You taught me everything I never wanted to know about emptiness dressed up as love. Your “kindness” was a costume, your tenderness a script, your tears a cue for my empathy to rush in and rescue you on repeat. You fed on my naivety and called it connection, studied my wounds and called it intimacy. You built an altar to yourself out of my attention and then mocked me for kneeling.
Here’s what you did not expect: the supply woke up. The girl you misread as weak learned to sit with her pain long enough to understand it wasn’t proof that something was wrong with her; it was proof that something was wrong with what she accepted. The day I realized your cruelty was self-hatred in disguise, the spell broke. I stopped asking, “Why am I not enough?” and started asking, “Why am I still here?”
Covert narcissists don’t hate their targets; they hate the mirror. They envy the very things they try to destroy; authenticity, empathy, the ability to love without an audience. So they perform. They curate. They harvest. They rewrite. They turn your softness into a weapon and call you “too much or too sensitive” when you notice the cuts. But under the performance is a hollow so loud it needs constant applause just to drown itself out.
I don’t forgive what you did with my trust, my time, my nervous system. Forgiveness is no longer the currency I pay to stay in rooms that shrink me. My self-love is not a threat to me anymore; it’s a threat to the stories you spun and the one who finally chose their own soul over your approval.
If you recognize yourself in this, that’s between you and your reflection.
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