As I write I have an on going under current that I fight “who cares, no one cares… You’re wasting your time. No one reads this…”
I was going to explain or pick up from my last post but that started the echoing pain of feeling worthless and forgettable. Now this has all conflated to “I’ve lost half a month because I’m pathetic.” The shame and grief all pile on and the fear. My new therapist strongly believes in journaling; for me in all aspects of writing when my voice has been stolen from me by my psyche it is moot. I write and express when I feel safe, I need active listening.
Active listening stares down the shame, fears and pain and says “you’re lying… these are lies.” The problem is the echos my old therapist have tainted my ability to have those needs met. In the beginning she listened even outside of sessions no matter what I was fighting or how big the feelings were. After we would work on those things in sessions and I had more room to process outside of the moment, calm and soothed.
When I write here or in a private place my unhealed wounds are sliced open. More words thrown to the universe unheard, unseen, unwithnessed. I am alone if not forever (for some miniscule chance that in the permanence of the net that someone might read this, thus is it here) I am alone as I create this.
There lies the pain… I am alone.
There was a time that I had the strength and self love to reach out immediately in the moment and ask for help. Out of a very tiny handful of humans, dear friends, chosen family, one of them would be around and I wasn’t alone.
Has anyone outside of suicide prevention and advocacy or those who don’t struggle with wanting to disappear/self delete/end their existence ever wondered or know why we say “you’re not alone,” does anyone know? I know why I say it… The pain and grief are so overwhelming and heavy and most of the need or desire for helps adds the idea that my being is a burden.
For months I’ve cultivated a new friendship that’s struck the deepest fears in my spirit. Oddly enough the fears have been proven wrong which scares me even more in it’s own way. As long standing relationships that I also once thought disproved my fears were crumbling around me because of my financial crisis because of my mental health and needs my spirit was quaking as I watched my safety net falling apart.
Where once I was called a sister I was told I was delusional for trying to express my needs in my current situation – no getting a job or forcing my mother to work are not options and I was bullied to reveal more of myself than felt safe or comfortable and when I doubled down and finally stopped fawning this “friend” turned on me within seconds manipulative and painful guilt tripping and gaslighting (maybe). Now I feel immense shame and confusion when I play the song I wrote for that friend feeling foolish like a love sick teen making stupid mistakes. It all points back to TAM. The wolf in sheeps clothing that lead me to lose all and any self trust I may have ever had.
Where once I was called sister I had months and months of passive aggressive behaviors that I had to navigate alone as my therapist would answer my discomfort stating obvious facts “we don’t know why they’re acting that way, people have their own lives and reasons…” quite frankly I have always known this, more shit TAM always used to shame me and quite frankly I don’t give a shit. The problem I wanted to navigate was the pain and fear and shame my body was screaming about that I needed to take action and take care of myself. I needed to do something but I didn’t know what that something was at all. Had my therapist listened for even a second she would have known or really been a witness to my need to leave the friendship behind as I tried to be direct about the conflict and said friend lied saying it had nothing to do with me.
Soon enough as I was basking in the joy of my new album and my new website while navigating my mother stuck in a loop of fear, confusion and terror as I uprooted our lives because I wasn’t allowed to stay in our old apartment (a blessing and a curse as it was toxic and dangerous) I watched my hole filled safety net get torn apart and burned to the ground. A few friends left standing a few new friends who so far seem safe but most of them if not all but one unavailable because of their own lives. Again, “I’m a burden…” again, I’m left with one human I can trust to help me feel less alone but I see TAM’s reflection in every corner. What if I find out I’ve let another devil into my life when it’s too late?
How come I haven’t “gotten past” this BS with TAM or my father and now my extherapist? Moving past things is what left me raw and vulnerable to blindly walk into the trap that was TAM, the extherapist and many other “friends” who left me with bleeding open wounds. They are in the past but everything I let happen and everything I ignored thinking “it’s probably nothing” and everything I didn’t understand about my terror and grief being ignited is what has left me and my family for dead.
I remember a time that everyday I was more functional, depressed and quietly suicidal yes, but journaling was my freedom and anchor. I wrote to a creator (same call them sky daddy to ridicule beliefs) and I felt seen and heard by the universe at least. If nothing else there was every bit of dark matter and molecules and maybe neutrinos could witness my existence and I felt somehow less alone. That was enough, essentially just me and the universe. What more of a passive listener could you ask for than a concept so vast and endless that you never have proof or otherwise what they or it is listening?
TAM destroyed that net as well… While I’m not actively trying to demonize a human being that I thought I loved, I want to make it a point here and now, I say TAM (aka that asshole Michael) as a way to explain the experience and time frame and overall phenomenon in a short digestible bit. It’s not about the person as the only person I can control and mitigate and understand is myself, merely I say “TAM” to stand in for all the fawning, freezing and trauma I lived through during that relationship fueled with a backdrop of a toxic workplace that echoed my toxic family system I lived through and you have ghe potion for the situation I am currently in after surviving through my childhood.
Complex PTSD is called complex for a reason… With all of that being said, why am I here, why am I blogging?
