#existential trauma tw

[hamoodmood]

In another universe I was happy

[anonymoushotsexyperson]

Thinking a lot about how the inevitability of death is not talked about.

I know you got attention span issues pookie bear so I split this post into sections and you can read whatever your most into if you can't do the whole thing ^_^

SECTION 1 my first encounters with the idea of dying.

I wish I could literally hug John Green for writing the fault in our stars. People can say it's sappy or whatever but it is one of the only mainstream forms of media that successfully acknowledges the inevitability of death and the lack of control we have over it. Though it took a lot more than TFIOS to wake me up to the conversation of dying.

The first time I realized death was a thing I can remember so vividly. I was at least 4 years old, I forgot how the whole conversation went but I remember my dad saying

"well honey everyone has to die one day."

"even you and mom?"

"even me and mom."

He said it so casually while folding laundry in the kitchen not knowing my world view had just completely shattered 😀. I went into our shared bedroom ( I didn't have my own yet because POOR) and cried on my parents bed. I don't know what happened after that. I think I just shoved death into my back pocket and kept it pushing because it was too hard to really grasp at that age. It still is now, but it especially was then.

Section 2 Being someone aware of your mortality and not being able to cope with it.

I think about death a lot now, it's been a reoccurring visitor in my brain since covid. It surprises me that the average Joe doesn't think about death all the time considering the current climate of our world. Im not gonna lie i've developed a bit of thanatophobia (death anxiety). This is because I have always dug myself out of my depressive episodes using knowledge and through that knowledge, understanding my relationship to the world helped me fall involve with living in it. The idea that one day this experience will end and regardless of what you believe whether it's in heaven or reincarnation or whatever we really don't know what's coming next or if there is a next. I don't think i'd necessarily be too keen with an afterlife as well as the idea that an afterlife doesn't exist. Both seem pretty ass, because if there's an after life cool but like what happens after that? You telling me i'm just here for ALL ETERNITY NIGGA? But also the concept of just dying and thats just... it? Kinda stupid and DUMB if you ask me. I think what im really looking for here is control.

Section 3 Does no one talk about death because of capitalism?

Apart of me believes that this thing where people around me tend to avoid the conversation of death or respond like an npc when I do get them to speak about it is due to western cultures obsession with capitalism and power. Because if you contemplate your existence and how both big and small it is, all this capitalism shit becomes kind of extremely fictitious and ridiculous. Like yeah maybe people just don't talk about it because its SCARY but also what if it's so scary because we done talk about it and because we are wasting our lives as wage slaves and in some areas of the world, literal slaves. Also this makes me think a lot about how religions are used as a weapon of conservatism instead of respected as a philosophical and metaphysical analysis of the human experience. There is honestly so many examples of religion-especially religions associated with colonialism-being used to control people. This can be seen and interpreted many ways and most if not all of the most obvious interpretations probably ring true. But what i'm really attempting to segue into here is that religion is uses as a weapon by the powerful in all sorts of ways but the idea that it is used to keep us from pondering death instead of exploring what it's like is something ive been thinking about a lot. You can argue some religious folks specifically follow religion to relieve death anxiety and its always been that way but I think that it now exists on a dissociative level.

Also, the ignorant American I am, I couldn't tell you the part about western civilization playing a big role is from an informed experience it's more so a studious guess. I don't really know what the vibes in other countries are like when it comes to dying I have not gained enough international knowledge and experience yet. So thats where you come in reader. YES you. What do you think?

QOTD: why do you think the conversation around death and the inevitability of it is so hush hush? Where do you believe we 'go' after and how does that make you feel? If you are apart of a non western civilization do you see a cultural difference in our experiences?

[infizero-draws]

GET THIS GUY OUT OF HEREEEE

[neuroticboyfriend]

this can't be all there is. there has to be something after this. there has to be some kind of meaning to why we're here. there has to be some reason to keep going that doesn't just fade to time and decay. there has to be some kind of permanence. i don't know how to keep living this shit hand at life, going through all this suffering, fighting so hard every day... if there is all there fucking is. fuck. shit. motherfucker.

