You Watched Me Break [For Anyone Who Has Ever Been Gaslit]

Gaslighting is one of the most invisible forms of emotional abuse—and also one of the most damaging. It doesn’t leave bruises. It doesn’t shout. It whispers. It twists. It makes you question what you saw, what you felt, and eventually, who you are.

This piece is written from the wreckage that gaslighting leaves behind. It's about what it feels like to give someone your light, only to have them use it against you. It’s about the confusion, the silence, the erasure of self that happens when someone rewrites your reality and calls it truth.

But more than that, this piece is about rising. Because even when your sense of self is shattered, even when you doubt your worth and your voice, there is still something inside you that knows. Something unbreakable. This is the journey back to that knowing.

"Gaslighting doesn’t erase the truth—only your trust in it. But once you remember what you felt, saw, and knew deep down, you rise. Not as who you were before, but as someone no one will ever silence again."

You Watched Me Break

I saw the pain you carried. I recognised the resonance in your story—something familiar, something tender.
And all I wanted… was to give you my light.
To meet you in the dark.
To help hold the weight of what hurt you.
So I reached out my hand.
And I chose—chose—to stand beside you.

You wore sweetness like a mask.
But your coldness carved through me like glass.
You saw the cracks in my skin—
and still, you etched betrayal into every one of them.

Every breath I took around you started to feel like a lie.

Don’t tell me you didn’t see my world collapsing.
You saw it.
You just… played it cool.
You played it right.
While I was dying every night.

You let me break—
soul and bone—
and left me in a room you exited without a sound.
No goodbye. No closure. Just the echo of a door I didn’t know had closed.

I lay awake asking if I deserved it.
And for a moment—
I believed I did.

But now?

Now, I see it.

I gave you my light.
I gave you my nights.
I held your pain and dimmed my light.
I stood beside you in the storm.

But you never kept me warm.

You preferred to watch me fall.
You never reached for me.
Never tried to save me.
Just let me unravel—quietly, invisibly—like I was unworthy of any kindness.
Like I never existed in your world.

I stayed in the silence you left behind,
trying to fill it with reasons.
Trying to figure out what I did wrong.

But I didn’t break because I was weak.
I broke because I was too strong for the game you were playing.

You saw me cracking from the inside out,
and still…
you stood there.
Watched.
Like it wasn’t your fire that started the blaze.

You only ever felt comfortable with the quiet version of me—
the one who didn’t ask,
who didn’t need,
who swallowed storms and smiled through the pain.

But she’s gone.
Buried in the wreckage you left behind.

Now I see it clear.

You let me fall—
but that fall didn’t kill me.
It became the thing that awakened me.

It cracked me open.
Poured out the softness I gave too freely.
And left behind something sharper.
Stronger.
Unapologetically real.

So don’t come back.
Don’t try to fix what you never stayed long enough to understand.
I’m not waiting for closure.

I am the closure.

And you?

You’ll remember this silence.
Not the one you left me in—
but the one that rises
when I finally stop saying your name.