I don’t know what I’m feeling. I can’t access the depth of it, so it feels like there’s nothing overly deep there. For three years my feelings were inverted and invalidated. Now I just feel empty.

When I do find something, it sits in the pit of my stomach. It fluctuates between sickness and heartache. Other times the rage takes over and it’s a multisystem feeling. Right now, it’s just in my stomach. Part of why I can’t name it is that what I do find contradicts itself.

Some of the time it’s anger. I want to shout, ‘how fucking dare you say you ever cared about me. If you did, you wouldn’t have done that.’ There’s no planet on which what happened to me is caring. Caring about them? Sure, but me? Nope.

Part of the anger is that I need someone with authority to say that what happened was wrong, and I know I’m not going to get it. Even if there are consequences, it won’t be because anyone in power cares about the damage done to me. It will be because they’ve decided there’s an unacceptable risk it could happen to someone else. I’m told I need to accept that. I have a fierce, autistic sense of justice, and everything in me says it shouldn’t be something I have to accept.

Then there’s the pull. I had it yesterday, and I looked. I wanted to know whether she was suffering, but no amount of checking is going to answer that for me, and it ends up hurting me. The last time, I watched a video about safety in therapy and it sent me into a rage. So I have blocked all of it.

The other half is what I haven’t said out loud to anyone this week. I miss her in my life.

For all the harm that relationship brought, I enjoyed her company, even if it wasn’t real. For the better part of three years, she was a weekly fixture, and now she’s just gone. There’s a void where that routine used to sit. The hour in the room is when I got the version of her I needed the most. It was the only time my distress lowered. It’s a complete contradiction, because I was a masked version of myself the whole time I was with her. Real vulnerability felt dangerous, but the cup of tea and the hug at the end gave me something I needed. What? I don’t know, but something.

I feel guilty that I still care about her when I’ve submitted an epically thorough notification. I feel guilty that I still care when everyone else has had to pick up the mess. I feel guilty because the dysfunction is why I’m still caught in this push-pull cycle. I swing between that and hoping she’s suffered even a fraction of what I have in the aftermath, knowing how unlikely that is.

The version I got outside of the room didn’t feel the same to me. I never knew when a reply would come or what I would get. Sometimes I got a response when I was in crisis, sometimes not. Sometimes she responded to my anger, sometimes not. Sometimes she was warm, sometimes not. That intermittent pattern is what conditioned me to keep seeking. It’s the exact loop created by that kind of responsiveness, and it was ultimately reframed as me ‘breaching boundaries.’

I think this is why I can’t find my feelings now. What I learned from her was that if I felt hurt by something she did, it would be turned back on me as evidence that I expected her to be perfect. That’s how I learned my feelings didn’t matter. It was never more evident than at the very end, when I was shut out so loudly that my feelings weren’t even heard. They never even got the chance to be disregarded.

I still don’t know what I’m feeling, but for today, it’s out of my head now.