Fourteen times the speaker says "Stop," and the most devastating line in the poem is the one that doesn't. Bremarie Gulfan's "Abuse Issues" is built like a list of complaints, but it works more like a pile of small stones. Each accusation is light enough on its own, yet together they weigh enough to bury someone.
The "you" being addressed is never named. Clues such as "when you were a teen" and the repeated cousins suggest an older relative, but the poem withholds a name and a scene, which keeps our attention on the behaviour rather than the person. Its central idea is that constant blame, comparison and control can wear down a young person's sense of worth even when no one raises a hand. The blunt title, with its clinical word "abuse," insists that this counts as harm.
The poem's structure is repetition. There is no rhyme, no steady metre and no punctuation until the very end. Almost every line opens with "Stop," so the poem sounds like a protest that has been rehearsed many times. Within that pattern, two verbs come back again and again. "Blaming" appears three times, attached to grades, to "a bad days," and finally to the sweeping "everything was my fault." "Comparing" appears three times as well, measuring the speaker against cousins, against "other girls," against the adult's own teenage years, and even against the adult's looks. That last one, "you're more beautiful than me," is strange and revealing, because it shows a grown person competing with a child. It prepares the quietest accusation in the poem, "Stop being insecure." This short line is the speaker's diagnosis, and it implies that the cruelty may come from the other person's weakness.
The imagery is sparse, and the main picture is one of size. "Stop making me feel so small" is the shortest of the emotional lines, and its plainness is what hurts. Around it, the verbs are about power: "dictating," "controlling," "bullying." "Bullying" is a playground word, and placing it in the home, "to my classmates," suggests humiliation in front of the very people the speaker should feel safe with. Together the lines cover almost every part of a teenager's life: grades, looks, friends, cousins, even future partners. Nothing is left that belongs only to the speaker. "When crisis comes" and "bad days" hint at a household where moods and pressures land on one person.
The English is uneven. "Dictating me whom partner should I choose," "unders estimating" and "a bad days" would be marked wrong in an exam. Judging by the effect, though, these slips make the poem feel unedited, as if the feelings arrived faster than the grammar could manage. That roughness makes the voice more believable. Nothing here sounds polished or performed.
Then comes "I tried." Everything changes in two words. The commands stop, "you" becomes "I," and the present-tense demand becomes a past-tense admission. It is also the only line that ends with a full stop, which gives it a feeling of finality. It quietly answers the first line, where the speaker "can't get high grades," and it makes the reader reconsider the whole list. Tried to do what, exactly? To please, to measure up, to endure, to make the others stop? The poem doesn't say, and the past tense suggests that the trying has run out. After fourteen loud lines, the exhaustion is the loudest thing.
The poem matters because it names something that leaves no bruises. Comparisons with cousins and blame on a bad day can pass for ordinary family talk, and the poem shows how they add up to something heavier. Its power comes from honesty rather than polish. It gives young readers words for a feeling many may recognise, and it ends on the reminder that "I tried" is a complete and fair answer.