anathemacore

[anathemacore]

Guys I don’t think I want the body to keep the score anymore

[anathemacore]

sensory overload of the life. i can't catch up. days keep happening and i'm left behind, still processing years passed.

the weight of every day of my life is crushing. i can't fathom how anyone can handle living with so much having lived and yet they don't implode.

[anathemacore]

Can I Please Eat In The Computer Room Tonight? by Nicole Nikolich (2025)

[anathemacore]

the weight of every day of my life is crushing. i can't fathom how anyone can handle living with so much having lived and yet they don't implode.

[anathemacore]

i don't know how anyone finds christianity a comfort if they're going through truly awful things. it always just felt like a betrayal. punishment, and i don't know what i did. put in timeout, crying at the door asking why but he's not even on the other side. god doesn't make you want to kill yourself as a test of faith.

[anathemacore]

as if somewhere out there there's a me who isn't me at all. if every day i wake up and do everything i can to do what i'm supposed to what everyone tells me to do then maybe just maybe everything will go away.

i don't know how i got here. i cling so desperately to any remainder of the lives i lived before that i'll never live again. none of them were good but i know them better than i know this one and i will always favour familiarity.

familiarity above comfort, familiarity above peace of mind, familiarity above life, familiarity above all. it's all just too much. every day is less and less familiar.

if i don't have photo proof of everything i've ever experienced then who's to say i did? i feel the need to prove everything. no one disbelieves me. people believe me and i still insist to prove to them what they don't need proved.

i feel like an idiot because 20 years is fucking nothing. no one cares. that's not even old for any piece of media except maybe a youtube video. it's not old for a car. it's not at all old for a house. it's nothing to a tree.

but it's 20 years of misery. 17 years of daily abuse. 886 days of lying out of moral obligation and believing my own lies, 1772 if you count wednesdays and miscellaneous camps and events. 16 years of mental imprisonment and thought policing myself into oblivion. 7,300 days of suffering. i'm such a dramatic idiot. too much les mis, tiffany said.

i always want to make sure to document everything. if i remember something i have to write it down before it's lost forever. as if i'm lucky enough to forget.

20 years is nothing but it's way too fucking much.

i just want to wake up from the longest nightmare. 20 years is a long time to have a nightmare.

i reinvent myself every day, always trying and hoping that somehow i will stumble upon a version of myself that hasn't lived my life.

[anathemacore]

so the other night i decided to stalk the old apartments i used to live in between the ages of one and six and it makes me like, irrationally upset that i don't live in either of those places anymore.

for no good reason, just Change Is Bad All The Time No Matter What.

i've been constantly having dreams lately, especially about the one we moved into right before my fifth birthday and moved out of right before my seventh. in my dreams i'm always trying to find things i lost or left behind, sometimes i find them sometimes not, but somehow things are always at least somewhat in order. i come back and my family still lives there although evidently enough of my reality has seeped in because in the last one it was just my mom and my sister even though my sister is only six herself.

i'm always trying to get back to something.

both apartments were built in 1974. the first one looks it a lot more. visibly dated exterior design and not kept up quite as well. i always loved the weird tacky wooden shingles though. according to zillow it still comes with free cable. i couldn't find any listing pictures of ours but there were of my uncle's. plenty of different people had lived with him but the constant was my grandpa (the registered pedophile i grew up around my whole childhood...). of course we went over there all the time, my dad has never really ever spoken kindly of his brother but once they were adults and got their own places they still wanted to be close so they could hang out constantly. out there in the vast expanses of the internet are pictures of rooms i spent a considerable amount of my time in between the ages of one and seven, when we moved out of the second apartment they moved into it. and someone else was moving into theirs, it was a three way domino apartment switch.

although i'm more attached to the first, the pictures of the second are what really got me. my parents' car is in one of the most commonly circulated pictures, for one. chevy aveo, white because it's the cheapest for insurance. i spent so much time in that car. i lived and died in that car. ours was the farthest down and you can see the shed my dad built by the side of the building. i cried when i saw that they redid all the back decks. when we got there the deck was rotting so my dad up and build us a brand new one. i can only imagine what the landlord thought, they weren't strangers but still. when you're a landlord you don't exactly expect some 24 year old kid renter to up and build a new deck and a whole ass shed. i had my fifty birthday party on that deck, and they tore it out because to them it was never anything. the cinder block raised bed my uncle wanted for gardening was still there too. one day after church it was just me and my mom over there, and i was helping to dig up potatoes. my mom harshly told me to stop, and when i protested that i wasn't even getting any dirt on my dress, she insisted even more. i'd always suspected it was because of some "modesty" reason, especially since she was always warning me to be "modest" around men especially male family members. since she told me about my grandpa in 2023 i'm even more sure.

