“Take care of yourselves, watch the people around you carefully, and cordon off the ones who are toxic, so that the universe can decontaminate them for you through exposure and death.”
-Warren Ellis
This is always very good advice (I’ve written some version of it myself at various times), but it’s especially poignant for me to read it from Warren, now, because I’ve just had to remove a profoundly toxic, dishonest, manipulative, bad, bad, bad person from my life. You’d think it would be easy, but it wasn’t.
So, speaking from experience: it’s not your fault that a toxic person fooled you, even if they fooled you for years. It’s not your fault, and while it is entirely expected that you go through the normal grieving process that is associated with any loss, try not to spend any time blaming yourself for not seeing all the things that you can see now in hindsight much sooner than you did.
Take care of yourself, as Warren says.