[absolutelybatty]

It's fun being unable to tell if I have religious trauma or if I worry about hell the normal amount

[unofficialchronicle]

Al Anon Daily Affirmations book “The Courage to Change,” p. 299

[struggling-to-find-home]

An incredibly fucked up part of my life, now that I think about it, is that I simultaneously had two childhoods and also didn't have a childhood at all.

Like, obviously I was a child, at some point, considering that is how time works. I was a child, who had a personality, and thoughts, and feelings, and memories.

Then, I was a teenager - and, as a teenager, I killed my personality, got my thoughts indoctrinated by my abusers, denied all of my feelings, and had a constant stream of poisonous memories fuck up all my decisions in the backround. I knew what it was like to live through a childhood, an actual one, lasting multiple years.

Then, everything broke, my psyche broke, and, after swimming in dissociative hell for a good six months, I woke up after what I jokingly call my "factory reset" - and I had to memories. Like. At all. Literally, a black wall lasting seventeen years of my life, and then, all of a sudden - I was there.

My first ever conscious thought, the one I remember, at least, was - "Holy shit, I can actually think". Not very exciting for a first thought, I guess, but it was very exciting for me at the time, considering that my dissociation was so bad I couldn't count to five most days without getting lost.

Do you understand just how fucking terrifying it is, to suddenly gain awareness and realise that you don't know how you are, what has your life been life, and how to interact with the world, with the only information actually being in your brain being memories of abuse which were too horrible to forget? Because I fucking do, I lived it. You read isekai for the plot, I read it because it's the one genre that can describe my experience. I literally was the "born sexy yesterday" trope - a mind with no knowledge of how life works, who was, let's be real, at the emotional regulation level of a toddler, stuck in an body of an adult.

I had to teach myself everything - how to talk to people, how to focus for more than three seconds at a time, how to extract my memories, one by one, and slowly piece together who inhabited this body, my body, for all of my life. I was literally learning how to person from scratch, and in the beginning, you can bet your ass I didn't feel any close to, well, an actual adult, like I was supposed to be. I had to stumble over every mistake, and learn every lesson you learn as you grow older.

Fucking hell, for one and a half years, I lived in a world where I physically couldn't comprehend that someone wouldn't like me. When I say I had to learn everything, I mean it.

Sometimes, it gets to me - the fact that I am technically inhabiting the body of a corpse. She - the child, the teenager, the one who actually lived through hell - is dead. I am somebody else. I will never be her. All I can do is live - like this, in this bizzare existence - and try not to wince every time someone mentions their childhood.

I don't remember what it's like to be a kid - to be able to grow, make mistakes, and not be judged for being in the process of figuring things out. In all honesty, I'm not sure whether I was allowed to be a kid - I got some memories back, but none of them give me that kind of info. I don't remember what it's like to be a teenager.

I remember what it's like to try to live a normal life when your first memory was yesterday, a week ago, a month ago, a year ago. I remember what it's like - to have that innocence, that naivety, that additude of not having any shame or self-consciousness that you usually only see in children, going through the world without looking at any obstacles because your enthusiasm hasn't ever been crushed yet.

For a child, every obstacle they encounter can be the biggest one in their life yet - even if it's something as simple as learning to tie your shoes. Fortunately for me, the first obstacle I encountered as myself was a horrible, terrifying monster - my mother - raging at me and disowning me in a week-long fight over me not wanting to take a math test. Everything else seemed like a small problem after that. Well, until my brother pulled a gun on me, but that's besides the point.

So now, when people say "Childhood" - I think about my first days as myself, the amnesiac teenager. Being young, moldable, soaking every piece of information up with no filter because I didn't know better. But then I think to myself.

Oh. Right.

I was a child, but it wasn't a childhood.

I was a child, but that childhood is lost forever.

And then, internally, I weep.

