Last year, I started to feel something I didn’t have words for yet.
Heavy. Close. Too close.
A friendship that had once felt expansive and alive had quietly shifted into something else. Something more enmeshed. More emotionally loaded. Less breathable.
It didn’t happen all at once. It never does. What began as deep, supportive, emotionally close connection slowly became a dynamic where I was the emotional processor, the reassurance source, the stabiliser. The person who could hold the feelings, translate the feelings, soften the feelings. And because I’m empathetic, emotionally literate, used to being the calm one… I stepped into that role without noticing how much it was costing me.
It felt caring. It felt loving. It felt like showing up. Until I started to feel tired in a way that rest didn’t fix.
At the same time, something else was happening. I was healing. Quietly. Gaining clarity. Setting boundaries in small, careful ways. Needing more space. Becoming less emotionally available by default. Not performing softness just to keep the emotional temperature comfortable.
I didn’t do this loudly. I didn’t do it with anger. But growth changes the shape of a relationship, even if you don’t announce it. What felt like relief inside me felt like loss to them. What felt like self-trust inside me felt like distance to them. What felt like clarity inside me felt like threat to them. And instead of us meeting in that difference, the dynamic tightened.
I could feel the pressure... not spoken, but constant. Be the version of you I recognise. Not the one you’re becoming. There was a moment, brief but sharp, where I felt the narrative flip. You can feel it when it happens. It’s physical. A shift from “we’re navigating something together” to “you did something to me.” From shared complexity to quiet blame. And I remember the exact internal sentence: Oh. I’m the villain now. Not because I’d been cruel. Not because I’d attacked. But because when people don’t want to face their own part in a dynamic shifting, a story forms that protects them. In that story, I had changed for the worse. I had pulled away. I had hurt the friendship. In reality, I had just stopped shrinking.
There’s a particular kind of distortion that happens in enmeshment. The lines blur. Feelings get misread. Words come back to you slightly altered, as if you said more than you did. Or less. Or something else entirely. You start hesitating before sending a message. Wondering how it will land. Softening your edges. Pre-editing yourself. Managing someone else’s emotional response before you’ve even expressed your own. You start to feel responsible for their stability. That’s not love. That’s pressure wearing a loving face.
The hardest part for me is this... I really did try to handle it with care. With kindness. With empathy. I tried to name things gently. To hold both of us in it. To move slowly. And still, I’m the one being painted as the problem.
It hurts to imagine the stories being told about me that I know aren’t true. Like, really hurts. It hurts in a place that still wants to be understood. And at the same time… I can see what happened. My calm felt like abandonment to someone whose system was wired for closeness as safety. My independence felt like rejection. My boundaries felt like loss. So a narrative formed that made sense of that pain. I don’t think it’s malicious. I think it’s human. And still, I can’t carry it.
Villain came from that moment of seeing clearly. Not anger. Not revenge. Clarity. The realisation that someone can love you and still need you to stay smaller. That someone can feel hurt and still be projecting. That you can hold compassion for their pain and still not go back.
I didn’t become the villain. I just stopped playing the role they were comfortable with. And when the old dynamic couldn’t survive my growth, a story had to form to explain it.
That story is theirs. My story is simpler.
I healed. And that changed everything.