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yukieIt occurs to me, out of the blue, that on some level I feel horrifically guilty because I'm still here and a bunch of other people I know are not.
I mean. I know I have a right to be here. I've got a reason to be here, I have a purpose.
I need to remember this. It's not a sin for me to be here.
I know this sounds melodramatic and emo as shit. But this is survivor's guilt.
(The fact that more than a few of the people kicking around my space have this going on intensifies things. And one of them's got Catholic guilt on top of that - I adore you guy, but our synch ratio is ridonkulous and we CAN set each other off! ^^;)
This - plus the fact that for a hell of a lot of my life I was learning that I'm an unpleasant, unlikable, difficult, selfish person...well, it makes me a bit weird.
I know it's got to e frustrating sometimes, for people. They sit down next to me and I'm like a cat whose former owner used to smack it with a newspaper all the time. They lift a hand and I'm under the sofa making hideous spitty noises and they're wondering what in fuck. Just because they've got a copy of the Globe and Mail in their lap doesn't mean it's going to get aimed at my ass, naturally, but that became my default expectation over time.
I'm trying to erase all the stupidness I internalized. The 'you're selfish, you're manipulative, you're stupid, you're lazy, you're cruel, you're unworthy, you don't belong here, you can't belong anywhere, you're not important and you never will be'. I was perpetually on the outs, and as a result if I'm one of the last to know something for whatever reason I jump back into this twitchy mindset.
There were people in my life who would omit information, who wouldn't let me know of important things, and they would then turn around and call me a bad friend because I didn't know. My life was full of people who played little games like that. Leave me outside the circle, then stomp your feet and call me unkind for not knowing what I was never told. I knew a TON of people like that.
It's hard not to expect a newspaper to the ass when that was the sum total of a lot of your relationships.
I hung around poisonous people out of survivor's guilt.
I believed for a very long time that if I lost a friend to anything less than death I was a worthless being. I still fight with that idea.
I still fight with the idea that I can't be loved; my engagement falling through didn't help that. I'm still friends with him, but...
I've admitted to someone that I fell ass over tits for them like they did for me, and I fight with the idea that I'm a bad person for doing this.
I'm trying to reconcile what I want and what would make me happy with what I'm SUPPOSED to want and gain happiness from. They don't always converge.
I fight with my head a lot. I fight with a lot of stupid ghosts in there. On my bad days I'd immediately make the dionaea house vomit and die in a lot of pain, seriously. If you wanted to end that story truthfully with me as a character, you'd have to do this: the heroes find this dead flytrap house flailing its withered tendrils in despair while it's decomposing into mulch, and me twitching on the front porch looking fucking insulted. I'm absolutely god-awful to myself. I am my worst critic. The term 'poison mind' applies very, very much to me on a bad day. I tear myself down over and over and over.
And I project. That's the shittiest part. I think other people dislike me as much as I dislike me, and it's not the case, and it elicits floods of 'buh!?' more oft than not when it becomes clear that I think they hate me in the face.
Why am I writing this down?
Because it's less scary on a page or screen than in my mind. In my head, it's nebulous. Images of words cast on the screen of my mind's eye. The shape of nouns and verbs traced out in electrical impulses. In my head, these thoughts are ghosts. Writing them down is like aiming a proton gun at everything.
...The poindextrousness: it increases.
Anyhow.
The point of this is: I'm bruised and twitchy still, but I'm recovering. I'm better off than I was. Every day I get a little better. Maybe it'll never go away entirely, maybe I'll still have mini ghosts bouncing around in my head forever, but I know how to handle this better now.
Things will get better.
It's not a sin for me to exist.
I can say that and mean it. I'll remember it.
I mean. I know I have a right to be here. I've got a reason to be here, I have a purpose.
I need to remember this. It's not a sin for me to be here.
I know this sounds melodramatic and emo as shit. But this is survivor's guilt.
(The fact that more than a few of the people kicking around my space have this going on intensifies things. And one of them's got Catholic guilt on top of that - I adore you guy, but our synch ratio is ridonkulous and we CAN set each other off! ^^;)
This - plus the fact that for a hell of a lot of my life I was learning that I'm an unpleasant, unlikable, difficult, selfish person...well, it makes me a bit weird.