at least in the first apartment i remember being out. in the living room watching tv or colouring or in the kitchen dancing or doing crafts. sitting with my dad while he played guitar or playstation. watching et or trying raw coconut together for the first time. getting a whiffle ball stuck on my finger or accidently ingesting glowstick liquid. being imprisoned in a backwards armchair in the living room because i was sick or lost a toenail or that time i gave myself a mullet. i was out and about, generally. maybe not exactly spending time with my parents really, but in their presence a lot of the time at least.

that all changed when i turned five. i didn't spend time with anyone hardly, other than when i was outside with the neighbor kids. my only memory of my mom was when we were homeschooling and i was crying over how the early learning books were demeaning or when i was having a meal. i spent time at the table doing crafts but she never really engaged in it with me, just left me to my own devices. i spent neatly all my free time that i can remember in my room by myself, listening to music and doing puzzles or drawing or writing in my notebooks or reading. i loved new treasury of children's poetry compiled by joanna cole the illustrations are absolutely wonderful i also started to read little house on the prairie at this time. funny how basically none of my memories involve playing. in the second apartment i had a little flower house toy and a tiny wheelbarrow that went with it but no people(sold separately), a couple of those fancy fuzzy animals whose brand name eludes me at the moment (calico critters.), a strawberry shortcake with scented hair, a handful of littlest pet shops as well as a house for them, and a probably average amount of barbies for a five to six year old girl in 2009-10. my favorite thing to do was just look at them. they were pretty after all. i'd line them up and look at them. playing wasn't something i did. my favorite to look at was the flower house, i wish i still had it. i also had a fairly high quality keyboard, now that i played. for hours i'd dink around on it. it has prerecorded songs on that you were supposed to follow along to, but of course i just liked to listen to them. let it be and girl from ipanema were my favorite. around this time i was also obsessed with shrek. shrek, shrek 2, power puff girls, care bears, some bubble stories, and eventually barbie nutcracker. those were the vhs tapes i had. maybe the only neutral memory i have of my mom is when we would read secret garden together before bed. i'd always get annoyed though because she kept stopping me because i wasn't pausing at the punctuation. then she read the how to train your dragon books to me and the boy she babysat until i was 8 or so. some of my clearest childhood memories are from that apartment and yet the whole thing was a blur. i remember my fifth birthday but not much about my sixth other than some things i got for my birthday. i can't distinguish between things that happened when i was five and things that happened when i was six. this would be normal for people whose memory is generally foggy that far back but i can remember being three and four very clearly. so why is there a gap? i know we did other things outside of the house, summer reading library events, trips to the park. this is when josh got his first atv and his first proper mudding vehicle (blue geo tracker). this particular time was a special kind of weird though. it feels nebulous in a way that no other part of my childhood does. when we lived in the first apartment i felt i knew what was going on in my life, generally speaking. i didn't feel like there wasn't anything i didn't know that i wanted to.

what are we going to do with her? i don't know. she's so rude, unruly. out of control.

that's the conversation i overheard my parents having one night when i had gotten up to go to the bathroom. was i five or six then? i watched myself cry in the door mirror. i was always one for theatrics. i felt like i was watching the movie of my life in real time. i always enjoyed crying. it feels like validation. clearly i'm justified in being unhappy if my own eyes say so. so much i've been in pain and tearless. i felt shut out of my own life. did i shut myself out or was i pushed out? did i spend all that time in my room because it's how i wanted to spend my time or because it was the only place i felt safe? i don't know if that overhearing incident was before or after i smashed my fingers into my clothes drawer because i wanted to cry. was i five or six then?

when we moved into the house everything changed again. it was a fixer upper and while it was being fixed up i was, shocker, in my room by myself some more. the room had already been pink when we bought it, it was destiny. once we were settled in i didn't feel shut out, i felt too close. i knew what was going on in my life again and i hated it. it was to much, always. before it was just some crying over reading books, now it was screaming over history, handwriting, and language arts. if only those walls could talk i'd ask them if they could tell me the ratio of me and my mom fighting to time i spent actually learning. i hated language arts and history not because they weren't enjoyable subjects but because she always insisted on reading together things i'd have preferred to read on my own. i didn't want to discuss my thoughts about the poems, those are my own personal thoughts and it felt violating to have to share them. i was never one for memorization and i spent nearly a month trying and failing to memorize mr nobody by unknown, and she just wouldn't let it go. maybe she thought if she didn't force me to painstakingly memorize and recite this poem she'd be a bad parent because i wouldn't be where i was supposed to be developmentally. or maybe i wasn't where i was supposed to be developmentally because she never taught me in a way that was conducive to my learning. she taught me in a way that she wanted to, a way that for me meant constantly fighting against myself to try to do it how she wanted and against her for making me. even with all the time i spent in my room i still couldn't escape all the things that made me feel like shit and hate my life. everything after 10 years old is modern day that's not what i'm talking about right now.

