It happened in an instant — one of those quiet betrayals you don’t see coming.
A message I couldn’t answer.
A friendship I couldn’t reach.
And just like that, the door was closed, and I didn’t even know why.
The Blocked Friendship
The night before, I told myself I’d reply tomorrow. I was exhausted — the kind of exhaustion that seeps into your bones, where even a simple conversation feels like too much to carry.
At work that day, I had already lived inside assumptions.
I convinced myself that certain behavior was aimed at me. Whispers, distance, subtle shifts in the room — I carried them like proof. My chest was heavy with it all, bracing against the story I thought I was living.
Finally, I pulled someone from leadership aside. And the truth unraveled:
None of it was about me.
The behavior that felt like rejection wasn’t mine to carry. I had burned myself down over a narrative that wasn’t even real.
That conversation left me gutted. Relieved, yes — but emptied out. So when I walked through the door that night and saw her text come through, I thought:
Tomorrow. I’ll have the space tomorrow.
It had already been three months since I’d last heard from her. What harm could one more night do?
But by morning, the story had already been written without me.
I replied to her text. Then I opened Facebook and saw another message waiting: Did you block my number or change it?
My fingers hovered over the keyboard, ready to explain, to reassure. But when I tried to reply, the option was gone.
She had blocked me.
Everywhere.
My silence had been rewritten as betrayal. My exhaustion translated into rejection. And years of friendship disappeared in an instant.
That’s how assumptions work when inexperience is involved.
Without the context of lived experience, we don’t question the story we’re telling ourselves.
We believe the first draft of fear. And sometimes, it costs us everything.
Young Love & The Marriage
That wasn’t the only time inexperience betrayed me.
I married young — to the first person I ever dated seriously. Too young, too untested, too inexperienced to know what love was supposed to look like.
We fought constantly.
Over money.
Over family.
Over nothing at all.
The walls of our home carried echoes of slammed doors and raised voices. It was exhausting, but it was also… familiar.
And because I had no other baseline, I assumed this was marriage.
I assumed this was love.
When it ended, I didn’t walk away with clarity. I walked away with questions. If this wasn’t marriage, then what was? If this wasn’t love, then what was love supposed to be?
Carrying Broken Baselines
The danger of not knowing better is that you carry your broken baseline forward.
And I did.
In my next relationship, I showed up already primed for dysfunction. Raised voices didn’t shock me. Manipulation didn’t register as abuse. Instability didn’t send me running.
It felt familiar.
It felt like home.
That’s the trick of inexperience: it convinces you that harm is just part of the package. That pain is the price of love. That chaos is how life works.
And so you stay.
You excuse.
You normalize what should never be normal.
The Weight of Not Knowing
Looking back now, I see it clearly.
Inexperience isn’t just innocence — it’s dangerous.
It makes you vulnerable to other people’s stories.
It makes you mistake silence for rejection.
It makes you mistake fighting for love.
It makes you carry broken patterns, convinced they’re normal.
When you don’t know better, you accept less. You live smaller. You mistake harm for love. You absorb assumptions as truth.
And you don’t realize you’re imprisoned by them until something finally cracks you open.
Next in the Series
In Part 3, I’ll share what happens when inexperience collides with something darker: how gaslighting and repeated harm can train you to normalize abuse until it feels like home.
© 2025 Kimberly Thomas. All rights reserved.
Thank you for reading The Berbly Project. Each essay in this series unpacks how assumptions and inexperience can trap us in stories that were never ours to begin with. Have you ever looked back and realized you were living inside a false narrative — about yourself, or about someone else? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. Let’s start a conversation about the stories that shape us, and the truths that finally set us free.
Like this post?
Keep reading the series:
👈🏻 Part 1: The Weight of Assumptions – Words as Weapons
👉🏻 Part 3: The Lies That Teach You Silence
👉🏻 Part 4: The Ruin, The Reckoning – From Ashes to Strength
👉🏻 Part 5: A Love Letter to Endurance: Lessons in Salt, Stingers, and Survival