[wilde-words]

i am afraid to find that none of this is real—

that if the plane gets any higher i will see i have been living in a shoebox diorama in the hands of a vengeful God

who moves me around on a popsicle stick.

[nostomannia]

Sol is an adult. That should be very much apparent. She takes up a childlike humor and spirit, but that doesn't stop the fact she's an adult, body and mind.

With Deity, she just feels... dwarfed? When they're around, she isn't a full-grown woman with her own sense of self. She's a child clinging to Deity's coattails.

Heck, as soon as Deity is mentioned, it's like a switch is flipped. Solita seems to change from this big, loud personality of a woman to a meek and small little girl. She just feels like a kid trying to play dress up and be something she's not, living in another person's skin.

[venting-town]

I can’t trust my own “ family “ to really tell them anything

Not unless I want to:

- Be gaslit

- Be blamed

- Not be believed

- Not get acknowledged

- Be mocked

- Etc

Both sides are fucked. I hate both, mainly maternal side because they’re the ones I’ve spent most my life with compared to my parental side, but they aren’t exempt either

I shouldn’t have to constantly try to justify my reasoning for things ( such as not wanting to be around anybody/do anything social for instance ).

Yet when I try, sometimes they get incredibly upset at me for it.

Fuck off. If you all were ACTUALLY a good support system, ones that didn’t abuse me or neglect me or make fun of me or ignore me or get irrationally angry at me and blame me for it or hit me or genuinely love me or actually REALLY tried to understand why I was so depressed/anxious/angry/clingy/etc, MAYBE I WOULD want to be around you all

Not to mention that I just love/crave being alone in general. I didn’t have that growing up, not really.

What with me constantly being ripped from home and being sold out as a sex slave over and over and over and over for 9+ years, not being safe in my own bedroom as that fat fucktard came in to use me however he pleased, etc

But nobody wants to hear about that.

Grandmother didn’t. She didn’t care when I told her I was sex trafficked/abused/neglected as a child. Kept talking about other things WHILST I was confiding in her about what happened to me

And I’m sure they/etc will try to justify it:

“ Well if you’d just spend more time with them.. “

“ Well if you weren’t so aggressive and bitchy and ‘ victim-complexy ‘ as a kid.. “

“ Well if x,y,z, 1,2,3, etc (( aka I’m still getting blamed for them )) “

Fuck off. They were the ADULTS

I was a CHILD

No, they DIDN’T deserve “ more respect “ because they were older.

If you don’t give a child respect, whether you’re their parent/guardian, teacher, or WHOEVER as an adult figure, you SURE as hell don’t “ deserve “ respect from them.

Fucking entitled overgrown bastards.

They didn’t deserve it then. They don’t deserve my respect now

I can “ like “ them. I can even “ love “ them.

But they aren’t my family. They haven’t been for basically my entire life, save for the first 3-4 years of it.

They aren’t even strangers.

They just aren’t my family. Dead or alive or etc

[pandorasboxoftreasures]

It has to be said as much as it hurts...Sorry in advance. MAJOR TW!

Earlier I was going to make a meme with innuendo of Ritch when I got a response to an earlier post I made about the nastiest of Neteyam simps while also writing my fanfic with oc Recoms and a horrible realisation shot to the forefront of my skull like a 9mm hollow point that made me immediately stop making the meme. Not sure if it’ll ever see the light of day or if I’ll even keep it on my PC anymore after this. Technically, it’s not explicit. But with what I’ve been thinking about and will explain here, it creeps me out at the moment to even look at it.

I despise those sexualising the kids, a lot. But there's still a stomach-churning thing I've realised upon further reflection especially after so many times watching The Way Of Water (think it’s been about 9 now I’ll need to do a recount)...

The Recoms are babies.

Just because they were grown for 20 years longer than usual, doesn’t make them any less babies. They woke up in adult bodies but having an adult body doesn’t make you an adult. Neither do adult memories make them adults because the implanted memories don’t make the person.

