Gaslighter

18

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

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2018

          I'd always been an anxious person.

          There had never been a proper diagnosis, no, but it was something that had been with me ever since I could remember. It had started off as an unnerving tendency to second guess everything I did, said, or even thought, and people just passed it off as an inability to make up my mind. After it started evolving into constant worry and uneasiness, an attention to details that could very well not even be a possibility, I'd lost my ability to stay focused on the task at hand. My grades plummeted, the first red flag around my parents, and they had been notified of me snapping at teachers and classmates and falling asleep in class, seeing as I wasn't getting much sleep at home, unable to turn off my brain.

          I couldn't stop thinking. I couldn't understand why everyone else around me could do it just fine, once again reminding me I was the problem everywhere I went, and all I wanted was for it to stop. I wanted to stop worrying about things no one else was concerned about; I wanted to not constantly picture the worst-case scenario in every situation. Most of all, I wanted someone to take a good look at me and realize I wasn't okay and tell me that I could stop pretending to be. As the years went on and I started growing more independent and distant from my parents, I'd gotten a little bit better; at least, I was no longer falling asleep where I shouldn't. My grades were okay, adequate, even, and I was successfully fooling everyone.

          To them, I was okay. To them, there was no inner turmoil eating me alive with each step I took. As long as I appeared normal, no one would ever know about the fist permanently wrapped around my heart or about my struggles with the recurrent feelings of inadequacy and fears my mind would explode from all the worrying and overthinking. It was like drowning on dry land—the silent killer, made only that much more unstoppable with the lack of means for it to do so, but powering through it and leaving me helpless, with no lifeline to turn to.

          That was how I currently felt.

          I didn't know how to tell Chase about Stephen. Nothing in my life had ever prepared me for such a conversation and I had no previous knowledge or experience to fall back on, so it was every man for himself, but I still had to be extra cautious when I chose to approach the subject. If this were any normal relationship, it wouldn't be nearly as difficult to come up with a solution, but our circumstances were far from normal.

          We had never set the boundaries for our relationship, nor had we ever given it a name. Things had moved on incredibly quickly and we hadn't known each other for that long, which would be a red flag for anyone else, but I wanted to believe it was different for us. It was then that I stopped to think about all the excuses I built in my head to justify all of this—the secrecy, the sneaking around, the things that didn't seem quite okay—but maybe they weren't excuses. They could very well be rational explanations, maybe even emotionally-fueled justifications, but I was coming to terms with it all being a product of my fearful imagination. Maybe things had moved too quickly for comfort, maybe that had been the first mistake, but I had already given it so much of myself I couldn't turn my back and pretend it meant nothing.

          Realistically, I knew no one ever had fallen this hard, this fast for someone else, yet there I was, living proof of what going all in truly meant. It was mortifying just how dependent on him I was, even more so when I was so hyper aware of that fact, second guessing everything I did, everything I said just so it wouldn't be that obvious to him—and, most importantly, to other people—and I was filled with sheer horror at the realization that it could easily pass off as obsession. The second he thought I was just an obsessed little girl, the second he realized I simply was not good enough, it would be the end of us. It would be the end of the one thing I couldn't afford to lose, the one person who knew me, and how did one come back from that?