Just “fondly” remembering the time my grandma said she wanted to buy me my prom dress, took me to fancy shops with her sisters to try on fancy schmancy dresses. I found one I loved, and she said we’d come back for it.

I ended up buying my own dress, $15 off the clearance rack of a Deb fast fashion store.

Just like my mother, she made a show of how amazing she was for other people. Then she closed the door with them behind us, and closed the door on me, as she always did and always would.

It’s been 6 years since I last spoke to her, a woman who would write or speak glowingly of me to people when it made her look good, and shred me into pieces if I dared be against her. The last interaction I had with her, somewhere in the middle of those 6 years, she shared a picture from my Facebook I posted after I’d lost a ton of weight. She messaged me to say I looked good, which I ignored.

She then blocked me, ranting on her page about how terrible her daughter is, and how I’m “just like her.” (Of course my mother sent me the screenshots, because she couldn’t be miserable without me feeling it, too.)

It’s amazing to me, in hindsight, how these women think. Just as she saw me “just like” her daughter, with deep resentment and distaste, she sees herself. My mother sees herself through that woman’s eyes, too. At some point, I had to stop feeling so much empathy for how broken they are, and realize that their brokenness should never have dictated how they treat me.

The empathy I have left for them is only enough to remind me to never use my broken as an excuse to break others. My broken is mine to heal and to nurture, and the empathy I have for them exists now only to remind me that we have a choice in how to react, even if we don’t have a choice in how we feel.