At Your Lowest

There is a sentence I understand differently now.

“…one day it will hit you the hardest when you’re again at your lowest.”

I read those words one way when I first saw them. I read them as anger. Maybe even as someone hoping that eventually I would hurt enough to understand whatever version of me they had created.

But looking back, the phrase that catches me now is at your lowest.

Because I have started asking a different question.

What happens when someone actually gets you there?

For a long time, I believed the conflict surrounding me was simply conflict. Broken relationships. Hurt feelings. People choosing sides. Former friends talking to former partners. Anonymous accounts. Posts I recognized myself in even when my name wasn’t used. People discussing my mental and emotional state. People telling others I was unstable, deceptive, difficult, argumentative, high conflict or playing the victim.

And through all of it, there seemed to be this strange contradiction:

People who claimed they wanted nothing to do with me remained remarkably interested in me.

People who said I was the problem continued inserting themselves into my life.

People who supposedly wanted distance kept finding ways to remain close enough to watch the fallout.

For a while, I kept trying to understand each incident individually.

Now I’m looking at the effect collectively.

Because what happens when you convince someone that she cannot trust her own judgment?

What happens when friendships disappear? When relationships implode? When she becomes afraid to speak because anything she says might become somebody else’s screenshot, conversation or evidence that she’s exactly what they’ve been calling her?

What happens when she stops trusting people?

When she stops sleeping well?

When she loses her appetite?

When she stops writing freely?

When she leaves spaces she once enjoyed?

When she begins questioning whether simply existing publicly is somehow provoking people?

Eventually, you can make someone’s world very small.

And when someone’s world becomes small enough, something interesting happens:

She needs people.

She needs reassurance.

She needs someone to tell her what’s real.

She needs someone to defend her.

She needs somewhere safe to land.

And perhaps most importantly, she becomes much easier to pull back into relationships she had already learned to live without.

That is the part I hadn’t considered before.

I spent so much time asking why people who supposedly disliked me continued paying attention to me that I never asked the opposite question:

What would have happened if all of it had worked?

If I had become completely isolated, overwhelmed, frightened, financially strained, publicly embarrassed and unsure of myself, where would I have gone?

Maybe back toward familiar people.

Maybe back toward people I had already outgrown.

Maybe I would have needed the very people whose approval I had finally stopped needing.

I cannot tell you what was inside another person’s head. I cannot prove that every action shared one grand motive, and I’m no longer interested in pretending I can.

But I can look at outcomes.

And I can recognize that keeping someone emotionally destabilized can also keep them dependent.

That realization changed something for me.

Because I didn’t go back.

I got quieter for a while. I disappeared for a while. I questioned myself more than I should have. I lost pieces of my confidence and spent far too much energy trying to understand why people who claimed to want the best for my family seemed unwilling to allow it.

But I realized something in the process.

I learned how to stand without the people I once believed I could count on.

And maybe that’s why those words strike me so differently today.

“At your lowest.”

I was supposed to fear that place.

I have been intentionally pushed towards that place.

But the pushing didn’t make me need everyone again.

It taught me that I didn’t.