1-4 i felt lost but content in my life.

5-6 i felt hopelessly lost and closed off.

7-10 i couldn't breathe and i felt crushed. i wasn't lost i was trapped.

[anathemacore]

[anathemacore]

I will always be the girl who disappears.

[anathemacore]

to all the father havers out there at large, "that dress makes your boobs look big :)))" is not a normal thing for a father to say to their 14 year old right? right???

[anathemacore]

is it a symptom of childhood trauma to automatically accept whatever bad thing is happening as my new reality forever? i have no concept of things changing for the better, a lot of times i can't even imagine what that would be. i've been sick for a week and i have to keep telling myself that i am inevitably going to get better and not be sick anymore but i just have this this is the way things are gonna be now reflex. it's so silly but i'm having a hard time convincing myself i will not in fact have this respiratory infection for the rest of my entire life. not because of how long i've had it or the severely or anything it's just that I Have It Now and therefore i will always have it. i have the opposite with good things. if i have a good thing now i will lose it any minute and never get it ever again. i lived in a good things desert for so long i am conditioned to think good things are only mirages. everything is going to go to complete shit at any moment and when it does it will never be good again. i'm gonna fucking recover obviously. and when i think about it my next thought is always "and then i'll get sick again as soon as i get better" as if i get sick all the time. i don't, i've been wearing a mask in public for coming on five years and as a result i seldom get sick. that feels fake too. if i talk about how i'm gonna heal and probably not get sick again for a considerable amount of time then i'm jinxing it all and being hubris. i'm meant to expect the absolute worst all the time if i want to secure any chance of good luck, see. and i've never thought of myself as a superstitious person, what a joke i am.

[anathemacore]

and sometimes that sadness gets so deep in your heart that you can't even cry.

vishal rastogi

[anathemacore]

I’m not doing well but I don’t wanna tell anyone

[anathemacore]

[anathemacore]

idk what's wrong with me i go through my life wanting nothing more than to have friends and then whenever i do i end up not liking them once i get to know them better. eight months in i'm tired of them. sometimes i think boring people like me. maybe it's just that cool people *don't* like me. am i too picky? is it too much to ask for to want friends who i get along with in a fulfilling way? whenever i have friends i end up feeling that they don't understand me and they're not right for me and i'm not content. is that valid or do i just have attachment issues? why do i keep being interested in people until i learn more about them and find out they're not actually interesting? one of my biggest issues with people is that i don't feel seen by them. but also i don't really try to show myself to them very much because i think i'm actually an unlikeable dick deep down who's too damaged to be useful. but also i am doing my best to get along with people and generally come off as a likeable person.. i feel i'm a very good judge of character and i can tell if people are not able to see me in the way i want to be seen. it's not kind to expect more of people than what they are capable of and i can tell if people aren't what i want in a friend. and then there's that issue of seeing myself as an object and just wanting to be "useful" to people because i just want to be a perfect machine whose job it is to make everyone happy and it's so hard not to act like i am and ignore my own feelings because really, my feelings aren't important. they shouldn't be, i'm just an object. this causes me to stay in relationships i don't want to be in anymore because to leave a relationship where i'm not happy but the other person is is a failure on my part because if i'm not making people happy then i'm not fulfilling my purpose. to leave a situation where i'm making someone happy is like walking out on my job where the payment is the satisfaction of a job well done, nullifying the point of my existence. i dream of having friends that make me just as happy as i make them, i want symbiosis and i usually have it at the beginning, and then the happiness dries up for me. can i really keep blaming people for not being my type when this keeps happening to no end? is this what friendship is like in adulthood? no. i see adults with continuously symbiotic relationships. why can't i have them too?

[anathemacore]

Someone said, “The reason you isolate when you’re struggling is because you were left alone as a child to deal with your emotions” and I felt that.

[anathemacore]

ID: a picture i took of my window at night, Because it's covered in raindrops and the porchlight from across the street makes all the water look like glitter. /End id

i've taken a whole bunch of pictures of my window like this because few things in nature are more beautiful to me than the way that various forms of water seek to imitate a million diamonds scattered across a surface like sand on a beach.