they seldom had a name or a face. they knew everything about me but i knew nothing about them. their anonymity versus my specificity. no name, no face. just words, just abuse. they offered me nothing but threats and love that was a falsity. once caught in the first one’s trap, i was left wounded like a fox in the jaws of a bear trap. with bone showing and flesh cut away, it made me easier to catch. it weakened me. then came the next hunter, the next predator. and the next. and the next. unachievable is my justice as they remain nameless, faceless.
my early childhood. back then, when my sadness was not my default emotion. back then, when i had everything. when the world was beautiful. when i wasn’t running on empty. when things were ok. when i was ok. when my household was happy and perfect. everything was perfect. before my disorders started to show up.
yet, that feeling of happiness has become so fleeting, so foreign. i have yet to re-experience the bliss and carelessness i had as a young child. so many things that i cannot remember. but i think back, and i remember how i used to smile. i had a best friend. i spent time outside. i wasn’t tainted. i had not been exposed to the cruelty of this earth but there was only so much time until i would discover the truth of humanity.
i grieve for that peaceful time. i only had a little under 8 years of a childhood. why did it have to go wrong? why did i have to fall into the jaws of a predator?
i took another walk with my ex tonight. i struggled to maintain a conversation because my mind was so empty. we continued to walk for 30 minutes and when we returned to my house, i sat on the pavement and started crying. i don’t know why i was crying. i don’t know why i feel like this. i feel numb to the point where i cry in pain when i am unable to understand the pain. everything feels wrong. for some reason i have a gut feeling that my ex is struggling or suffering and not telling me about it, but i think that i assume there’s something wrong outside of me because i can’t locate why i feel so incompetent and pathetic and weak.
why must i feel this way?
and yet again, it begins. the trial. the trial of me having to suffer withdrawal so that they can give me yet another round of a new medication. i’m so tired. i can taste the release of death. it would be so easy. so, so easy. i can taste it. yes, load me up with another drug. because it will be different this time, right? it will last longer this time, right? right?
i made paper cut outs today. i laminated them afterwards, and went to cut off the excess plastic. i was in the middle of carefully cutting around the paper, when the overwhelming urge to cut up all of my hair, my skin, and my clothes came over me. nothing triggered it. just an intrusive thought. why do they have to happen, though? my mind is already so cluttered, why does my brain create more mess for me to wade through? i’ve avoided cooking for a very long time because of it.. i can’t even dice vegetables without an intrusive thought telling me to stab myself or try to split the wood cabinet with the knife. i feel ashamed of it, too. especially the kinds of thoughts i get when i’m around multiple people. it most often occurs when i’m around strangers (bonus points if they’re adult men), i just experience my brain insisting that they’re bad people and that i should kill them before they kill me.
it’s scary.
my thoughts are scary.
P.S. – a reminder to other posters:
today I was sad. I have had no motivation to do anything, and that also applies to journalling. I made a promise to myself to do it every day… so, here it is I guess.
the only reason i haven’t offed myself is because the people around me keep pleading me not to. why? why do they care? my ex came to my house last night around 1 am because he was worried about me. He rang the doorbell and woke my parents, but luckily they went back to sleep. He walked to my house. At midnight. In the cold. why do they care? I was on the phone with him for 2 hours telling him to go home but he was refusing to do so until he was convinced that I was safe. I just want to be gone. let me be gone. let me disappear. I’m so fucking tired. I’m exhausted. let me sleep. let me rest. why am I living for other people. I don’t want to be alive, other people want me alive. That’s akin to letting a very sick elderly person die a painful death instead of respecting their request to pull them off of life support.
edit: please don’t bring religion into this, i really don’t want to hear it. the question was rhetorical.
