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carousels-on-fire · 8 years ago

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Sorry to anyone on mobile who accidentally sees this. Readmores don’t seem to work on mobile, so sorry for this mini novel you’re being forced to scroll past. ------------------------------------- My life got so isolated so quickly. I’ve always felt alone on some level. I don’t know if there’s some inherent quality that makes me the odd one out, or if I’ve just never felt comfortable enough around people to believe they really want me around. But I think living back home has put in stark relief how few people care about me. Like I know who my good friends are. I know who...I hope...would be there if things went horribly wrong. But in the day to day I’m alone. And my online friendships have ceased to make me feel less alone, even though they should. Even though people care, I’ve always felt, on some level like I’m sitting in a wide, depthless room with nothing in it, screaming and it doesn’t even echo. Just this emptiness. Silence. There are things to fill the silence, but sometimes it isn’t enough. I think it’s the fact that most days the only people I see are my parents. But they’re not like people, like friends. They’re more of an obstacle that sometimes seems like a person I can care about. But that’s dangerous thinking. I can’t confide in them, I have to be so very careful that the things I do say don’t throw me into a minefield of having to defend myself. Or better yet have the things I love and feel passionate about brushed off as some unimportant thing. As something to which you respond “Hm.” and go back to watching TV. And on the days I don’t see my parents I do see my co-workers at the library. I am friends with one of my co-workers. But its more or less professional. There’s still a level of detachment there. Even if we have talked about our lives and she notices when I’m feeling less than myself, it’s not a friendship that leaves work. And I still feel like a stranger in the tattoo shop. They know me, they teach me things, they try to invite me to things. But I always feel like one day I’ll walk in and not be welcome. That I’ll let them down somehow. I am friends with one of my co-workers. Two maybe. But it feels like something that was forced upon them because I’m a new person that needs to be led around and taught the ropes. I never feel like I’m supposed to be there. It always felt this way in my classes back in college. Even if I’m still friends with a lot of my old classmates. Even if they were friendly to me, I always felt like the friendship ended at the classroom door. I think belonging for me is dangerous, it’s all-consuming. My parent’s love has always seemed to be born out of guilt. They feel bad for how they treated me as a child. I never really thought my parents were in any shape abusive, until I looked back on my childhood. My mother screaming at me, telling me I needed to lose weight and screaming at me about it because she had to buy me new clothing, her digging her nails into my skin, slapping me across the face when I did something wrong. Or the time when I was a small child and my father chased me through the house screaming, and hit the door I’d locked myself behind to escape him hard enough to leave a crack in the wood. My father making comments about my body after I hit puberty and giving my anxiety/body image issues about it for the rest of my life. I always just thought they were strict. It never seemed like how you see abuse on tv. I’m not even sure it counts as abuse. Maybe they were just strict and unkind. Who knows. But I recall an incident when I was 14 or so. I had a friend called Max. He was 18, and a senior, and I thought he was cool because he knew who Cradle of Filth were when no one else did. I was rather oblivious, so I always thought he just wanted to be friends. I suppose I assumed because that’s all I wanted, that’s all they wanted. Plus I was desperate to befriend anyone who was even vaguely ‘alternative’ because I grew up in a town of 2000 people and there wasn’t really a scene. I didn’t really know how to say no or to navigate out of uncomfortable situatuions at that age. But I remember he drove us to see House of Wax in theatres, the whole thing should have screamed ‘date’ but again, I am oblivious. And I just remember he went to gesture about something and I flinched back and kind of curled in on myself like I was about to be hit. And even if he was a bit of a creep, he wasn’t an abuser, to my knowledge. He just said in the most unsettled voice “... I’m not going to hit you.” Like he was surprised. I was surprised too. At that point in my life I hadn’t spent a lot of time around other people. And I remember trying to laugh it off. Are kids who aren’t abused supposed to have a flinch response to a man raising their hand? Not even in anger? I always hated and envied friends who got on well with their parents. Who can’t wait to see them. On the outside mine get along with me, but it’s such a false relationship. It’s