Enough

I heard this recently and couldn’t agree with it more:

‘Pushing someone to their breaking point, and then ignoring them and their experience is a form of abuse. You push them, you provoke them, you shame them, you hurt them, and then you flip the blame on them so you can be the victim. It’s not misunderstanding. It’s manipulation.’

Just know that if someone can’t handle the truth behind an experience or a harsh telling of reality— negating everything that’s ever happened, to protect a timeline that has been distorted due to acts of abuse, that is a direct reflection of their own image and has nothing to do with you. It doesn’t matter what happened around the time and discourse of these acts, no matter how seemingly unaffected they are to the harm done. It still remains the truth, and it should remain a priority to address. The minimization and ignorance of something “this serious” is actually a direct reflection of you, and you really are that type of person, no matter how hard you frame yourself otherwise.

Manipulation is not something consenting, but something you endure through the emotional regulation of another person. In Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Heloise discovers a painting she did not consent to, the painting is destroyed, meaning is regaining restoration because it is not longer a possession of intimacy that was never agreed to from both the painter and the subject. Manipulation is similar, an insistence of truth without consent or acknowledgment.

All this to say, there are people who will witness harm and call it complicated. Who will see a pattern and call it a misunderstanding. Who will hold your pain next to someone else's comfort and decide the comfort matters more. That is also a choice. Silence is also a choice. And what you normalize, you become complicit in.