on betrayal: when your brain becomes a crime scene investigator

2025 taught us all how to question reality. some of us got private lessons.

tl;dr: betrayal doesn't just break your heart. it breaks your internal gps, your internal compass… or as i like to call it, your “picker”. but rebuilding that while the world is also on fire? sorry for my french here, but what the fucking fuck?

it’s december 27th.

we’re in that weird purgatory week, that strange and lawless territory that is between christmas and new year’s where time collapses into a greasy blur of leftovers and existential reckoning. i’ve been wearing the same fucking hoodie for three days. and somewhere in the distance, i hear 2026, revving its engine like a threat.

and look, 2025 has been… well…

calling it brutal feels too small. too polite. this year feels like it kneecapped our collective sanity, shook us down for our lunch money, and set the cafeteria on fire.

we have been running a marathon on a treadmill made of bad news and broken dreams, and the treadmill is on fire, and the fire is somehow our fault. trauma prime, baby. two-day delivery on your complete psychological unravelling. no returns accepted, all sales are final.

so if you find yourself reading this and you’ve also been betrayed this year, by a person, by institutions, by your own body, by the sheer audacity of life itself… i see you. i am you. we are all just standing in the rubble wondering how we even missed the signs.

that’s the thing about betrayal that really hits different, no? it’s not just all the loss. it’s the way it makes you question your own damn perception, your very own reality.

and once that starts… you’re in for a long night.

the forensic phase

there is a certain peculiar kind of madness that sets in after betrayal. it’s not the screaming, the tantrums, the throwing of things, the gnashing of teeth… it’s a much quieter one, at least from what i have experienced. it’s the kind where you find yourself replaying every minute, every word of every conversation like a detective scrubbing through surveillance footage at 3 am, running on cold, watery, shitty coffee and the fumes of your own disintegrating trust.

¿cómo no lo vi? how did i not see it?!?

and this question loops endlessly.

i have been betrayed in ways both spectacular and mundane this year. the friend who borrowed money that she never intended to repay. the acquaintance that was becoming a friend but then leveraged my relationship with them for their social clout. the colleague who smiled in my face while quietly building a case against me in emails or texts i wasn’t included on. the community group that said it would be a haven for good and it turned out was just a high school clique with adults bullying each other behind the scenes. the “friend” who helped himself to my body by the handful whenever we would drink together. the institutions that promised me services, safety, support… and instead only gave me paperwork, paper cuts, and a phone tree that led to fucking nowhere.

each time, the initial wound healed faster than the secondary infection: the creeping suspicion that i am fundamentally broken. that my judgement is garbage. that i am the kind of person who walks into the walls that everyone can see.

the thing about betrayal that no one tells you is that the person who hurt you gets to walk away. they get to post about their “healing journey”, or another fraud-rife gofundme when their grift reaches a dead end, or some stupid ass picture of a sunset while saying that they are “releasing what no longer serves them”. (you were the thing that no longer served them, by the way.) it’s like we are all a product and we’re consumed, voided of everything we have.

but you? you’re stuck in the crime scene of your own mind, dusting for fingerprints on every memory.

the autopsy of affection

when someone lies to you, you start performing forensic analysis on love itself.

that time they said they were proud of me? was it real? the birthday dinner where he seemed so present… was he already planning his exit? the inside jokes, the 2 a.m. confessions, the heart to hearts, the trust, the secrets… which parts were genuine and which parts were theater?

this is betrayal’s cruelest trick. it doesn’t just poison the present. it reaches backward in time and contaminates everything. the beautiful moments become suspect. the hard moments become evidence.

me, trying to be healthy: “i should process my grief constructively.”

also me, at 3 am, going absolutely feral: [rewatching mental footage of a dinner from 2019 like it’s the zapruder film]

i spent months doing this. i analyzed texts like they were encrypted transmissions. i looked for the code that would finally explain it all, the primer that would show me how could i have been so wrong about someone i thought i knew.

spoiler: there was no code. there is no code. sometimes people just choose to be dishonest bastards, and me, doing the exhausting work of trying to make it make sense. some people are just snakes in love’s clothing. they slither and like like it’s breathing. there is no amount of forensic analysis that will change that or make it your fault.

the real wound

we often talk about betrayal like the injury is the loss. the friendship that ended, the shattered romance… but that’s just a piece of the picture. it’s the surface laceration.

the deeper wound is epistemological. (yes, i said epistemological. i had to check the spelling. i went to therapy and i have vocabulary now.)

