There are certain kinds of shitty people who thinks your life is just an extension of theirs. I knew a woman like that once. She had this way of showing up uninvited—sometimes literally at your door, sometimes through the phone with a crisis that needed immediate attention, sometimes just by barging into your mood when you were finally starting to feel okay.
If you tried to draw a line, she’d treat it like a suggestion. Not a wall, not even a door she needed to knock on, just a faint chalk mark she could scuff with her shoe. And when you reminded her, “This is my space,” she’d get that wounded look. The one that said, how dare you shut me out when I’ve given you everything. It wasn’t about what you needed—it was always about her performance of sacrifice, her story of being the long-suffering one.
The hardest part wasn’t even the intrusion. It was the way she could make you doubt yourself. Like maybe you were too sensitive, maybe you were ungrateful for not dropping everything to manage her emotions. That’s the trick shitty people pull: they do the thing, and then they convince you that noticing the thing makes you the real problem.
I think back on that woman a lot. About how much time I spent explaining myself, rehearsing conversations in my head, trying to find the magic sentence that would finally make her see me as separate, as deserving of my own edges. There was never a sentence. There was never a moment. Because her behavior wasn’t about not knowing better—it was about choosing herself at my expense, every single time.
Some people don’t misunderstand your boundaries. They bulldoze them on purpose.
Usually The Shitty People Are the Ones We Love
And then there was the man I used to love. Shitty people doing shitty things don’t always come in the form of family—they can show up in the person who swore they’d never hurt you. He didn’t knock down my boundaries with his body; he used charm, apologies, promises. The kind of language that makes you think the last wound was an accident, the last betrayal just a mistake.
You start to bargain with yourself: If I just hold on a little longer, maybe the good version of him will come back. Maybe the person I fell in love with is still in there, buried under the drinking, the lies, the silence. But here’s the thing—when someone shows you, over and over again, that they’ll choose their comfort over your safety, believe them.
Love doesn’t fix a pattern. It just makes the bruise easier to excuse.
With him, the shitty thing wasn’t just what he did. It was how he let me carry the weight of it. As though if I were stronger, more patient, more forgiving, he’d finally rise to meet me. I kept waiting for that day. It never came.
The waiting almost broke me worse than the hurt.
And then there was Alyssa. Not her real name, but it doesn’t matter—what matters is what she taught me. Alyssa wasn’t family. She wasn’t someone I loved romantically. She was a friend, the kind you think will stick with you because you’ve weathered storms together. But Alyssa had this way of making every story tilt in her favor. Every good thing was hers to claim, every bad thing was someone else’s fault.
The shitty thing about Alyssa wasn’t as dramatic as slammed doors or bruised trust. It was quieter, slower—death by a thousand cuts. A joke at your expense that didn’t feel like a joke. A “forgetting” that only ever went one way. A friendship that left you emptier every time you walked away, but guilty for even noticing.
Sometimes the worst betrayal is the one that looks like loyalty until you’re bleeding from paper cuts.
Alyssa was the moment I realized: it wasn’t just them. It was me. Not in the sense that I caused their behavior—shitty people do shitty things all on their own—but in the sense that I kept letting it touch me. I kept making room, kept handing over explanations, kept treating their choices like puzzles I was responsible for solving.
It’s not my job to turn their wreckage into a map.
And here’s the truth I had to choke down before I could believe it: shitty people are going to keep doing shitty things. They don’t stop because you love them. They don’t stop because you beg, or plead, or sacrifice yourself. They stop—maybe—when they decide to. And that decision has nothing to do with you.
What you can control is whether you let it land. Whether you keep setting the table for someone who never brings anything but scraps. Whether you keep letting them barge into your space, or you finally lock the door.
I can’t stop shitty people from being shitty.
But I can stop handing them the keys.