This is your friendly late Saturday night reminder that even those well-versed in how gaslighting works can still fall victim to it.

Eww. I’m still feeling itchy about it.

I think I’ve just fallen out of practice with defending from or sensing when this sort of thing happens, because honestly I’ve done so well with kicking that toxicity to the curb that I’m not really around it anymore. I’m not on high alert as much as I used to be. But earlier this week I was talking to someone I haven’t talked to or seen in a long time, and I felt like I was being guilted into connecting. And while it isn’t that I didn’t want to, it just wasn’t sitting right, but I couldn’t put my finger on why. It was maddening!

The recognition that I felt like I was going mad trying to understand, that something I was being told which should be positive was only making me feel negative, the feeling that my emotions were going round in circles, was what made me realize – pretty belatedly – that I’d been gaslit. And I’m rather pissed about it, because I feel like I should know better, but that isn’t really how it works.

Gaslighting is when someone tries to distort your understanding of reality to better align with their own instead. Essentially, a gaslighter tries to make you think you’re crazy; it’s the opposite of validation.

Happens to the best of us, I guess?

It’s just infuriating when I work so hard all the time to have the prevailing voice inside my head be one of reason, not of madness. But maybe, just maybe, attempts at reason are mad, while my madness has reasons.

Maybe we’re all mad here.