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Strength, resilience, self-love, independence, optimism, etc ...

I don't like these things, they don't make me feel "empowered", they don't give me that "Fuck yeah!" feeling that others seem to get

I feel like a traveling spirit that got off at the wrong train stop.

This particular world is not for me.

This world where I need resilience because I am being attacked

Strength because sometimes I must hurt others

Self-love because no one else will love me

Independence because we aren't there for each other

Optimism because we're naturally overwhelmed by how bad things are

I thought I was someplace else entirely. Why would I want this?

Every so often I feel something deep within me wake up, say "Hoooly shit, we're still HERE? I told you years ago that we need to move on from this life. Oh well, I'll check back later," and it goes back to sleep

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I actually liked people a LOT, before I understood them.

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I think the reason I stuck around so long was because I didn't realize it was damage, I thought it was just hurt. You know, the kind of hurt where you just seethe for a little while and then try to move on. I didn't realize it was changing me.

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A clearly-traumatized kid got transferred over to my department. His old boss had made a very mild sexual joke and the kid literally broke down crying behind the deli counter.

I noticed he was always super quiet and aloof, kinda struggled with even basic tasks. People tried to be gentle with him. I didn't treat him as fragile, I just treated him like a normal person and with genuine acceptance and kindness. I don't know his story, but I've been through some deep trauma myself, so I genuinely cared and wanted him to feel comfortable around me. (I wonder if anyone else noticed the subtle signs that he wasn't sober at work - a coping mechanism?)

But if anything, it seemed like he was repelled by my kindness toward him, and he instead gravitated toward the other two guys in my department. The guys who would give a halfhearted smile to him and then turn around and give each other a look behind his back. When he wasn't around, they'd always make scathing comments and jokes about how lazy and incompetent he was. I tried to defend him, but it seemed to fall on deaf ears. 

But I watched with a kind of curious amazement as he kept gravitating toward them and thinking they were his friends, all the while not really paying any attention to my genuine acceptance.

Funny how trauma works.

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Allistics: Oh my god why don't you ever think before you speak?

Also allistics: Oh my god, he's hesitating before he speaks, he must be lying 🤔

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“With the right music, you either forget everything or you remember everything.”

— Unknown

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[tw suicidality]

Sometimes I wonder if the reason it feels so lonely is because most of the people like me—the only people who could ever really understand—already had the sense and strength to leave this world when the hopelessness became so clear.

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I envy the "this too shall pass" people.

I'm more "this too shall be something that continues to weigh me down for the foreseeable future, but whatever, what am I gonna do 🤷"

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I'm realizing now that what you really wanted was to be able to call yourself a good parent. Which is different than wanting to *be* one.

It didn't matter if I struggled, as long as you found a way to argue it was my own fault.

It didn't matter if I was hurting, as long as you could persuade yourself it was best to do nothing.

It didn't matter if I was in need, as long as you had everyone convinced that you gave plenty.

You were too busy crafting your own story to put any care into the way you crafted mine

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You thought you could push the feelings away

But you only pushed them out of your conscious awareness

They're still down there, active and alive in your subconscious

Running the show behind the scenes

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There's a bridge from "Wtf this seems almost like abuse, what's going on?" to "This. Is. Abuse." that took me way too long to cross

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sorry for giving you more than you deserve

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I never really considered my dissociation to be a bad thing. Like, have you looked around at this world? Who really wants to spend a ton of time there

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it's ironic how i've had to overcome what i believed was a healthy degree of humility. i was very aware that i don't know everything, so when i sought help and advice, i kept an open mind and was willing to consider the things that many people were trying to tell me. turns out, those people had no fucking clue. en masse, somehow. they don't know what it's like to be me. they don't have the same goals as me. they spread information that they wish to be true, not what is true. some of them made shit up just to protect their egos from the horror of saying "i don't know". and in the very worst cases, they pegged my vulnerability and put bullshit into my head to manipulate me.

invalidating those people feels like arrogance and closed-mindedness right now, because i'm not used to it, but i now know the only person i can trust is myself