The Day I Got Married Was World Narcissistic Abuse Awareness Day - I Just Didn't Know It Yet
June 1st holds two truths for me. I'm still learning to carry both.
I got married on June 1st.
I wore white. I said my vows. I believed every word.
What I didn't know, what I wouldn't know for years, was that June 1st is also World Narcissistic Abuse Awareness Day. A day designated to acknowledge the confusion, the gaslighting, the slow erasure that happens when you love someone who doesn't love you back the way you think they do. A day for survivors.
I became one of those survivors. On the very day the world was already marking in their honor.
If that isn't the universe trying to tell you something, I don't know what is.
It started the way it always does
Not with cruelty. Not with raised voices or red flags flying high enough for anyone to see.
It started with feeling chosen.
He made me feel like the most important person in any room. Like he had been waiting his whole life to find someone exactly like me. The attention was intoxicating. The love, or what I believed was love, felt like coming home.
That's the part no one warns you about. The beginning is beautiful. It's designed to be. Narcissistic abuse doesn't announce itself. It arrives dressed as a fairytale, and by the time the costume comes off, you've already built your entire life around it.
What it looks like from the inside
From the outside, I imagine we looked fine. Maybe even happy.
From the inside, I was slowly disappearing.
Not all at once; that would have been too obvious, even to me. It happened in increments. A comment here that made me second-guess myself. A reaction there that made me feel like I was always getting it wrong. The subtle art of making someone feel like they are the problem, over and over, until they start to believe it.
That's what gaslighting does. It doesn't just make you doubt the facts of a situation. It makes you doubt your own perception, your own memory, your own sanity. You start to believe that your feelings are an overreaction. That you're too sensitive. That if you could just be a little different, a little calmer, a little more understanding, a little less you, everything would be fine.
I spent years trying to be a little less me.
The moment that said everything
Years later, when he had kicked me out of our home, I came back to collect some of my things.
I asked for my wedding dress.
He took it into the garage and spray-painted it black.
I want you to sit with that for a moment, because I've had to. He didn't throw it away. He didn't say no. He went and got a can of black spray paint and covered it, deliberately, completely, before handing it back to me.
That dress was the symbol of the day I said yes to him. And when I came to reclaim it, he made sure I would never be able to look at it the same way again.
That is what narcissistic abuse looks like when the mask is fully off. It's not just anger. It's not just a bad divorce. It's the calculated destruction of something that mattered to you, done slowly enough that he could watch your face while he did it.
I think about the woman who wore that dress. How certain she was. How full of hope.
I think about what she deserved, and what she got instead.
The irony I only see now
When I found out that June 1st is World Narcissistic Abuse Awareness Day, I sat with that for a long time.
Part of me wanted to laugh. Part of me wanted to cry. Mostly, I felt something I can only describe as recognition, like the universe had been winking at me from the very beginning, and I'd been too busy looking the other way to catch it.
Stop. Pay attention. Back up. Run the other way.
That's the message I wish I'd heard on my wedding day. I didn't hear it then. I hear it clearly now.
And maybe that's the point. Maybe some messages aren't meant to be received until you're ready for them. Until you've lived enough of the story to understand what it was trying to teach you.
What I want you to know if you're in it
Narcissistic abuse is real, and it leaves marks that don't always show.
There's no bruise to point to. No single incident dramatic enough to make the story make sense from the outside. What there is instead is a slow, grinding erosion of your confidence, your identity, your trust in your own judgment.
If you are in a relationship right now and something feels off, but you can't quite name it, I want you to know that that feeling is worth listening to.
If you have been told, in ways large or small, that your feelings are too much, that you're imagining things, that you are the reason things are hard, please hear me when I say: that is not love. That is control wearing love's clothing.
You are not crazy. You are not too sensitive. You are not the problem.
Where I am now
He permanently changed my life. I won't pretend otherwise.
The version of me that walked down that aisle on June 1st would not recognize the woman writing these words, and I mean that in the best possible way. She is harder in some places where she used to be soft. She is softer in others where she used to be guarded. She knows things about herself she never would have discovered if her world hadn't been blown apart and slowly, painstakingly rebuilt.
That's not a thank you to him. It is not a silver lining I'm drawing around his behavior.
It is simply the truth of survival: you come out changed. And change, when you choose it, can be a form of freedom.
Today, I choose myself. I have chosen myself every day since I stopped choosing him, and I will keep choosing myself for the rest of my life.
To everyone who knows this day from the inside
Whether you are still in it, just getting out, or years down the road on the other side, this day belongs to you.
Your story is real. Your pain is valid. And your healing, however non-linear and messy and slow it may feel, is happening.
You don't have to have it figured out. You don't have to be past it to deserve support. You just have to keep going.
I see you. I'm glad you're still here.
If you or someone you know may be experiencing narcissistic abuse or emotional abuse in a relationship, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available 24/7 at 1-800-799-7233.
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