If they didn’t have those implants or they malfunctioned, what would they be? Unable to speak or walk or sit up or control waste functions even though they would have the muscle strength to because they're still newborn babies in adult bodies.

Would they still be hot then because they’ll still have those bodies?

Despite having an aesthetic, emotional, sensual and romantic attraction to Recom Quaritch myself, this is probably the main reason why I've been knocked physically ill sometimes by the extreme levels of thirst directed his way for the past few months as well as to all of the Recoms.

It's a 13 going on 30, Jack or Big situation. And people just can not shut up about their filthy, filthy fantasies everywhere I look.

And subconsciously in my brain I've been getting alarm bells going off because my stupid yet frustratingly insightful skull-blancmange can't help but notice and check philosophical, logical and moral inconsistencies like this.

But now it's not subconscious. It's conscious. It's melting my head. I can't keep quiet about it.

Are we honestly that much better than the ageing-up self-shippers? 

Yes, but still not clean of the same dirt, either. We're looking at technical toddlers here even if they don’t look or sound it. 

There's little hints peppered throughout the movie even that they're scared little kids sent out to fight and die when they're nowhere near ready to mentally under all that blue muscle and marine bravado, no matter how many adult experienced memories they upload into them. It definitely didn’t save most of their lives, for sure.

But nobody's thinking about all that. They just wanna see some blue meat and ponder angles and stripe patterns and I’m hunched over a bucket.

“Looks like an adult so is OK” is an excuse I regularly see online for those posting explicit content of canonically underaged characters that may or may not have been aged up. Including the Na’vi kids.

If we’re gonna point out the hypocrisy of that mentality, we have to accept in some way we are also victim to it. Albeit in another form.

God damn am I glad to be watching a modern sci-fi property that actually has mind-bending philosophical stuff going on again, though. Even if it’s hidden under many, many layers of subtext so as not to alienate a general audience, but I sure as hell ain’t glad that this is the property that broke my streak of never being romantically interested in fictional characters because now look what’s happened.

[hamoodmood]

[aikya-kat-44]

I would not seek out the reaper, but I would not fight them if they sought me. What even is the point in living any longer? Look at the world outside the window, it's just going to get worse. The world is tearing itself apart. Bigotry and hate are running rampant through the litter covered streets, and it's not like anyone actually cares. I just want to go home (what even is home anymore?) let me sleep, I wouldn't be upset if the morning never arrived, I would live another day if it did.

(I just want someone to understand me for once)

Would anyone even care if I died? If there is the slightest chance that someone might feel the slightest bit of pain, then I will live. Just for a second, just for a second more....

Just until the day the storm clouds clear and I don't have to cry anymore

[missenntrophy]

If only we could live and thrive and not just survive

But that's just how things are i guess

One must suffer to become saint

[equinox-vixen]

“There’s a theory that says you don’t exist unless someone calls and you respond.” In this video from SlamFind, sam sax, author of the chapbook All the Rage (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2016), reads his poem “Hydrophobia.”

[alltimefail]

Depression is strange.

I don't have a more eloquent way of putting it, although I wish I did. If I take the time to think about it, I can't recall a time where I didn't feel some degree of sadness. I guess I've just been a little sad my entire life. It's hard for me to imagine a sadness that is temporary or one that does not permeate all facets of existence. It's hard for me to imagine that there are people who do not feel this way, who do not understand what I'm talking about, who go about their days only feeling sadness when the situation calls for it.

There usually isn't a discernible cause to my own sadness, if I'm being completely honest with myself. I think that would be really nice - knowing where the sadness is coming from, what might be bringing it on, so that I could remove that trigger from my life or at the very least learn ways to cope with it. More than often, however, my sadness is just kind of an underlying but consistent ache. My sadness is a particularly gnarly bruise under the skin that will not heal. The ache has "good" days (the pain being present but manageable) and the ache also has bad days (severe pain, debilitating, feels like I'm gasping for air from the moment I wake up). It never goes away entirely and worst of all, the "good" days are more like dormant days. "Good" days are spent waiting around - it's hard to enjoy them fully when you still feel a passive sadness that at any moment could become all consuming without so much as a warning.

