The Unreliable Witness

I have spent most of my life believing that other people see a version of me that does not actually exist. Not because I think everyone who has ever loved me is lying, and not because I believe every kind word has been some elaborate act of pity, but because there has always been this strange disconnect between the person other people describe and the person I experience from inside my own skin. They will tell me I am kind, and I immediately remember every cruel thing I have ever said. They will tell me I am strong, and I think about all the nights I have collapsed under the weight of things nobody else knew I was carrying. They tell me I am a good person, and somewhere inside my head a filing cabinet flies open, spilling every mistake I have ever made onto the floor like evidence. I know too much about myself to believe them. I know every thought I never said out loud, every selfish impulse I swallowed, every time I loved someone and still managed to hurt them, every moment when fear turned me into someone sharper than I wanted to be. Other people only get the edited version, I have always thought. They see the house from the street. I live inside it. I know which floorboards are rotting underneath the rugs. I know where the walls are cracked beneath the paint. I know what is buried in the basement. Surely that makes me the more reliable witness.

I believed that for a very long time without ever really questioning it. Then I fell in love with someone who does the exact same thing, and suddenly I understood how infuriating it is to stand on the other side of someone else's self-hatred. I have watched him fight me relentlessly over the person I see when I look at him, as though loving him means I have somehow forfeited my ability to observe him accurately. I tell him something good about himself and he immediately begins dismantling it. If I tell him he is a good man, he can produce an entire inventory of reasons he isn't. If I tell him I admire the way he carries responsibility, he will explain that he is only doing what he is supposed to do, as though goodness only counts when nobody expects it from you. If I tell him I see softness in him, he points toward every hard thing he has ever done. If I tell him I see how deeply he loves, he tells me about the people he has disappointed. If I tell him he makes me feel safe, he remembers every time he has made me cry. There is always a rebuttal waiting. Every compliment I hand him is placed underneath a microscope until he finds some imperfection that proves it counterfeit. Every beautiful thing has an asterisk beside it. Every good quality comes with a footnote explaining why it does not actually count.

And I understand more than I wish I did, because I know exactly what he is doing. He thinks I am looking at him through rose-colored glass while he is looking at himself beneath fluorescent lighting, but I don't think he realizes how insulting that can feel from this side of it. I am not blind. I am not some lovesick idiot who accidentally fell in love with a character I invented because reality wasn't pretty enough. I know the sharp edges are there because some of them have cut me. I know what his anger sounds like. I know what happens when fear convinces him that leaving first will hurt less than being left. I know how quickly tenderness can disappear behind armor when something gets too close to the bone. I know he can retreat so deeply into himself that loving him feels like standing outside a locked house in the rain, pounding on the door while he insists nobody is home. I am soaked, sore from the cold, and he still won’t open the door because he needs to believe the walls are protecting him, even when I can see from where I’m standing that they are mostly keeping him trapped inside. He thinks letting me in means giving me access to everything he has worked so hard to hide, while I’m outside trying desperately to make him understand that I already know the house is damaged. I can see the broken windows. I can smell the smoke. I am not knocking because I mistook it for something pristine. I am knocking because I know he is still inside. I know he can say things he regrets. I know he can hurt people while trying desperately not to be hurt himself. I know there are pieces of him that are unfinished and frightened and defensive and infuriating. I know because I have met them all. Loving him has never required me to pretend they aren't there.

But I have met the rest of him, too. I have seen the man underneath all of that armor, sometimes in moments so small I don't think he even realizes he has shown himself. I see him in the things he remembers when nobody asked him to remember them, in the way responsibility settles onto his shoulders even when he complains about the weight of it, in the instinct to take care of people he claims he isn't particularly sentimental about. I see him in the softness that slips through before he remembers he is supposed to be guarded. I see him in the laughter he cannot quite hold back when he is trying to be annoyed with me, in the way his voice changes when he speaks to me, in the tenderness hidden underneath teasing and exhaustion and all of that attitude. I have watched him make room for other people's fear while pretending he doesn't know what to do with his own. I have watched him carry people when he was already tired. I have watched him care and then immediately try to convince everyone, including himself, that it wasn't caring at all. There are moments when I want to grab him by the shoulders and shake him because I cannot understand how someone can live inside himself every single day and still be so completely unfamiliar with the person I know.

