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my last creative writing - months old but starting to feel the words again. thanks :) this is censored but references to abuse, body, harm and others.
i worry.
i had my first raw, jarring therapy breakthrough in a remarkable amount of years and i’ve become really emotional over it.
i have been slipping on a pretty noticeable downward trajectory for the past 6-or-so years, and i have been doing nothing but building up momentum doing so. whether i try to stop myself or not, i have been gaining speed and crashing into things and losing things and ruining things that you’d think would bring on some amount of clarity; instead, the length of time between these situations has lessened while the crash on impact has only intensified. it was pretty common to feel the occasional sense of dysphoria or detachment in my teens and into my 20s. i am now 34 years old and stare at myself in the mirror waiting to catch the moment when my body and its reflection don’t match. i start to lose any feeling of possession over my looks, or simply my entire being. i was in a philosophy class that i truly had barely found myself able to attend and did end up dropping the class just a few weeks later, but i felt so connected to the concept of body-mind dualism: the idea that we are only the electricity and hormones and synapses firing in our brain, and our actual self is separated entirely from the bodies we find ourselves in. i convinced myself for far too long of time that i was simply “plugged in” to the things i was experiencing. my ideations weren’t active. i developed and cradled passivity. i was passively kling myself, and i chose that over and over and over again without acknowledging that i was capable of making changes for myself. a cycle of self-imposed suffering.
my core negative beliefs: i am inconvenient. i am unlovable. i am powerless.
at 19 years old i was admitted during a cardiac event and treated for esophageal tears and early signs of kidney failure because i had multiple eating d/orders, but to me it felt like i had found control . i od’d on o-piates when i was 24 and woke up after two days in a basement with compartment syndrome, pneumonia and s. assault, but to me it felt like i had found control. i entered treatment for co-occuring disorders when i was 28 a year to the day after my sister’s suicide due to my uncontrollable s-stance abuse, self h and psychotic episodes, but to me it felt like i had found control. at 30 years old i had a bac of .191 and was denied pain medication for a compound hip and leg fracture because my drug screen came back positive for substances i didn’t remember taking, but to me it felt like i had found control. at 32 years old i was diagnosed with a personality disorder, a mood disorder, a behavioral disorder, major depressive disorder and chronic anxiety that cost me and lost me years to improper medication management, disassociation and stigmas, but to me it felt like i had found control. i have lost healthy relationships of all kinds, career opportunities, financial wellness, my credibility on all types of scales and large amounts of pride, but to me it truly, truly felt like i had found control.
i was very young when i started purposefully creating and practicing specific “people pleasing” behaviors that i now recognize as emotional monitoring. as i started to develop more self-awareness, i also increasingly started to recognize my own distress and discomfort relative to what i felt was my life, and i had no way to process and control these feelings internally or control any part of my environment externally. my first misappropriated behavior was manipulating interactions to have positive outcomes through placating, as a way to minimize my own discomfort. i had no way to communicate my hypersensitivity and i had no bodily autonomy of my own, and i never developed an ability to protect myself from overexposure because that was never modeled to me. and so i became a very measured, very intuitive, very attentive child - now a very insecure and very unsettled adult. eventually these shortcuts became habits, and these habits eventually became fastened into my fiber of my being, my personality traits, ultimately developing into my chronic feelings of emptiness and uneasiness because i had replaced my own sense of security with a continuous at-odds gamble on how others would react, and ultimately that developed into restlessness and worry and this gnawing need to always be thinking about the next move, the next play, the next thing to say when ultimately, what i worked so hard on curating around me would crumble once and when i disappointed you.
i worry.
i never truly identified as a shy kid, but i went from always being surrounded by kids from my school and neighborhood to playing by myself, and it happened pretty quickly. i was put into this situation growing up that reinforced a sense of powerlessness with abrupt changes in the family dynamic, frequent moves out of school districts and eventually a shift out of public school entirely. my sister and i were forced to make space for new fundamentalist religious indoctrinations, expected social changes and interpersonal paranoias, changing educational routines and also the burden of developing habits of independence without maturity or grace. by the time i was put back into public school, i was a 12-year-old child who always had ice cream and never had a bedtime, but i cried every night because my mommy was an alcoholic and if i didn’t convince her to stop drinking then i would be the reason she burned in *** for eternity.
