Prey for the Silent Gaslighter

I didn’t know I was prey. Not at first.

There were no threats, no raised fists, no screaming matches that would’ve confirmed, "yes, this is abuse." Just silence. Silence that slipped into the spaces between my words. Silence that recoiled when I needed comfort. Silence that punished without name, without cause, without end.

It’s strange—how someone can hurt you more with nothing than with anything.

When you grow up unseen, untouched by the warmth of consistent love, you learn to chase the crumbs. You learn to find meaning in absence. You learn to justify why someone won’t look you in the eye, won’t speak to you for days, won’t acknowledge your pain—because maybe you were too much. Maybe if you were quieter, smaller, more accommodating, they’d stop disappearing.

But silent gaslighting doesn’t shout, it starves. It deprives. It rewrites reality not with lies, but with erasure.
And I was perfect prey.

The child in me already believed she didn’t matter. That her feelings were burdens. That her truth was inconvenient. And so, when the silent gaslighter came—with their vague confusion, with their withholding, with their uncanny ability to twist my clarity into doubt—I folded. Not because I was weak, but because I was conditioned to make space for someone else's discomfort.
Even if it meant abandoning myself.

They don’t have to call you crazy.
They just have to make you question if you ever made sense to begin with.