You can feel it. The overwhelming dread of it all, the persistent paranoia; draped upon your shoulders like a cloak. It seems to swallow you whole. It’s what makes you sit down in the shower, wailing into your folded arms as the painfully hot water falls onto your back. It’s the tactile hallucinations of someone standing right behind you, watching you. It makes you feel like you’re delusional, like you can’t tell anybody or even begin to explain any of it. They wouldn’t understand. It’s the same thing that forces you to battle yourself into staying awake as long as possible so that you can avoid another round of your parasomnia.
one of my biggest coping mechanisms is songwriting, so I thought I might share something I’m working on. it can be read like poetry I guess, it communicates a lot of the feelings I have about my recent abuser. even though its in present tense, the song is referring to past events. im no longer in contact with my abuser and am on complete social lockdown.
verse a
euphoria
it’s so possesing
can’t stop myself
from obsessing
you hold me close
just to bruise me
why is your love
so confusing
pre-chorus
i’m supposed to feel safe here
but everything’s so cold
you get me so high but
you push me down so low
chorus
you’re heroin
and i wanna get sober
you plague my mind
after the rush is over
like little needles in my veins
my blood burns and my skin stings
the disgust. the self shaming and hatred. it kills me. because of the nature of the abuse i’ve endured, i’m left with a body devoid of purity, a husk adorned with scars and tainted with contempt. i am repulsed. i am repulsed with myself, i am repulsed by sexuality because it has not been presented to me as a loving gift, but a weapon. a weapon to degrade me and disintegrate any sense of dignity i had left. a weapon to steal away the power from me, to leave me as nothing but a puppet. a slave. reduced to an object. discarded once they’ve tortured me until i’m emotionally unresponsive, until i’m numb. they get bored, and they discard me.
the repulsion often eats away at me.
i want to lay down, wrap myself in my blankets and sleep forever… but i fear what waits for me on the other side of my slumber. the things i experience when i dream. they continue to plague me, night after night. my mother is making me take a magnesium supplement to help with my sleep (note: I am a VERY small person, this will be important in a second). all it’s done so far has been give me a stomach upset. i highly doubt a sour magnesium drink that Maya Rudolph does commercials for is going to cure my c-ptsd induced parasomnia. i’m at the lowest dose, and i’m frustrated that she doesn’t do her own research when she buys these kinds of things. i take birth control as a hormone regulator (I have a hormonal imbalance) and she wanted me to start taking these vitamins she was taking… they tasted awful, and a couple days into taking them i found myself feeling a lot worse (emotionally). i did some research and it turned out that they had red clover extract, something that essentially cancels out the effects of birth control. it’s frustrating, because I take a LOT of medication… and you’d think it’s a given to check the interact effects of anything considered medicinal, right? i understand she means well, but i don’t like feeling nauseous every night after drinking tea ruined by the sour flavor of magnesium powder.
today was strange. i don’t have much to write other than these few things.
the assignments keep stacking. i feel like i can barely keep my head above the surface, i’m treading water. i’m hanging by a thread.
i took a walk with my ex today (we’re still very close friends because of the nature of our breakup, neither of us wanted to, but he needed to work on himself and he was ignoring his problems). it was nice, but it felt wrong. it feels wrong not to hold his hand, lean against him, rest my head on his shoulder. i really hope we can get back together at some point… i really do love him. the thing that stabbed me a bit is that he said “I’m learning not to get in relationships with people I want to keep as friends” which i understand to an extent, but i didn’t leave, did i? i’m still here, present in your life. it’s selfish of me, i know. he just made me feel so safe. so protected. so loved. he is of the rare two people who were not abusive. it just hurts. it’s hard to just be his friend because i have such intense feelings for him.
