I wouldn’t call it crazy.
Crazy feels too sudden, too dramatic, too easy of an explanation for something that took root so quietly. What happened to me wasn’t an explosion. It was erosion.
A little piece of me disappeared every day, and I hardly noticed it happening.
I can trace it back to that day, though. Something shifted. Something small, almost invisible. Like a crack forming beneath the surface of glass. It didn’t shatter immediately. It waited. It spread. It deepened.
At first, I convinced myself I was handling it well.
I crumpled papers in my hands until my fingers hurt. I tore pages apart. I found harmless ways to release the pressure building inside my chest. I thought that was enough. I thought I was stronger than whatever was happening to me.
But pain has a way of growing when it is ignored.
The thoughts became louder. The disappointments became heavier. The questions became impossible to silence.
Why wasn’t I enough?
Why did asking for more make me feel guilty?
Why did wanting to be loved the way I loved feel like a crime?
The pressure kept building, and eventually crumpled paper wasn’t enough anymore.
I started throwing my phone against the wall.
I watched objects break and felt relief when they did. For a moment, the destruction outside of me matched the destruction inside. For a moment, I wasn’t carrying it alone.
Then came the nights when I pulled at my own hair because I didn’t know where else to put the anger. The nights when I hit myself until bruises bloomed beneath my skin. The nights when I punched my head over and over, as if I could somehow beat the thoughts out of it.
The pain would linger until the next morning.
Sometimes the next day.
Sometimes longer.
And still, it wasn’t enough.
So I found new ways to hurt.
New ways to quiet the noise.
New ways to punish the version of myself that kept hoping, kept expecting, kept believing things would change.
I started cutting.
Not because I wanted to die.
Not because I wanted attention.
But because for a few moments, physical pain felt simpler than emotional pain.
Physical pain had boundaries.
It had beginnings and endings.
Emotional pain lingered. It followed me into every room. It sat beside me when I woke up and crawled into bed with me at night. It turned every silence into a question and every disappointment into proof that I was asking for too much.
And somewhere along the way, diminishing myself became a comfort.
It became routine.
The sadness would come.
Then the anger.
Then the overwhelming feeling that my chest was too small to contain everything inside it.
And then I would hurt myself.
The cycle became familiar.
Predictable.
Safe, in the most dangerous way possible.
Because at least I knew what came next.
At least I knew how to survive those moments.
Even if survival looked a lot like destruction.
The worst part wasn’t the bruises.
It wasn’t the broken things.
It wasn’t even the scars.
The worst part was looking in the mirror and realizing I no longer recognized the person staring back at me.
I wasn’t always like this.
I used to laugh easier.
I used to believe love didn’t have to hurt.
I used to think vulnerability was beautiful.
I used to think asking for reassurance was normal.
I used to think wanting effort in return for effort wasn’t selfish.
But somewhere along the way, I became someone who measured her worth through suffering.
Someone who convinced herself that her needs were burdens.
Someone who apologized for wanting to be chosen.
Someone who shrank herself over and over again in the hope that she would finally fit into a space where she felt unwanted.
And maybe that’s what breaks my heart the most.
Not the things I destroyed.
But the person I destroyed alongside them.
Because all I really wanted was more.
More consistency.
More reassurance.
More effort.
More love.
Things that should have been ordinary.
Things that should have never cost me pieces of myself.
Yet somehow, every time I asked for them, I was made to feel demanding.
Every time I expressed hurt, I felt unreasonable.
Every time I reached for understanding, I was left questioning my own reality.
So I stopped fighting for my needs and started fighting myself instead.
And that battle nearly consumed me.
I wouldn’t call it crazy.
I would call it grief.
The grief of watching yourself disappear.
The grief of becoming unrecognizable.
The grief of loving so deeply that when your needs go unmet for too long, the pain has nowhere left to go except inward.
I wasn’t always like this.
But by wanting more, demanding more, expecting more—by believing I deserved the things I was once told were too much—I slowly lost my mind trying to convince myself I needed less.
And that, more than anything, is what almost destroyed me.
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