betrayal makes you doubt the very instruments and assumptions that you use to better navigate the world: your perception. your gut, your picker, your ability to sense danger, to know when someone is really being real with you.

if you were wrong about them, what else are you wrong about?

this is the question that haunts me every moment of my life now. it’s not just staying up at 3 am anymore, it’s every waking minute of my life. i’ve become a walking and talking security system that runs on threat assessments on anyone that gets closer, seeing a myriad of conspiracies in an outstretched hand, in a person offering me kindness. where is the other shoe? what’s the catch? where’s the fine print?

my therapist says this is hypervigilance. okay. i called it “finally being smart”.

but she was right, though. i was exhausted and paranoid and mistaking my own fear for discernment and wisdom.

the real wisdom, which i’m still learning, is that you can be careful while being closed. you can protect yourself without becoming an unassailable fortress. you can really learn from betrayal without letting it teach you that everything and everyone is a threat.

but fucking hell, that’s hard. especially on a year like this one.

rebuilding the compass

so what happens now? do we just accept that betrayal leaves permanent damage?

maybe. but it doesn’t feel to me like that’s the whole story.

the thing i have learned, slowly, painfully, through too much therapy and too many 3 am reddit rabbit holes about attachment theory: you don’t rebuild trust in others first. you start by rebuilding trust in yourself.

not the naive trust of before, but something that is more calibrated, grounded on actions and evidence. on deeds, not words.

trust that when someone shows you who they are, you will believe them. trust that you’re perfectly okay to leave any situation that feels wrong, even if you can’t exactly put a pin on why. trust that your gut is not your enemy, even though it failed to protect you once. (or maybe it did and you didn’t listen to it, which is even worse and something i’m absolutely guilty of.)

in argentina there’s a popular saying. it goes: el que se quema con leche, ve una vaca y llora. the one who burns themselves with milk cries when they see a cow. weird, i know. but it’s a warning about becoming so traumatized that you cannot fucking function.

but i’ve been thinking about it differently. maybe the tears aren’t weakness. maybe they’re data. your nervous system saying: you know what hot milk feels like now. act accordingly.

a quiet, tentative hope for 2026

here’s what i want you to know if you are, like me, in the middle of this right now:

you probably didn’t miss it.

you probably saw something. felt something. a restless energy. a flicker. a moment where things did not sit right. and then you proceeded to explain it away, because you cared. you wanted to be a better person. because you wanted the stories and the feelings to be true, and ultimately because the alternative was too painful.

that does not make you stupid or gullible. it makes you human.

the capacity to trust is not a design flaw. the willingness to believe the best about people you love is not naivety to be cured.

they lied. you believed them. that is precisely what lying is meant to do, and you are not broken forever because one of those lies got through to you and worked.

listen, i’m not gonna wrap this shit in a bow. i can imagine my writing lately feels dark and sad and horrible, but that’s just where i am now and i sure as hell won’t put up a fucking mask for anyone anymore.

i’m not gonna sit here and tell you or myself that time is going to heal our wounds and that we’ll all be stronger on the other side of the shitshow.

one can only hope that 2026 will surprise us in a good way.

and honestly… that’s all i fucking got. nothing but hope. it’s tentative, bruised, and limping (or maybe even army crawling) toward the new year.

the reconstruction always tends to be slower than you want or wish. it is always fraught with relapses, with mistakes. it’s never linear or neat. there will be days where you trust yourself completely and others where you feel like becoming a hermit and only talking to plants.

but you keep going. you learn that trust is not a light switch. it’s a dimmer. you can adjust it based on evidence. you can give people access to more of you as they prove themselves worthy of it.

this is not hubris. i’m not better than anyone. this is protection. this is discernment.

and maybe, eventually you’ll stop performing the autopsy on every memory you hold. the dead stay dead. you opt instead to place your energy into the living, into the worthy that are showing up.

not because you’ve forgotten. but because you decided that living deserves more of your attention and less of your passivity and derision.

hasta la próxima, mi gente. please be gentle with yourselves on this limbo, this purgatory of a week. and even more if 2025 took more from you than you can even name.

here’s to making it to 2026. here’s to trusting ourselves again, one day at a time.

i’m still here. you’re still here. and i think that counts for something.

con amor,

edgard 💖✊🏽🌈

p.s. if you’re unraveling a betrayal right now, my DMs are open. not to fix anything. just to witness.

p.p.s. betrayal trauma is real and treatable. therapy has helped me. so did people who believed me when i said something felt wrong. you deserve both.

if any of this resonated, you can buy me a coffee. no pressure. no subscription. just a one-time “thanks for existing” if you feel like it.