There is something uniquely painful about loving someone who continually tells you that you are wrong for loving them. It turns affection into an argument you can never win. You bring them evidence of their goodness and they bring you evidence of their failures, and before long you are standing in the middle of this imaginary courtroom begging them to understand that you never claimed they were innocent of every terrible thing they have ever done. You are only trying to tell them that a human being is more than the worst exhibit entered into evidence. But they have already appointed themselves prosecutor, defendant, judge, and jury, and the verdict was handed down years before you arrived. Guilty. Damaged. Dangerous. Unworthy. Do not get too close. And no matter how many times you object, trauma keeps overruling you. And somewhere in the middle of arguing his case against himself for the thousandth time, I realized with an almost nauseating amount of clarity that I knew every single one of his arguments by heart… not because he had repeated them so often, but because I had been using different versions of them against myself for years.

That is what finally made something uncomfortable click inside me, because I have spent years doing exactly the same thing. If he can be wrong about himself, then I have to at least consider the possibility that I might be wrong about me. I hate that possibility more than I can explain. There is something almost safer about believing I am damaged beyond repair because at least then the world makes sense. If I am difficult to love, then every person who has left fits neatly into the story. If I am too much, then every person who has become overwhelmed by me becomes evidence. If I am not enough, then every person who chose something or someone else confirms what I already suspected. Pain becomes predictable when you can make yourself its common denominator. There is a sick kind of comfort in believing the fire keeps following you because you are the match. At least then you know where it comes from. At least then you can stop wondering why people hurt you and simply decide that you are something people eventually hurt. There is control hidden inside self-hatred that I don't think we talk about enough. If I am always the problem, then at least the problem has a name. If people leave because I am inherently difficult to love, then I never have to wrestle with the much more frightening truth that sometimes people leave people who were worth staying for. Sometimes people hurt people who didn't deserve it. Sometimes love can be real and still fail. Sometimes there is no flaw I could have corrected that would have changed the ending. Somehow it feels safer to put myself on trial than to accept that terrifying amount of uncertainty, because if I am guilty, at least the world still has rules.

Maybe that is why the cruel things people say burrow so much deeper than the beautiful ones. Someone can tell me they love me a thousand times and somehow my brain treats every one of those declarations like something written in pencil, temporary and erasable, while one sentence spoken in anger gets carved into stone. Someone tells me I am beautiful and I can immediately list everything wrong with my reflection. Someone tells me I am worth loving and I remember every person who decided loving me was too difficult. Someone tells me I am important and my brain drags out every memory of being overlooked, forgotten, abandoned, replaced, or made to feel optional. But let someone tell me I am exhausting, difficult, dramatic, needy, selfish, too sensitive, too much, and suddenly there is no trial at all. No cross-examination. No demand for additional evidence. The sentence slides effortlessly into the lock because it was cut from the same key I have been using against myself for years. Cruelty doesn't have to convince me. It only has to introduce itself. I already know its name. 

That is the part I cannot stop thinking about. Why is love required to provide identification at the door while hatred walks straight into the house and makes itself comfortable? Why do I interrogate tenderness but accept rejection as fact? Why can someone spend years loving me and I still wonder whether they really mean it, but someone can spit something vicious at me in the middle of an argument and I will carry it around for the rest of my life like scripture? It is as though trauma has coated the inside of my head in smoke. Everything good has to fight its way through the haze until its shape becomes distorted, while anything dark blends seamlessly into what is already there. Eventually I don't even know whether I am seeing myself anymore or only looking at the soot left behind by everyone who ever burned me.

And then I begin changing myself around those words. That may be the saddest part. Tell me I am too much often enough, and I will begin amputating pieces of myself to become easier to hold. I will swallow the text I wanted to send. I will apologize for needing reassurance. I will make myself quieter when I want to scream. I will pretend something didn't hurt because I don't want to be "too sensitive." I will turn every need into an inconvenience and every emotion into something I should clean up before anyone else has to see it. I will become smaller and smaller until I am standing inside the outline of myself, wondering where the rest of me went. Then someone tells me I am not enough, and suddenly I am expected to understand how to become more after spending years learning how to disappear. It is an impossible way to live. Too much, so become less. Not enough, so become more. Difficult to love, so require nothing. Too independent, so soften. Too needy, so pull away. Too emotional, so stop feeling. Too cold, so open up. Eventually you become a collection of contradictory instructions written by people who were angry, wounded, careless, or simply incapable of loving you in the way you needed, and somehow you start calling that collection a personality.