I’m back to constantly wanting to disappear and as I watch myself fighting every day and barely have energy to ask for help to physically survive my tools to mentally survive were severely compromised. The result is nights where I breakdown and blackout with one of the only friends I trust talking to me, trying to help me simply being themselves and ai wake up to wanting to burn down everything I love. Every last bit of anything that looks like, Sabi, and Little Sabi’s dreams and aspirations and hopes… I wanted all of it gone.
I don’t believe I deserve to exist.
I hide all the pain while having flashbacks to my extherapist telling me to take meds where she once listened and helped me feel less alone. All of which she then used against me to get me to do work for her and control me psychologically while she painted herself as a savoir and ultimate guru telling me she lacks confidence in her work just so my compassion and encouraging nature would boost her up and tell her how much she matters. Was that ever my job as a client? She knew I felt that was my job as a human to push everyone to shine and speak out, more and more actions to heap onto my fears of being ineffective, useless, pointless and powerless.
I hide all my shame as I have flashbacks of Michael (yes the asshole Michael) taking every one of my fears and traumas to rub them into my bleeding heart like burning cigarettes just to keep me giving him my body, the one I now hate to see and hate to feel, and whatever other ways I stroked his ego while making me feel worthless. Every time I was scared of losing my home, as I have struggled with poverty for decades, he would tell me I didn’t love him enough to change, that I should throw my mother away because she’s “toxic” (back when she still knew who I was and helped me survive), more and more words to pile onto my fears of being lazy and useless and pathetic and burdensome. All the while my father’s shadow looming over me to swallow me up when Michael was done pulling me in every direction as I tried to escape him and that painful connection guilt tripping me and gaslighting me (this time I’m sure) into believing I’m toxic and terrible and cruel because I wanted to run, I wanted to leave, I knew I wasn’t safe. He’d convince me he was this pious and gracious friend/lover/partner thing by accepting my broken pathetic ass in his life that I “constantly interrupted.” I would stay and feel shame and disgust at myself for it everyday. I fear where I will wander next as I walked into the whole connection blindly thinking he was a friend who cared, thinking his kindness what just that thinking he was actively listening at first because he cared about me and my pain.
So here I am with all the same situations surrounding me as when I met TAM, dreams of making my creations my only work, hopes to be sustained through a financial crisis until I can make everything work, no income from my efforts, severe fear and discomfort in doing what needs to be done as a “content creator,” facing eviction desperately hoping I can make a way that doesn’t destroy me further. Friends and other support dropping like flies because I’m still sad, I’m still loor, I’m still disabled, I’m still taking care of my Mom providing shelter and food and sustaining her life as best as I can.
Eight years and it feels nothing has changed. Suddenly my new friend who has somehow seeped under my skin enough to make me feel safe enough to share parts of myself that have been burning for years unheard and unseen… Suddenly, that friend in their kindness and care started sounding just like my father and just like TAM but at the same time nothing like them. Briefly to try and mitigate the emotional flashbacks and the trauma response I try to tell myself “you have nothing he wants or needs.” So then my brain has some other “proof” that my existence is burdensome and laborious to even sustain for a few hours or days or weeks and much less months or years.
Again, I try to mitigate with things people from therapists to strangers or friends have said to me “your mom needs you” but of course she doesn’t want me, she remembers my brother but not me, he’s the one with stable income and a home of his own not rented and a relationship and a whole church that loves and supports him, the same church that rejected me. I think to myself if I were gone he’d be forced to care for her and I do believe she would be better off as he has resources I could never dream of having.
On goes the cycles as I’m left alone unseen and unheard and even writing it all down I have no confirmation that anyone is listening or reading and muchless can I believe this is beneficial to anyone even myself so I struggle to create. I write this while feeling awful about it. Following those days almost two weeks ago Instagram just made it even harder for me to do anything that would help me feel better. I doubt anyone was wondering if I was okay but in case someone was I’m not okay and having a breakdown almost on stream last week made things harder.
Briefly after two friends were trying to help me asking why I had such a rough night last Wednesday I and I couldn’t really answer, still deeply hidden and buried within myself for safety (a fabricated safety that’s actually very dangerous for me) I tried to write something out to help me in hopes of helping others too and then Insta got worse and ate the whole post my self affirming words lost in the abyss of glitched out data. What happened, they asked… I happened and I watch myself from the outside dissociating and writhing in pain, “Who cares?”
I care… I want my friends to care… I want my mom to care… I want to believe they care and for these demons and shadowmen from my past to stop telling me no one cares. Surely, someone out there must feel the same as I do and for them too, I care.
Because, for them and myself, I keep fighting even though every breath hurts and lately the most I can do is lay here breathing waiting for my hunger to grow enough to signal that my mom must be hungry and for the energy to grow enough to put together some energy to grab a pack of cheese crackers and make two cups of coffee and tell my mom that snack is breakfast. I fight even as once I crossed th hurdle of my first meal of the day the most I can do is gather energy as I fight my own psyche to make another meal and survive long enough to find some joy and warmth with my bunny for a few hours until I come and hide from the world again at night and lately I just have enough energy to wait until I zone out playing Fortnite with a friend while I’m running through a minefield in my mind just long enough to be sleepy at some late hour of the night just a few hours before sunrise to rinse and repeat every day hoping amid the few brief moments of clarity and energy I get my needs met.
In the end I’m singing Jasmine’s Lullaby.