Am I Crazy?

There is a sentence I have heard from more women than I can count.

“I thought I was losing my mind.”

Different women. Different marriages. Different circumstances, but somehow, the same words.

I know those words because, in my own way, I have lived them too.

There were times in my former marriage when I knew something wasn’t right. Sometimes I had more than intuition. I had facts. Information. Things I could see with my own eyes. Photocopies. And somehow, by the end of the conversation, I was the crazy one.

I was overreacting. I was imagining things. I was making something out of nothing, and when someone you love tells you that often enough, something begins to happen inside of you.

You stop asking only, Can I trust him?

And begin asking,

Can I trust me?

And that is an entirely different kind of damage.

Recently, someone I love dearly learned a truth that shattered her understanding of years of her life. For years, she had received messages from fake profiles and unknown numbers. Messages meant to frighten her. Humiliate her. Make her believe someone from her past was obsessed with tormenting her. At the same time, she was being told stories about things she had supposedly done years before, things she couldn’t remember doing.

So she searched her memory. She questioned herself. She wondered what kind of person could do something terrible and not even remember it.

She lived with anxiety every time an unfamiliar number appeared on her phone, and beside her was the person she trusted most. The person she went to when she was afraid. The person who reassured her when she couldn’t make sense of what was happening. Until she learned the truth.

It was him.

The person comforting her was the person creating the fear.

The stories weren’t real. The mysterious person terrorizing her didn’t exist. The things she couldn’t remember? She couldn’t remember them because they had never happened. And as I listened to her try to process the unimaginable weight of that revelation, one thought would not leave me:

How many women have been taught not to trust themselves?

Maybe your story isn’t as extreme as hers. Maybe nobody created fake profiles. Maybe nobody invented an entire person to terrorize you. Maybe it looked much quieter.

You found something and were told you misunderstood it. You confronted a lie and somehow ended up apologizing. You asked a reasonable question and were called insecure. You noticed inconsistencies and were told you were paranoid. You remembered exactly what was said, only to be told, “That never happened.” You knew something was wrong, but every conversation left you questioning whether perhaps you really were the problem, and eventually, you stopped trusting the little voice inside of you that said,

Something isn’t right.

I have sat with women in ministry for years, and I cannot tell you how many times I have heard some version of this story. Not identical circumstances, but the same aftermath.

Confusion.

Anxiety.

Shame.

Second-guessing.

Women carrying screenshots and receipts while simultaneously wondering whether they’re allowed to believe what is right in front of them. Women who don’t trust their own memories anymore. Women apologizing for being suspicious when someone has repeatedly given them reason to be suspicious. Women describing themselves as “crazy” because that word has been handed to them so many times that they eventually picked it up and started using it against themselves.

But hear me:

Being confused in a confusing environment does not make you crazy. Becoming anxious while living with deception does not mean there is something inherently wrong with you. Wanting answers when the story keeps changing does not make you difficult. And recognizing inconsistencies does not make you paranoid.

Sometimes your mind has been working overtime trying to reconcile two completely different realities:

The person you love, and the things that person is doing.

That is an exhausting place to live, and there is another layer I think we need to talk about.

When the truth finally comes out, women often turn the anger back toward themselves.

How did I not know?

Why did I believe him?

Why did I stay?

How could I have been so stupid?

Please don’t do that to yourself. You were making decisions with the information you had while someone else possessed information you did not.

Trust is not stupidity. Love is not stupidity. Believing someone you have built your life with is not stupidity.

The deception belongs to the person who chose to deceive. The manipulation belongs to the person who chose to manipulate. The shame belongs nowhere on your shoulders. And maybe part of healing is learning to trust yourself again.

Slowly.

Not because you will always interpret everything perfectly. None of us will, but because your voice matters. Your observations matter. Your questions matter.

That uncomfortable feeling you spent years silencing deserves to be heard. You are allowed to say, “That doesn’t make sense.” You are allowed to ask another question. You are allowed to believe the evidence in front of you. You are allowed to stop participating in conversations designed only to make you doubt what you already know.

And you are allowed to tell the truth about what happened to you, even if someone else doesn’t like the way the truth makes them look.

Scripture says that the truth will set us free. Sometimes we imagine that freedom arriving gently. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes truth comes crashing through the door and breaks our hearts before it begins putting us back together.

Because discovering the truth may mean grieving the person you thought someone was. It may mean grieving years you now see differently. It may mean going back through memories and realizing why you felt the way you did. But truth can also return something deception stole from you:

Your trust in your own voice.

Maybe you weren’t losing your mind. Maybe you were trying desperately to make sense of a reality someone else kept rewriting, and maybe healing begins with finally being able to whisper:

I knew something wasn’t right.

And instead of immediately talking yourself out of it, you believe yourself.