Maybe that is why some of us sabotage love when it finally arrives. Because when someone sees something in us that contradicts everything we have spent years believing, it doesn't always feel comforting. Sometimes it feels threatening. Their love asks us to reconsider an entire mythology we built to survive. If you believe I am worthy, then what am I supposed to do with all these years I spent believing I wasn't? If you think I am good, what do I do with the things I still haven't forgiven myself for? If you can see my damage and remain, then maybe damage does not automatically make someone disposable, and that possibility is almost more terrifying than abandonment because it means I might have misunderstood myself all along.

So instead of accepting the love, we test it. We poke holes in it. We interrogate it. We hold our ugliest pieces directly underneath the light and say, What about this? They stay, so we reach deeper. Okay, but what about this? They stay again, so eventually we stop showing them old wounds and start creating new ones. We push. We withdraw. We say something cruel and watch their face. We shut down when we desperately want them to come closer. We tell them to leave while silently begging them to understand that leaving is the one thing we are terrified they will do. And maybe the most shameful part is that sometimes I know I am doing it while I am doing it. There are moments when some quiet, rational piece of me is still alive underneath all that panic, watching me reach for the sharpest sentence I can find and begging me not to say it. I know I don't actually want the person in front of me to leave. I know I don't actually believe I don't care. I know that what I want is almost embarrassingly simple: Please come closer. Please reassure me. Please prove that this fear is lying to me. But those words require me to expose the softest part of my throat, and anger feels safer, so what comes out sounds nothing like what I mean. Fine. Go. I don't need you. I'm done. And then I stand there horrified when they believe the words I deliberately chose instead of the ones I was too afraid to say.

We make them prove themselves over and over until loving us starts to feel like running an obstacle course whose finish line moves every time they get close. And sometimes we attack. That word is ugly, but I think it needs to be. Sometimes we throw verbal punch after verbal punch at someone who is standing there trying to love us, because there is some terrified part of us that needs them to finally agree with what we believe about ourselves. We tell them they don't know us. We tell them they'll get tired of us. We tell them they deserve better. We tell them we're impossible. We accuse them of motives they don't have because the motives we imagine make more sense than the possibility that someone might simply love us. We keep swinging until eventually they stop trying to convince us otherwise. Maybe they get angry. Maybe they say something cruel back. Maybe they finally do leave. Maybe they simply become quieter because they have learned that everything beautiful they offer will eventually be turned into another weapon.

And there it is. The proof. See? I told you. Except it never feels good. That is the strangest part of all. If we were truly trying to prove ourselves right, victory should feel like relief. Instead, when the person finally breaks, something inside us breaks with them. There is no satisfaction in standing in the wreckage saying, I knew you would leave. There is only grief, because some part of us knows what actually happened. We didn't uncover the truth. We helped manufacture it. In order to convince someone that we are as terrible as we believe ourselves to be, sometimes we have to behave like someone we aren't until they finally believe us. We have to become crueler than we wanted to be. Colder than we actually feel. More indifferent than we are capable of being. We have to shove away the person we are terrified of losing and then watch them stumble backward. We have to light the match, hold it against the curtains, watch the whole house burn down, and then stand among the ashes whispering, See? I knew this place would never survive a fire. That isn't prophecy. It is arson.

And then comes the guilt. The kind that eats instead of aches. The kind that crawls inside your ribs and chews through everything soft. Because now you aren't only grieving what happened to you; you are grieving what you did while trying to protect yourself from what you were certain would happen. You remember the exact moment you could have reached out and chose to withdraw instead. The sentence you could have swallowed but didn't. The apology you delayed because pride felt safer than vulnerability. The person standing in front of you saying, I love you, while you kept handing them reasons not to. That is when isolation starts looking less like loneliness and more like mercy. There are times when the belief that I would be better off alone settles over me with such frightening calm that I don't experience it as sadness. It feels logical. Almost peaceful. If I am alone, there is nobody to disappoint. Nobody to exhaust. Nobody whose affection I have to decipher. Nobody who can wake up one morning and realize I am more work than I am worth. Nobody close enough to find the parts of me I spend so much energy keeping covered. Nobody to tell me I am too much. Nobody to tell me I am not enough. Nobody to leave if I never let anyone stay.