i spoke to my therapist today. i read to her my recent journals to help me evoke emotions so i could actually talk about something. i spoke about how bad the nightmares have been getting, how the paranoia is affecting me, et cetera… and i don’t quite remember how, but we ended up on the topic of the recent violently abusive situation i was in (in august). there was something there that i hadn’t unearthed before? the anger towards my parents. allow me to provide some context: in the situation i was in, i was being blackmailed. my abuser was forcing me to do horrible things to myself so that my family wouldn’t be in danger. he was threatening to hurt my family. that’s why i submitted. i did everything in my power to ensure they would stay out of the situation, to ensure they would be safe and be left untouched. and what do i get in return? not sympathy, not a “it’s not your fault”, no. none of that. what i got in return for my self sacrifice was blame and anger and self-loathing. “you put US in danger” “you should have told US” “you’re making ME feel in danger” “you’re making ME so upset” ME, ME, ME, ME, ME! because this is about you, right? this is about YOUR feelings, isn’t it? no, no, not my feelings. not the feelings of me, the person who was the victim in this situation. not the feelings of the person who was willing to do anything to protect you, no. i let myself be the fucking sacrificial lamb in order to keep this horrible, violent man from seeing to it that they would be hurt.
“why didn’t you tell us”
BECAUSE WHEN YOU FIND OUT, THIS IS WHAT YOU DO.
WHEN YOU FIND OUT, I’M TO BLAME.
WHEN YOU FIND OUT, I’M AT FAULT.
not the abuser, oh, no. this has nothing to do with the person who committed the crime, right? it’s MY fault. it’s MY fault for being manipulated. it’s MY FAULT for being blackmailed. HE BLACKMAILED ME WITH INFORMATION THAT I NEVER PROVIDED TO HIM. HE FOUND ME ON HIS OWN.
this is why i don’t tell you things.
i’m in a place where i am mentally unable to handle anything. schoolwork feels like trying to roll a boulder up a mountain. functioning in general, actually. i feel so isolated. my friends aren’t as responsive as they used to be when we were all in treatment together… i just feel like shit. i haven’t been able to even work up the motivation to finish my paintings (which are way past due). i have a reading response due tomorrow (600 words) and i haven’t even been able to figure out what the fuck i’m going to say about this passage from Walden. he contradicts himself every other line, how am i supposed to explain what “rhetoric” he’s using? seems like Thoreau himself doesn’t even know!
i had yet another nightmare last night. i tried to make up for lost sleep by taking a nap during my free-period but i ended up giving up when a nightmare started (I was half awake, it was weird). it was about some murderer named Calamity? i don’t even know. i was in a stranger environment this time, not the usual uncanny version of my house. this time, it looked nothing like where i live. it was some hoity-toity rich-person house in a gated community. there was a tennis court next to the backyard (the tennis court was for everyone in the community) and there was a pool (again, public to anyone who lived there). there were some random kids i didn’t know and their mum… it wasn’t their house but it wasn’t mine either. i remember being really anxious because nobody was listening to me when i was telling them “lock the doors” and whatnot… and everyone was being really secretive about the location of Calamity and where the attacks were occurring. they weren’t telling me because they were worrying about making me panic. all that did was tell me that it was clearly in the area i was in. i kept pestering my parents to drive all of us back home. for some reason that wasn’t an option… maybe we were at the weird house because it was happening near my house? i know all of this sounds really stupid and “oh that’s not scary” but it’s hard to explain the feelings i was having and it was a lot more chaotic than im able to describe. i know this storyline and i know how it would have ended had i not gotten up before falling completely asleep.
i often feel like it’s my fate to never be truly happy. as if i’m destined to suffer, that’s my purpose.
many try to make the point of “oh, the bad parts will be over soon”
and to that, I have to ask when? when will they be over? when will they cease to repeat themselves?
it’s a question left unanswered, because the answer is something they don’t want to admit.
The answer is “never”.
for me, at least. I find myself to constantly be a target for abuse, manipulation, pain, et fucking cetera. over and over and over, a never-ending cycle of torture and emotional turmoil.
i don’t have the energy to function right now. the assignments keep stacking. i haven’t showered since friday. my diet is devoid of any nutritional value. the only thing i can stomach is cereal, rice, fruit, and ice (I fucking eat ice for some reason). i feel exhausted, yet i don’t want to sleep. my blood sugar is really low and it’s causing me to have a headache. my head feels heavy on my shoulders. i just want to feel okay. i want to be normal, whatever that entails. i want my childhood that i didn’t get to have. i want to be able to remember things from those years that aren’t just memories of abuse.