I know it's got to e frustrating sometimes, for people. They sit down next to me and I'm like a cat whose former owner used to smack it with a newspaper all the time. They lift a hand and I'm under the sofa making hideous spitty noises and they're wondering what in fuck. Just because they've got a copy of the Globe and Mail in their lap doesn't mean it's going to get aimed at my ass, naturally, but that became my default expectation over time.
I'm trying to erase all the stupidness I internalized. The 'you're selfish, you're manipulative, you're stupid, you're lazy, you're cruel, you're unworthy, you don't belong here, you can't belong anywhere, you're not important and you never will be'. I was perpetually on the outs, and as a result if I'm one of the last to know something for whatever reason I jump back into this twitchy mindset.
There were people in my life who would omit information, who wouldn't let me know of important things, and they would then turn around and call me a bad friend because I didn't know. My life was full of people who played little games like that. Leave me outside the circle, then stomp your feet and call me unkind for not knowing what I was never told. I knew a TON of people like that.
It's hard not to expect a newspaper to the ass when that was the sum total of a lot of your relationships.
I hung around poisonous people out of survivor's guilt.
I believed for a very long time that if I lost a friend to anything less than death I was a worthless being. I still fight with that idea.
I still fight with the idea that I can't be loved; my engagement falling through didn't help that. I'm still friends with him, but...
I've admitted to someone that I fell ass over tits for them like they did for me, and I fight with the idea that I'm a bad person for doing this.
I'm trying to reconcile what I want and what would make me happy with what I'm SUPPOSED to want and gain happiness from. They don't always converge.
I fight with my head a lot. I fight with a lot of stupid ghosts in there. On my bad days I'd immediately make the dionaea house vomit and die in a lot of pain, seriously. If you wanted to end that story truthfully with me as a character, you'd have to do this: the heroes find this dead flytrap house flailing its withered tendrils in despair while it's decomposing into mulch, and me twitching on the front porch looking fucking insulted. I'm absolutely god-awful to myself. I am my worst critic. The term 'poison mind' applies very, very much to me on a bad day. I tear myself down over and over and over.
And I project. That's the shittiest part. I think other people dislike me as much as I dislike me, and it's not the case, and it elicits floods of 'buh!?' more oft than not when it becomes clear that I think they hate me in the face.
Why am I writing this down?
Because it's less scary on a page or screen than in my mind. In my head, it's nebulous. Images of words cast on the screen of my mind's eye. The shape of nouns and verbs traced out in electrical impulses. In my head, these thoughts are ghosts. Writing them down is like aiming a proton gun at everything.
...The poindextrousness: it increases.
Anyhow.
The point of this is: I'm bruised and twitchy still, but I'm recovering. I'm better off than I was. Every day I get a little better. Maybe it'll never go away entirely, maybe I'll still have mini ghosts bouncing around in my head forever, but I know how to handle this better now.
Things will get better.
It's not a sin for me to exist.
I can say that and mean it. I'll remember it.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-30 11:05 pm (UTC)It's not a sin for me to exist.
Didn't somebody tell Ansem something similar at one point, and he replied with almost that same thing? Or am I misremembering?
no subject
Date: 2009-12-01 01:42 am (UTC)It sounds like an Ansem-ism though. If I could say it half as cool as he could I'd be set. XD
I need to learn to do that to my brain!
Sorry if this was the downer from hell. I tried to end on an optimistic note because at the end of the day I can make it better. I can handle this shit. Sometimes (like now) my reserves are depleted and I have to bring the thoughts out into some sort of concrete form so I can stare them down and tell them to fuck straight off. But in the end I kick a little bit more of the mental nonsense shit out, and my head is a little bit nicer a place to live in.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-01 02:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-04 02:31 pm (UTC)And - yeah. I am an expert at clinging all tenaciouslike.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-01 01:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-01 01:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-02 07:36 pm (UTC)Hamster wheels really need to DIAF.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-04 02:30 pm (UTC)