Be Who You Want to be, Not Who They Try to Make You

When you’re being gaslit, it’s the worst thing that can happen because you don’t even realise that it’s happening until after you’re out of the situation/relationship/friendship.

The after effects stick with you, not just for a few weeks or even a few months, but for years after. It can even stay with you forever. You end up always second guessing yourself, wondering if you’ve made the right decision in that moment, if you’re behaving in the correct way in a situation, or whether your reaction is justified. You lose yourself and the confidence within yourself that you used to have.

Having gone through a couple of relationships with this behaviour being put on me, I now have a fair few holes dug into the person I used to be. I look back at the Holly I was 10 years ago and she knew who she was. She was outspoken. She was confident. She didn’t question herself. EVER. Now I look at the shell of a person that I’ve become: I question every decision I make, I hold back how I feel because I’m worried about being perceived to be acting in a certain way, I back down far too often.

I’m thinking about this as I listen to Hunter Hayes ‘Wanted’ whilst flying down a french motorway to Italy. The lyrics state ‘your beauty’s deeper than the make up’ and I’m sat second guessing whether I’m a beautiful person on the inside. This holiday has highlighted that I am inherently a kind person and would do anything for almost anyone (to the detriment of my own needs sometimes), but because I’ve been told time and time again that I’m aggressive and nasty and my attitude was the reason my ex ‘didn’t want to have sex with me’, I’m sat here questioning whether my gut instinct is right.

If a person you love and trust tells you once, twice, fifteen times, that your behavioural attributes are negative, you believe it. Your assertiveness is aggression now, so you become less assertive. You end up becoming a different person to the one that they fell in love with which inevitably leads to them falling out of love with you. And that's when they end up turning around and somehow making it your fault.

Even though I’m sat in the back of the car right now, questioning myself as I write this, it’s something that I’m working hard to reverse. I need to have the faith in myself that the attributes I have, the ones that have been given a negative light over the last few years, are actually positives - you just need to use different adjectives to describe them. Yes, there are times I can be a bitch if someone has pissed me off enough, but just because I stand up for the way I think and feel, it doesn’t make me a bad person. It doesn’t make me aggressive, it makes me opinionated and that’s not a bad thing. It makes me a fierce friend and loyal in every sense of the word.

I am not the person someone tried to grind me down to be and neither are you.