It has a name.

It is a studied thing, a thing people do to other people on purpose, and it follows a pattern, and I had been living inside the pattern without a map.

First they isolate you — my mother-in-law moving in, the friends who fell away because I was always too tired and too on edge to see them.

Then they reframe your reality — every true thing you say recast as a symptom, until you stop trusting your own eyes.

Then they enlist your own exhaustion against you, so that the very toll their behavior takes on you becomes the proof of your unfitness.