You’ve got worms in your head.
You need help.
You’re mental.
You’re paranoid.
You overthink.
You can’t let go of the past.
You make things up.
You’re a liar.
You’re pathetic.
You deserve it.
You deserve to be cheated on.
You’re simple.
You’re a mentalist.
You’re psycho.
You’re crazy.
You’re a c*nt.
You’re a hypocrite.
You’re a man‑trapper.
You’re a shithead.
I deserve better than you.
I’d start checking myself before I spoke. I’d rehearse sentences in my head. I’d apologise before I knew what I’d done.
Worms in your head.
He said it so often that it started to sound like a diagnosis. Something permanent and persistent and proof there was something wrong with me. Had the worms taken root in my mind, like something rotten and uncontrollable living inside me?
He called me so many things I lost track of where his voice ended and mine began. I started to believe him, bit by bit.
I need help.
I’m mental.
Paranoid.
I overthink everything.
I can’t let go of the past.
I make things up.
I lie.
I’m pathetic.
Sometimes they landed like punches. Others he would drop casually, almost bored, as if he was stating facts everyone else already knew.
Piece of shit.
Shithead.
C*nt.
Crazy.
Psycho.
Mentalist.
Simple.
Hypocrite.
Man‑trapper.
Sometimes he’d say I deserved it. Deserved to be cheated on. Deserved to be treated the way I was because of how I was, of how difficult I was, of how impossible it was to love me properly. He’d tell me he deserved better than me. Somehow I’d find myself nodding, already rehearsing how to become quieter, easier, less.
The worst part wasn’t any single word. It was the repetition. The way the words stacked up day after day until they started to feel like evidence. Until I stopped arguing back and started checking myself instead.
Am I lying? Am I imagining this? Am I crazy?
After he left, the words and thoughts didn’t. They stayed where he’d put them. In my mouth. In my head. Waiting.
Worms in my head, I’d think, when I forgot something.
Crazy, when I cried.
Liar, when my memory didn’t line up with his version of events.
I can still hear him sometimes, even now, years on. His voice slips in when I’m tired or unsure, offering its familiar conclusions. I don’t remember all the things he called me, these are just the ones that stayed. These are the ones that lodged themselves somewhere deep and stubborn, and the ones that took the longest to scrape out.
It took time to realise that none of those words came from me. After the relationship ended, the words slowly started to lose their grip. They didn’t disappear all at once. They weakened. Worms in my head became intuition. Crazy became reacting to something that was wrong. Pathetic became tired.
I wasn’t paranoid.
I was noticing patterns, shifts, silences, and reactions that my body recognised long before my mind could name them.
I wasn’t overthinking.
I was analysing danger, trying to predict outcomes, and doing the mental work required to stay safe in an unpredictable environment.
I wasn’t stuck in the past.
I was carrying wounds that had never been acknowledged, let alone healed, and they were still shaping how I moved through the world.
I didn’t deserve to be cheated on.
I was living in a reality where betrayal was reframed as my inadequacy, not his choice, and that distortion kept me small.
I didn’t deserve to be spoken to like that.
His words were never about who I was, they were tools designed to unsettle me, silence me, and make me doubt my own worth.
I didn’t deserve to shrink to make someone else feel larger.
That shrinking wasn’t compromise or kindness, it was conditioning, slowly teaching me that his comfort mattered more than my identity.
What he called me was never who I was. It was who he needed me to believe I was, a smaller, quieter version of myself he could control. His words weren’t reflections of my character, they were tools designed to keep me doubting my worth so I wouldn’t recognise the strength it would take to leave.