I have a lot more bad days in the spring and summer. My therapist says that is unusual, but not unheard of. I miss the cold of winter, I miss the leaves of fall. I hate this time of year. Today was hard, but the last few weeks have been hard. I feel like I say that a lot - maybe life is just really hard. Is that melodramatic? I don't mean it to be. Earnestly, I don't know why I struggle so much to want to be here. We're back to my original point - Depression is strange. I am tired, but I want to write these thoughts. I need to speak them into the world as I feel them because maybe then I will be able to make sense of them. Or, even if I can't make sense of them, I at least want to vent and grapple with the unfortunate fact that I have always thought we have made this whole "being alive" thing far more challenging than it needs to be. This isn't a new sentiment, I'm far from the first person to say it, but we have made existence a cruel thing.

I know, I know that there is beauty in this world! I know there is kindness in people! The sentiment tastes bitter! It's hard to enjoy the beauty, to escape in it, to fully appreciate it, when it is so quickly pulled out from under you. I wonder what a "good" day is really, to someone whose good days do not come with a catch? But I also hate feeling this way - I bear witness to gentleness that has brought tears to my eyes. I'm not trying to be a cynic, and I know there are people who find me unbearable to be around. I told my loved ones - just over a year ago now - that I am a corpse they are just dragging around. My mom has always told me to stop thinking like this. People tell me to reframe the way I think and try to focus on the good, but are they just able to do that all the time? Are there people who feel "good" by default? If they are, I think their advice - try not to be anxious, focus on the positives, try not to care so much - is a bit silly, as if I chose to be like this, as if they made some choice along the way that kept them from being like me. Maybe they did - I wouldn't know. Knowing what I know, I don't think anyone would chose to be sad all the time, to hate themselves a little bit (sometimes a lot), to be riddled with regret, to struggle to "just reach out" when they feel the hands pulling them down again. I have an unanswered message from my closest childhood friend in my inbox right now that I can't bring myself to answer - I'm not sure why, but I feel guilty nonetheless. I never want to lose her, but something in me says it's been too long and she is probably better off without a corpse to drag along.

I was 7 years old the first time I asked my mom if we might be in the big capital-h-double-hockey sticks (Hell). I didn't grow up religious, although everyone around me had a whole lot to say about God. I wondered what could be worse than a supposedly "free will" existence where we are powerless to suffering, war, famine, disease, even our own mind? I know she did her best to understand, but I think about the look she gave me often. At the time it was new, but I would come to be familiar with it over the years - I have been on the receiving end of that kind of look my whole life now. Pained confusion, I call it: when a person so badly wants to understand but they can't because while they love you and they do feel pain like everyone does, they do not live in pain. They have reprieve from the ache. They don't think of impending doom at snack time and in-between classes; they do not choke out cheers for their favorite with a painful realization that this could be the first and last time they get to do this. They do not wake up every day hoping that they will not want to die today. They do not wake up on "good" days with lingering guilt from the "bad" days. They do not feel a call to die, they do not fear that one day they will answer that call. It's not funny, but it kind of is in a twisted sort of way: I have never truly wished to die, I fear it actually, and I think that's the anxiety part of me that I worries so much about death - but a part of me will always think about it, yearn for it even. Is it a long sleep? Does it feel like a moment of quiet that lasts forever, an exhale, a loss of the burdens that only existing can bring? Is death a breeze between the trees, warm raindrops on skin, rippling creek water, the tide returning from where it once came? Will I be sent to eternal suffering? Will some divine being have mercy for thrusting me into its world with a weak mind and weaker heart? Will I get to try again? Will I find my loved ones in the next life, in heaven, in the breeze, just to tell them how sorry I am?

