What we experience is based on how we perceive and create our "reality".

The weight of the experience crept on me like a fast rushing wave.  I thought I could handle it, but it swallowed me.  That hollow, sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach. The voice inside of me wanting to break everything in my life to match how I was feeling. The disbelief. I’d been scammed. Not in some dramatic, Hollywood kind of way, but in a subtle, manipulative way that left me feeling incredibly foolish and, more than anything, vulnerable.