just something that looks normal from the outside. I tell them I love them with the same conviction I told customers to have a nice day when I worked retail. I think this is why I struggle so much with relationships now. I remember being the weird kid out because I wore hearing aids and wanted to talk about nerdy things that no one else cared about. But I remember that people would befriend me for a short period of time, and then, it’s like they were embarrassed to be my friend and would gradually stop talking to me. It’s strange that something that happened so long ago, a lifetime ago, would still haunt me now at 26. I graduated high school 8 years ago, elementary and middle school was even further back than that. But I can still remember the cruelty in my best friend’s voice when she told me ‘no one will ever go to prom with you.’ Because we were drawing what our dresses would look like. And the funny thing is, I didn’t even flinch. I didn’t reprimand her. I was...socialized to accept unkind things from the people who were supposed to be my best friends. I think it carved the path for later emotionally abusive relationships. I think once you’re used to the people you love hurting you, making unkind comments, tearing you down, even if, on some level you know it’s not right, you seek out that kind of pain because it makes it feel real to you. I had some friendships in early college, where, even if I’m still friends with those people, they hurt me, they were cruel to me, I distinctly remember it. I remember being yelled at for things I couldn’t control. For habits I had because I’d been basically locked up with hyper-controlling people who watched my every move, who criticized every small thing I did from how cleaned the counters to where I was allowed to wait outside movie theatre after seeing a film with my friends. All that and then I was suddenly tossed out into the world. I went from having to beg to be driven to see my friends, to being able to do anything. And it was terrifying. And to people who’d always had that freedom, my fear was incomprehensible. My habits, the untreated mental illnesses were written off as merely annoying peculiarities that had to be overcome by them. And I’ve never brought it up. Because I understand that they were hurting too. Maybe I shouldn’t forgive them. But I’ve been forced to forgive so many people who have hurt me as survival. But I’ve realized, if I don’t forgive the people who hurt me, I’ll barely have anyone at all. We all wear our crown of thorns I suppose. I think this is why that first relationship I had didn’t last. Because when most of your relationships have been with cruel uncaring people, the first time someone makes you feel special you will cling to that with everything you have. Even if you end up suffocating the other person in the process. You won’t even realize it because you’re desperate. When you go from basically being ignored, to someone thinking you’re worth something, like genuinely, and not because they just want to show you off to other people like a possession; it’s hard to not want to be around that 24/7. It’s a drug-like addiction. And when it ended, when I thought I could just quit that feeling cold-turkey because I realized that person and I were not suited, or that I wanted a different kind of relationship than what we had, the ensuing depression dragged me under. Like imagine wanting something your entire life, being starved of it, having it, conditionally, having to hide it, and then throwing it away because you don’t know how to react to having what you want. The sense of loss and failure and worthlessness can’t be measured in words. It’s a depression that’s taken me 6 years to get away from. I’m still not there. It was like a catalyst for all the self-loathing I’d been feeling to finally be set free. It’s been this voice saying “You ruined the one good thing you will ever have.” I think that may be the real reason I’ve been alone for so long and my friends are not. My casual acquaintances and people I went to school with are all married and living this blissful normal life. But they didn’t grow up equating love with terror, they don’t know how very wrong things can go if you pick the wrong person. They don’t have this terrible weight of years of cruelty from other people that has never once been acknowledged. Its like you accept that cruelty and carry it with you, and sometimes it comes back as that voice in your head. I’m a much more broken person than I ever thought I was, but I suppose I’m still here and that’s what counts.

#do not re'blog #my rambling and being entirely too open about deeply personal things #this one is a doozy #puts up a sign like willy wonka before the boat scene #sorry to folks on mobile this is an extremely long post I'm sorry #tw abuse #tw depression #not sure what else to tag for #here's hoping creeper dudes don't start randomly following because I tagged the tw's

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glaintrashart · 5 years ago

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