I have watched death, natural and painless death, death of 80-year-olds who have lived long lives, absolutely destroy people. I never thought I would live this long; 27 years! I thought I would leave my childhood home and, in turn, be able to leave the guilt-inducing visual reminders that came with embracing the call for death. I just didn't want my loved ones to find me, to have to tidy the room of a dead girl, to wonder what they did wrong. I didn't want my mortality to hang like a heavy cloud over every beautiful moment to come - an "I wish she were still with us" at weddings, prom nights, holidays, so on. I didn't want to ruin my dad's second marriage and new family that he made when he left us, I didn't want to break my mom's heart more than it already was, I didn't want my little siblings to feel the ache like I did, I needed to care for them and stay around for them. But I thought maybe if I went away, if I isolated myself, if I did it in a far away place it would be easier for them. They could remember me as I was. Depression bargains with your mind in this way, it disregards logic. Depression is strange.

So I did go away, I did isolate, but *spoiler* I didn't die and I didn't die and I didn't die and so on. I have my own family now that I love desperately. I have a child and a husband. I heard somewhere that many people who attempt suicide and fail or have second thoughts never do it again which is wonderful; I wish that was true for every person. I wish that no one knew unyielding mental ache. As for me, I have never been so lucky. (I remember when I was really young, like 4 or 5, my dad would say he was cursed with unluckiness - that if there was a God, that god had it out for him. Perhaps I got the shitty odds from him. I wouldn't know, we don't talk much any more). But despite coming close to the edge, despite the fear of falling, despite surviving that fall on more than one occasion, I've always been stubborn and the ache remains unchanged: I feel so much pain that some days - bad days, like today - I am only staying alive so as not to hurt my child and my husband in the long run. I'm not 15 any more but it's the same battle as before, just different physical circumstances I suppose.

The ache does not go away. I have so much to be joyful for. This sadness is deep in my bones. I love my child more than I have ever loved anything in my life. I will bury my darkness so they only ever feel warmth, feel light from me, even if it is painful. The thought of leaving my child makes me sick. I lay awake most nights and believe that this world does not need me, that I am a burden on everyone who has ever known me. I feel guilt for every poor decision I've ever made and that keeps me up at night, too. I believe there is so much good in the world. I'm so terribly sorry, I wish everyone I've ever hurt, even those I hurt when I was young and immature and still learning, knows that. I love so many people with the entirety of my soul. I wish I could cry this deep sadness out of my system but it is bottomless. I believe there must be meaning and intention in all things. I am furious at the idea of god. I believe there is a god who is loving. I ask god why this world is what it is and I hear nothing. I scream and I hope no one hears me - I believe no one does. All I hear is screams. It's all true, it all exists at the same time. "I am half a soul divided." Depression is strange.

I ponder the "What ifs" often. As it turns out, that's really not great for a person like me to do. But I'm shoulder-deep in the "What ifs" today. I'm also quite tired - a heavy tired that tugs at my eyelids while I'm sitting fully straight up. My soul is in a really weird place at the moment. I'm sad that anyone has loved me. I imagine it's all connected.

I don't think I have much more to say; I have little motivation to do anything, which is why I started typing this in the first place. I keep myself physically busy to ignore the thoughts, to ignore the ache. Click click click, replay that song, the louder the better.

I don't want to forget the moments that I feel this way. Depression is strange, and when things are going a little too good for a little too long, I hope that by posting this and looking back on these moments it might make the fall from grace hurt a little less. I am woefully human, I will take happiness for granted, I will fly to close to the sun, I will feel the ache again, but I will also live. I will read this when I am sad, and I will be sad again - probably sooner than later, but I will know that I have lived to look back, to reflect, to mourn and that will be enough to do it all over again. It's almost clinical to wash the filth off my hands that came from digging through the recesses of my mind day in and day out just to enter that place again, sterile lighting shining on my worst moments as I cradle the sadness in my arms and give it a place to cry. I try and try and try and try and try again, over and over, to go into a new day knowing that at best I will be a little sad, and at worst I will want to die (and hate myself for it).

The "good" days, what I can get of them, are worth it. I choose to believe that. What other option do I have?

Depression is strange. I persist.