Sometimes that sounds so much easier. These days especially, because my cup feels empty. Not chipped. Not even half-full. Empty. Bone dry. I feel like I have spent years tipping it toward other people, shaking out the last drops, scraping the bottom as though maybe love could be manufactured through sheer effort. I have poured from myself until the sound changed, until there was nothing left but the hollow echo of an empty vessel, and somehow I still find myself apologizing that there isn't more. There is no great reservoir inside me right now. No abundance. No secret supply of softness waiting to be discovered. I am tired in a way sleep does not fix. There are days when I genuinely cannot imagine what I have left to give anyone. And that is when the old voice becomes loudest. You would be better off alone. Not as punishment. Not dramatically. Not in some romantic, tragic way. It feels factual. Responsible, even. Like perhaps isolation is the kindest thing I can offer the people I love because then nobody has to carry me when I am this empty. Nobody has to keep convincing me I am worth staying for. Nobody has to fight through all the smoke inside my head just to make themselves heard.

The frightening thing about an empty cup is that it doesn't mean I stopped loving anyone. If anything, that would be easier. The love is still here; I just don't seem to have the strength required to carry it outward anymore. I can care desperately and still stare at a message because forming a response feels impossible. I can miss someone and still want silence. I can want to be held and simultaneously feel irritated by the thought of being touched. I can love people with everything left inside me and still have absolutely nothing useful to hand them. And that creates its own kind of guilt, because I have always measured my love by what I can give. So when I have nothing left to give, some part of me immediately concludes that perhaps there is nothing valuable left of me either.

But then I remember what it feels like to stand on the other side of someone else's certainty. I remember what it feels like to look at someone who is absolutely convinced that I have imagined everything beautiful about him and want to scream because I know I haven't. I know the difference between loving someone blindly and loving someone completely. I know his faults. I know his damage. I know the doors he slams and the walls he builds and the places he retreats when something hurts too much. I know loving him can hurt. I know there are moments when two wounded people can find exactly the wrong bruise on each other and press until neither remembers who touched it first. And still, none of that erases what I see.

That is what makes this realization so uncomfortable. Because if I am allowed to see all of him, the beautiful and the ugly, the tenderness and the anger, the damage and the goodness, and still insist that the worst parts are not the whole person, then perhaps I don't get to use a different measuring stick on myself. Maybe I am not the only reliable narrator of me simply because I live here. Maybe living inside the house means I know where every crack is, but it also means I have spent so long staring at the cracks that I have forgotten there are windows. Maybe someone standing outside can see light coming through them. Maybe the people who love us are not imagining better versions of us. Maybe they are simply seeing parts of us that trauma trained us to overlook. Maybe they aren't blind to the damage at all. Maybe they can see the ruined rooms and the scorched walls and still understand that a burned house is not the same thing as an empty one.

I wish I could say realizing that changes the way I see myself. It doesn't. I still feel damaged. I still feel empty. I still have moments when I believe, with every rational part of my mind, that I would be easier to love from a distance and safer to love not at all. I still hear the cruel things louder than the tender ones. I still know exactly which insults to pull from memory when I need evidence against myself. I can still tell you every reason someone might eventually decide I am not worth the trouble. I just don't know anymore whether I can call those things facts. Because I love someone who believes terrible things about himself with the same certainty I believe terrible things about me, and I have stood outside of him thinking, God, if you could only see yourself from here. Maybe someone has stood outside of me thinking the same thing. Maybe someone has looked at all the things I thought I hid so well, the cracks, the smoke, the empty rooms, the parts of me still blackened from fires that went out years ago, and loved me without needing to pretend they aren't there.

So, maybe they aren't seeing an imaginary version of me. Maybe I am the one looking into a funhouse mirror built from every abandonment, every insult, every failure, every person who ever taught me that love was something I had to earn and could lose without warning, and I have been staring into that distorted glass for so long that I started calling the reflection accurate. I don't know how to stop doing that yet. I don't know how to refill an empty cup by simply deciding I deserve water. I don't know how to hear tenderness louder than cruelty when cruelty has had years to perfect its echo. I don't know how to suddenly believe I am worthy of love just because I have finally recognized that I might be an unreliable witness against myself. But I do know what it feels like to love someone who cannot see what I see. I know how desperately I wish he would stop fighting me long enough to consider that perhaps I am not foolish, delusional, or blinded by love. Perhaps I am simply standing somewhere he cannot stand, looking at him from an angle he cannot reach. And if I want him to trust my eyes for even a moment, maybe someday I will have to consider trusting the eyes of the people who have loved me. Because maybe the cruelest thing trauma ever did wasn't convincing us that we were damaged. Maybe it convinced us that damage was the only thing anyone could possibly see when they looked at us.

And maybe that is why we keep breaking our own hearts trying to prove it.