I’m so tired.
Partially because the ~6 or so hours of sleep I get are of abysmal quality, but I mostly attribute my exhaustion to me being sick. I’m so fucking sick. I’m so exhausted all the time, the nightmares and night terrors plague me and I spend a significant amount of my day thinking about the awful dreams or worrying that it’s some kind of “sign” or “warning,” as if I have precognition or some shit (I know it’s stupid, I don’t know why my anxiety seems to make me delusional to an extent). The effects of my PTSD are fucking debilitating. The dissociation kills me. I often depersonalize and I’m looking at the world through tunnel vision, it feels like I’m in a first-person VR video game and I’m looking down. My hands aren’t mine, everything feels strange and unreal.
“Okay, I’m sick
Not the kind of sick that lands you in the doctor
Not the kind that makes you weak and then heals you stronger
It’s the kind of sick that turns your legs into spaghetti
It’s the kind of sick that makes your blood burn and your bones heavy
The kind of sick that makes an atheist pray for Jesus
The kind of sickness that turns your power into weakness
And I’m sick of being sick for this whole fucking place to witness
And I’m living a sick life that most people call privileged
And they’re kinda right, but I’m still sicker than I can cope with”
last night I had another nightmare. i don’t know why I say this as if I don’t have them every single night. when i wake up, i have to spend a while laying awake in bed, trying to process what i had experienced during my rest. it’s horrifying. these people that i try to push from my mind reappear as if my dream is their real estate. i’ve tried medication, meditation to induce lucid dreams, i’ve done everything within my power. it’s like some twisted possession, my thoughts are no longer in my control and the images of disturbing, horrifying things sit in front of my eyes. closing my eyes doesn’t do any good. it’s like a projection of an image. and trying to think about something else only makes it worse. all i can do is cover my head and wait for it to end.
feb. 8th 2021 – 1:39 am
I’m scared to sleep. I don’t want to, but I have class tomorrow. This is why I used to do lines of ritalin every fucking night. to avoid sleeping. to avoid having to experience tragedy even in my sleep. even in my sleep; to not only be unable to save the people around me, but also be unable to save myself. I consistently have debilitatingly terrifying nightmares about very far-off natural disasters.. almost an apocalyptic situation. where a fire is slowly but surely burning through everything in its path, and nobody can put it out. where our planet has been flung out of orbit and for some fucking reason that means the concept of perspective has changed (I cant explain it, but everything becomes flat instead of dimensional, including people), strangers or suddenly deranged family members/friends coming to my home and stabbing everyone in it– and every fucking time, I end up with blood on my hands. every time. I have to kill someone. to protect myself. and I hate it. because by the time the perpetrators are dead, they’ve already done their damage. this is so clearly a reflection of my self hatred and my habit of victim blaming myself (I don’t victim blame others, I just always hyper-fixate on things like “but I could have done this” when in reality, I couldn’t have. I did what I could in those situations to get out with the least possible damage done). I’m never free from the pain. not when I’m awake, not when I’m asleep. it suffocates me.
i functioned today. I sat at my desk instead of sitting in my bed. I drank more water than usual. I brushed my hair. I’ll probably write more later when I have the time to focus on my feelings.
feb. 7th 2021 – 3:16 am
it’s night time now (i date my posts based on the site’s time, not my timezone). this is when the bad thoughts get worse. I have too much time to think, there is too much silence. my appetite has been small, and i haven’t been eating enough food that is nutritionally meaningful. ive eaten rice (haven’t even finished it) for a couple days now. im in a weird position where im hungry but nothing sounds appetizing and i just don’t want to eat. i’ve never had an unhealthy relationship with food, so im assuming this is just depression appetite (it happens a lot for me). im trying my best to keep working on assignments, but my meds have worn off and its hard to focus now (I have really bad adhd). im hoping I can get another assignment done. i don’t know if my brain will let me concentrate on schoolwork for more than 20 min at this point in the day.
