Mafalda's "Toxic" follows a speaker caught in a spiral of overthinking. The first half is built on repetition: "As I think about..." opens line after line, moving from the speaker's day to their friends, family and lost friends. The pattern feels like a mind that can't stop circling, and it ends in four blunt statements of self-blame: doubt, hurt, punishment, hate.
Then the poem turns. The speaker decides that the people who left were not the toxic ones, and that the problem is "I." The short line "I am" lands hard because it comes so suddenly. From there, the speaker explains the loss as a kind of rescue: the friends "had to" go, with "no option," to be "saved." The mood is heavy, sad and self-punishing. What stands out is that the speaker treats abandonment as something they deserved, and even as a kindness, which suggests how deeply the self-hatred runs.