Rule one: Don’t call it betrayal.
That word is so swollen with soap opera melodrama, and it drips down your chin like cheap lipstick in August heat.
The word itself feels theatrical and overwrought. It belongs in a daytime television script rather than your actual life. Instead, call it the edit. The quiet deletion. The sly reformatting of what you thought was real.
That’s what it is, isn’t it? Not the act itself, but the erasure that follows. The careful adjustments made while you’re away: context removed here, motives reassigned there, until suddenly you’re drowning in a story that doesn’t feel like yours. Until you’re questioning whether your memories are authentic or implanted from someone else’s life.
I think about how editors work, dissecting sentences with calculated precision, discarding what they determine is wasteful. What authority do they claim over meaning itself? That’s what betrayal is: someone else revising your reality without your knowledge or permission.

The Language of Denial
They’ll insist it’s no big deal. They’ll touch your face like you’re a lost child. It’s condescension masquerading as care. Relax. She’s just a friend. You’re imagining things. The phrases drift down like ash from a distant fire, each one harmless alone, but together they settle in your lungs until you’re suffocating on their contempt.
And you want to scream! Yet the scream would make you the villain. That’s their goal, so…you hold it in. You practice silence until it’s like a second language. One you never signed up for but somehow speak fluently. Your throat becomes a graveyard for all the responses that would brand you as delusional, needy, or theatrical. These dismissals are their way of editing you out of your own story.
Silence accumulates. It coats your throat like dust, muffling every response that might show them you see through their performance. Because you see everything. You always have. The problem was never your blindness, it was your choice to pretend you couldn’t read the writing on the wall.
The Mathematics of Subtraction
Here’s the truth: It’s not her face, though you’ll memorize it anyway. Not her body, though you’ll compare every curve of yours to the imagined geography of hers. Not her perfume souring in the hallway, though the scent will haunt you for months to come. Why? Olfactory recognition, because it’s yours. The same one you wore for years, now weaponized and oversprayed like she’s pissing on a fire hydrant to mark her territory. The scent that used to make you feel beautiful now makes you nauseous, a smell that was once yours turned into her declaration of ownership.
It’s the math. The subtraction you weren’t told about. The way intimacy gets redistributed without your knowledge. It’s like someone’s been skimming off the top of your emotional bank account. It’s the rewrite, the audacity of someone taking your shared oxygen, the very air you breathe together, and auctioning it off for a cheaper thrill.
What do you do with that kind of theft? The kind that leaves no bruises, no broken windows, and no evidence except the hollow feeling in your solar plexus. He looks through you now, instead of at you…
So you document it. You become an archivist of your undoing.


The Alchemy of Hurt
You write it down. You write some more. You press it between pages like a flower and study its delicate anatomy, the way it still holds its shape even after you’ve preserved it. You turn it into something beautiful and corrosive.
There’s an art to this transformation, this alchemy of turning pain into something useful. It requires surgical precision, the kind of focused attention you might give to setting a broken bone. Every word must be chosen for its healing properties. Every sentence constructed to support the entire architecture of what you’ve overcome.
You become bilingual in the language of loss, speaking in signals that only other veterans of betrayal will interpret.
Because here’s what no one tells you about betrayal: If they can’t make you doubt what you saw, they’ll try to make you doubt what you are. They’ll chip away at your sense of self until you’re questioning not just the facts of what happened, but your right to have feelings about it.
The Erosion of Self
They’ll tell you you’re too sensitive, too emotional, too much. They’ll imply that a healthier woman would shrug this off, that a more confident person wouldn’t even notice. They’ll gaslight you with clinical language, pathologizing your natural reactions to their calculated cruelty. The cruelest part isn’t the betrayal itself, it’s the way they enlist you into your own disappearance. How they teach you to fold inward. How they teach you to muffle yourself, to become smaller. To vacate yourself out of your own existence.
Drawing the Line
And that’s where you draw the line, but not in pencil! Pencil can be erased, edited, and revised into something more palatable. I do it in ink. Permanent. Like a name carved into wet cement, daring the world to rain.
You use sumi ink, the kind that bleeds into paper and stays there. You draw it with the understanding that some things can’t be undone. Some wounds become part of your architecture. You know that healing doesn’t mean forgetting. Recovery doesn’t require forgiveness.
You’ve learned that the only way to survive someone else’s attempt to delete you is to reclaim your voice. To speak yourself back into existence with such unwavering conviction that no one will make you doubt yourself again.
The Inventory of Survival
This is what you keep: The way your gut knew before your brain admitted it. The exact shade of morning light when you finally stopped performing. The sound of your own voice forming the word “no” after months of silence. The weight of the pen in your hand as you resurrect yourself through words.
This is what you leave behind: The version of yourself that apologized for taking up space. The woman who made herself smaller to accommodate someone else’s expansion. The girl who believed that love meant accepting less than she deserved.
You emerge as someone else entirely, not improved, not diminished, but transformed. Someone who can distinguish between chosen solitude and imposed isolation. Someone who recognizes that the most lethal people are those who weaponize your self-doubt.


The Art of Testimony
You write not because you want to, but because you HAVE to. Silence is complicity, and you’ve been complicit in your decline for too long. You write because someone else needs to know they’re not crazy! They’re not too much, and aren’t imagining things.
You write because testimony is resistance. Bearing witness is rebellion in a world that profits from women’s silence. You write because the story you tell becomes the story other people finally have permission to tell about themselves.
You write because wounds, when properly tended, can become doors. Pain, when alchemized through language, becomes power. The pen in your hand is both a compass and a key, both an instrument of healing and a tool of transformation.
You write because you’re still standing, and standing demands documentation. You’re still here, still inhaling, still taking up precious space in a world that attempted to void you. Your continued existence is testimony to their defeat.
The wound has a name now. And so do you.
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