Come on, it’s total bull. We all have that one person that no matter how badly they spit on your heart, you’ll go crawling back to them through whatever horrible mud and barbed wire it takes. Maybe more than one person. And it usually hurts more than anything they could ever do to us because we know exactly what we’re doing.

Ironically, it’s not always the people who we hate that hurt us the most. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but harsh words are like tiny daggers ripping apart my self-confidence, especially when they come from the people I care about.

These master manipulators are not worth our time, yet we give it to them anyway. We force ourselves to get some distance, yet as soon as we come back it feels like eating a greasy burger while you’re on a juice cleanse. For so long you were doing so well, and then you went and sabotaged yourself. Your insides seize up and you feel like you’re on fire, and all this suffering is self-induced. Way to go.

Except that’s not it. I said they’re master manipulators, and it’s true. Somehow between their ignorance, malice, and our own wishful thinking, the blame gets turned around on us. It’s our fault for slinking back to people who put us down more than they lift us up because maybe they really aren’t as bad as we thought.

It’s our fault for texting that one friend who makes us feel like crap, but they’ve been with us through tough times so we can’t afford to lose them. It’s our fault because for just once we want to feel like people love us for who we are instead of the 2-dimensional plastic versions of us they completely made up in their head.

These people are not our problem. They are their own. But something inside us keeps whispering that they can still be good, still be saved. I’m not sure if that something is an optimist or a masochist, but whatever it is all it really does is send our emotions to the front line to be slaughtered.

We give these people power over us because we want to be loved, or to be a hero, or we think we don’t have anything else to turn to. This doesn’t make us weak. No, it means we’re ambitious, loyal. It means that we believe in something better, whether that be the present or the future we know we can shape.

But even ambitions can be warped or misplaced, and even loyalty doesn’t protect you from being stabbed in the back. Every time we hand people power over us, it will hurt like hell when they use it to put us down.

It’s a testament to our strength that we keep getting up, that we keep trusting folks. Maybe not a testament to our self-control when we keep trusting those who have proven themselves untrustworthy, but everyone has room for improvement.

The important thing is that we don’t turn into the people who step on our hearts by letting bitterness take over and warp us into someone unrecognizable. Because otherwise the power we hand others to hurt us turns us into people who hurt others, and no one really wants to be that person.