The Moment I Believed My Own Story After Emotional Abuse

For a long time, the story I carried had a question mark at the end of it.

Not in the version I told other people. That one sounded clean and finished. But in the version I lived with alone, the one I turned over at 2 a.m., there was always this small, persistent doubt. What if I got it wrong? What if it was not as bad as I remember? What if I am the one who made it bigger than it was?

That doubt was not mine originally. It was installed.

The doubt had a face

His name is not in this post. But the doubt had his cadence. The quiet corrections. The patient explanations of what I had misunderstood. The look when I got emotional. Not unkind exactly. Just tired. There she goes again.

I internalized that look. I started giving it to myself. Every time a memory surfaced, I applied it automatically. There she goes again. Out of proportion. Making it about her.

That is what gaslighting does at its most thorough. It does not only make you doubt specific events. It makes you doubt the instrument you use to evaluate events, which is yourself. Once that is compromised, you can barely trust your own testimony about your own life.

The evidence that mounted

There was not one moment where I knew. There were dozens of small ones spread over years that I kept filing under probably nothing.

The friend who said, quietly, "I do not like how he talks to you." The journal entry from two years earlier that described something I had told myself did not happen. The way my body still flinched, eighteen months after leaving, when a man raised his voice in a restaurant. Bodies remember what the mind is still arguing about.

Then there was the night I was reading someone else’s story and hit a sentence that stopped me cold. I read it four times. It described something so specific to my experience that I sat with it afterward, not crying exactly, more like something releasing.

Someone had written down what had happened to me. And called it what it was.

The moment itself

It was not dramatic. I did not close the book and immediately call someone. I sat in my kitchen, at a table I had bought for myself after I left, and I let the sentence be true.

What someone else had documented, named, and printed in a book matched. If it matched for them, if they had written it with enough clarity that a stranger could recognize her own life in it, then maybe my version was real too. Maybe the question mark at the end of my story did not belong there.

I took it off. Not all at once. But that night was the beginning.

What I did with it

I started writing. Badly at first. Pages that were more argument than narrative, still trying to prove something to an imaginary jury. Slowly the arguing gave way to remembering. Remembering gave way to something that felt, for the first time, like my own account of my own life.

That is where Toxic Luv came from. Not from wanting to expose anyone. Not only from anger, though there was some. From wanting to write the book I needed that night in my kitchen. The one that would say to someone else: yes, this is real, this happened, you are not making it up. Here is a woman who went through it too and came out the other side still standing.

Why I wrote Victoria

Victoria’s story is fiction built on truth. Her details are different from mine. But the arc of her doubt, the way she keeps diminishing her own experience, the moment she finally runs out of explanations for herself, that is mine. That is the part I knew how to write.

If you have a question mark at the end of your story, I wrote this book for you. You do not need all the proof yet. You do not need to have left yet. You only need to be sitting somewhere wondering if what you went through counts.

It counts.

Toxic Luv is the story I needed to read before I could write it.

Read Toxic Luv now in paperback, ebook, or audiobook.