for going back. It is not evidence that the relationship was actually fine. It is not your heart overruling your head or your weakness showing or your healing failing. It is grief. Clean, ordinary, entirely appropriate grief for something that was real to you even if it was not what you thought it was.
Everyone around you has an opinion about how you should feel by now. Some of them say it directly. Some of them say it with their silence when you bring it up again. The message is consistent regardless of how it is delivered. You should be further along. You should be angrier or less angry or more healed or less focused on it. The timeline they have assigned your grief does not fit the grief you are actually carrying.
You are not crazy for missing someone who hurt you. You are not weak for crying over someone who made you cry. You are not broken for loving someone who broke you. You are human. And nobody is saying that to you clearly enough. 🧵👇
The people with the best vibe are the ones who naturally enjoy being kind to others. They have no strategy or hidden agenda. They just know how hard life is and how kindness has the power to make the day brighter.