and by the time i was a teenager it was becoming apparent that what i had innocently believed would be picking up a single piece of trash before anyone else noticed had slowly and deceptively and quietly grown into a whole belief system where i associated any person’s trash with my own personal and spiritual failures to a point where i believed that i was that trash. my entire self worth constantly trembling on stilts, always braced for the eventual fall. i was out of most extracurricular activities by the time i was 16 and instead found comfort in reading as a way to reinforce a means of feeling prepared - feeling secure, feeling safe. i would research things that i felt i had missed out on learning, and then i would research things that i felt would make me appear more confident and capable, and ultimately i would research things just as an way to hide behind something that i wouldn’t be capable of becoming minimized from. i will forever be a proud seeker and supporter of self education, but i was ingesting unhealthy amounts of information about things i was not emotionally equipped to handle and this became very apparent when i was in high school and lost my voice overnight with a random bout of laryngitis. i couldn’t whisper, i couldn’t whistle, i couldn’t scream if i wanted to. we lived in a farmhouse on a plot of land that didn’t have visibility to another human being unless you were half a mile out of a treeline. i had never experienced cyclical rumination until that first night, when i laid in my bed and for the first time ever in my life thought, “what if someone is looking in the windows and it’s so dark, i can’t see them there?” and then they began dripping out, “did i lock my windows?”, “did i lock my door?”, “is the front door locked?”, “should i close the blinds?”
“what if someone breaks in my room tonight and rps me and slts my throat and no one will hear me scream?”, “who would find my body first?”, “do rp victims go to ***?”
i worry.
i didn’t sleep for three days. that was ***. no one knew, eyes up. my thoughts were a burden. i was a burden. i was a problem. i was a deficit. my 4.0 gpa average dropped to 1.9 within half of a school year. i was a deficit. i was a problem. i was a burden. my thoughts were a burden.
then, i would find myself facing this question once again just 3 years later, staring at my ceiling.
a rp victim.
no one could know about me. (no one.)
i lost more friends. i secured new bad habits. i became addicted to the satisfaction i felt when i deprived myself of things i felt i didn’t deserve. i didn’t deserve new shoes. i didn’t deserve full meals. i didn’t deserve others’ time. i didn’t deserve my wellbeing. what started off as controlling my suffering by satisfying others eroded into a satisfaction from my suffering. i became a prisoner trapped by my freedoms. i stopped writing for myself. my journals that were once filled with poems and drawings and observations were emptied to torn-out pages and scratched out words because i hated how masculine my handwriting looked. my soul diaries became food diaries. i starved every part of me, from my spirit to my spine - one more visible than the other.
i wore the same outfit a few days in a row if i knew other people were going to see me, because once my teacher told me she liked the sweater i wore the day before but didn’t say she liked the sweater i was wearing that day. i took that to mean that the sweater i chose to wear that day was unreasonable hideous and i had no right to attempt personal style. this would grow into a paranoia that i was actually disgusting and i became fixated on the idea that i was unclean or appeared unkempt, so i would instead change up to 6 ot 7 times per day. i slowly started to erase myself, and that space was quickly filled in with cementing, paralyzing self doubt. that self doubt, over time, developed into resentment - into contempt - eventually, into self hatred. i was a pendulum swinging between fighting for myself and fighting myself, punishing myself by throwing my body against the rocks and then drowning myself, disgusted that i bleed.
i took up space - a continual apology. “i’m sorry that i am here.”
i obsess over how to be the best possible person. what should i know? what do i need to fix? how can i act differently so that it is easier to love me? “i promise, i barely feel it..” i’ll make parts of me smaller, and the parts i can’t maker smaller will be worked on to be disguised. i’ll blend in. i’ll become the exact person you want, because your happiness makes me happy.
shouldn’t that make me happy?
i’m not.
i’m a liar, and i am a good one. (the worst kind.)
​
“i know you don’t have room for me, but please don’t leave me.” not because i need you. i don’t need anyone. i don’t even need myself. i am here only out of the fear that if i leave, and someone should need me, i’d then have to say “i’m sorry that i am not there.”
what if that is a lie too?
are you happy? i just need to know, so i know what outfit to wear. what face should i be making?
(is it happy?)
i am inconvenient. i am unlovable. i am powerless. i think i locked the windows, but i’ll check again - not because i don’t trust you; because i don’t believe i am capable of trust.
i worry. i worry that i’m not capable of much at all. i’m not.
