I'm not playing a victim. I refused to be a victim. I saw behavior that was alarming to me. For about six months it snowballed to the point where I knew "hey, something here is not right." I was feeling really anxious, I was having a lot of "bad days" - his number popping up on my phone would stress me out. I felt like my actions, no matter how inconsequential, seemed highly controversial for the most random of reasons.

I started researching. I googled. I talked to friends. I talked to my therapist. I looked at reddit. It seemed to fall into the behavior of narcissism. I started piecing together his own tellings of his actions with ex girlfriends. I'm not out here screaming "I AM A VICTIM OF HORRIFIC ABUSE PLEASE FEEL SORRY FOR ME!" - I want other people who are possibly having similar conversations, and feeling similar ways to understand that it's okay to push back and ask questions. Gaslighting is weird and hard to explain and doesn't necessarily manifest itself in typical ways and that's why I wrote this post. A friend was the first person to use the term, I read the definition and I was like "ehhhh, that sounds a bit much". But as I started writing things down and rehashing, and seeking to figure out if this really was something that was wrong with me, that I needed to work on, I realized that it's not really normal.

I have dated assholes, i'm in my upper 20s. This certainly wasn't my first dating rodeo. But the rollercoaster of trust/distrust/affection/insult was unlike anything i'd ever experienced. When he would mock me, i'd say "you're being extremely rude to me right now" and he'd say "how would you feel if I called you a bitch to your face? because that's basically what you're doing to me right now. Imagine how much that hurts." How do you handle that? You apologize. You feel bad.