When the butterflies aren’t butterflies, you get so excited and anxious to talk to that person. Maybe you just met them. Maybe you can’t believe how lucky you are to be starting a relationship with them. Pure excitement. Joy. Adrenaline. You wonder how this person can actually be so into you.
But sometimes the butterflies aren’t butterflies.
Sometimes it’s your gut. Telling you to run. Telling you to get out. Because you thinking it might be too good to be true, is 100 percent accurate.
Sometimes they’re not butterflies.
Sometimes it’s your body’s way of telling you to get out. To leave before you’re in too deep. Before you get deeply hurt.
Before you let someone in. Before you allow someone to tear you down slowly, but definitively. Before someone starts talking down to you. Before someone starts making you question yourself.
Before someone diminishes all you important relationships because they want control. Before you stop doing the things you love. Before you start to change who you are. All to make someone else happy.
Sometimes we get pulled in quickly. We fall fast. And hard. Just to be have our world unravel.
And while the hurt may start out gradually, eventually you’ll wonder how you got here. How did you allow someone to control your life? Your every move? You don’t know how you got here, or how to leave.
Every day becomes a struggle. To be who you are. To please this person. To try not to anger this person. Because emotional manipulation is a real thing. At a point you’re so far in.
In hindsight, you should have seen this coming. You dodged friends and family who may have warned you. Maybe they were jealous. They didn’t get it. You hate to admit that they were right.
So you don’t. You sit. And wait. And suffer.
Until you absolutely have to get out. Before your life depends on it.
Because sometimes they’re not butterflies. Sometimes they’re warning signs. Warning signs that make your heart beat faster. They make you lose your breath. Eventually you’ll learn the difference between butterflies and toxicity.
Butterflies aren’t always butterflies.
Sometimes it’s the very opposite.