I’ve been avoiding showers and changing clothes. Partially because I’m low functioning, but mostly because I don’t want to remember. Every time I shower or change my clothes, I have to see it. I have to see his name, etched into my flesh.
I feel sick to my stomach right now. I can’t stop thinking about it. The things he did. The things he made me do. It’s humiliating. I feel so small and hopeless. I just want to forget. Whenever I remember or think about the things that happened, my face feels heavy.
I want to crawl out of my skin, I don’t want this body. I want a new one. I want one that hasn’t been tainted with scars and abuse.
Existing is uncomfortable and scary. I’m so afraid. What if it happens again? I’m told over and over, “It won’t happen again, it won’t happen again”. Why, then? Can you tell me why it happened again all those other times before? Can you? Can you look me in the eye and explain to me why they keep finding me? I live in fear. I live in fear of the abuse finding me again. I hate it. I hate feeling like this. Why am I here? If there is a God, why? All I have to ask is why? Why? Why did you? Why did you let them find me? (note: I don’t believe in God. I never have)
I don’t want to be a puppet anymore
I want the memories to go away
I want it to go away
please
feb. 6th 2021 – 12:41 am
there’s more on my mind so im going to write more
it hurts it hurts it hurts I want it to stop. I don’t want to feel like this anymore. I want his name off of me. I want it gone. go away go away go away please just make it disappear.
it makes me feel like property. im not property. im not. but why was I treated like I am? why have I been treated like a slave? forced to essentially brand myself? why? I want to know why. why did it happen. why did he do that? why did he do any of those things? i want to know. i want to know. i feel like im suffocating. i want to be free from this. from all of it. from the things that happened for 9 years until august. i want to cry but nothing is happening. im numb but at the same time i feel everything.
feb. 6th 2021 – 2:32 am
I dont think I’ve spoken about my dissociation on here yet. I think I should. It might help.
I have an undiagnosed dissociative disorder (therapist thinks it’s OSDD, I agree with that assumption). All of my alters have been dormant except for my introject. my introject is always co-conscious, and never fronts. it is the first alter that I developed. it is very angry, hateful, and I’m scared of it. I can tell that its an amalgamation of all of the abusers ive had over the years. it says horrible things to me, things akin to what my abusers have said. my trauma holder (she holds childhood trauma & the feelings attached to it, everyone in the system has the same memories but only specific alters have the emotions linked to them) has been dormant for a while and I dont like it. its hard without her. I have to deal with the introject myself. my child alter is also dormant.
I’m hurting a lot today. I would say more than normal, but on the other hand, it just feels the same– and that’s part of why it’s so exhausting. Everything has become so mundane. I’ve been sober since late September, I think. I’m proud of myself, I guess. But, dealing with my feelings instead of numbing them with vodka is debilitatingly difficult. I’m having the same issue with sleep. I have horrifying chronic nightmares. Sometimes, my brain will give me an extra “fuck you” and I’ll have a night terror. I’m so tired. I’m so, so tired. I used to snort Ritalin at night in order to stay awake so I could avoid having to experience a nightmare again. Again, I’m clean. But it’s fucking difficult. I’m not saying I’m going to relapse, because I’ve come way too far to do that when I’m consciously able to stop myself, but I’m not even safe in my sleep. He’s in my dreams a little more than half of the time. He’s there, plaguing my sleep. It’s so vivid, too. The abuse, the pain, the feelings, everything about it. I can feel all of it. I can’t remember the last time I woke up and wasn’t in a cold sweat. I’m clean, but everything that I tried to numb or avoid with the drugs is still there. It’s still fucking there. I want to escape it. But I just can’t. There are days when I find myself sitting down in the shower (on the days that I have the energy to shower at all), muttering “get out of my head” over and over as if that would change anything. He won’t leave. He. Won’t. Leave. Please. I just want to be free from him. We’re not even in contact, I cut him off months ago but he poisoned my brain so that I would never fucking forget. I want to forget.
I want to forget.
Newer Posts