Have you ever had a good and decent person in your life suddenly turn on you? I am thinking of several examples of this myself, over the past few years. In some cases, the relationship had been romantic, but the person’s behavior caused me to reconsider how I viewed them, and I told them the truth about how I felt. This had the effect of inciting their rage (on a bad day), or their seething resentment (on a good one), but they all let me know their feelings about my new boundaries, in no uncertain terms. No matter how much they had said in the past that they loved or cared about me, I was told I was a f***ing bitch or to f*** off more times than I can count. But even those verbal lashings seemed like a drop in the bucket, compared to one former lover’s seemingly strategic plan to gaslight and manipulate me clear to the point of madness and self-destruction. Regardless — and naive as this may sound to you, dear reader — I do not believe that any of these people acted out of sociopathic-level badness towards me. Instead, I am more inclined to believe that they were all, in their own ways, deeply hurt by my own expressed feelings, so they found their perfect self-expression in the intentional infliction of pain upon me. Deep down, I know what good people each one of them is, because at various points in these relationships, they all showed me a real and beautiful dimension of their personality — whether it was love for the opera, for physical fitness, or for the latest technological gadgets. Deep down, we all have a deep and true love for some person, place, or thing that makes us glow from the inside out. Anger and fear may obscure this love light temporarily, and all the potential for good it contains. But I know it’s there. And that’s what I have chosen to focus on and remember these people by, instead. ❤️‍🔥—Y.B.D.