Something I think about a lot is deleting this blog.
Or sometimes I think about creating some kind of archive of it, but GOD, that would be so much work.
On one hand, there's a lot of stuff here that's incredibly cool and even useful for me. On the other hand, it's kind of wildly embarrassing in many ways.
I actually archived all of my instagram posts lately because that, too, felt embarrassing, but this is far more so, obviously. Just less people can see this, or will see this.
There's something kind of mortifying about being thirty-one years old and being able to look back on, like, fourteen years of my young life and draw a line through every single mental health and trauma struggle I ever had. It's also embarrassing how many people I used to love are written about all over the walls of this place, especially considering how many of them ended up harming me.
But why should that feel embarrassing? (My therapist recently told me I call a lot of things embarrassing, and the lady I saw for two sessions before this one told me I was using that word incorrectly. She pulled out a book to define it to me and everything. I think the word she told me to use instead was "shame" or "ashamed" but that feels so serious.) I dunno, there's just something about having a trauma history as large and daunting as mine that is innately embarrassing.
It's like, first of all, I clearly trusted and loved a lot of people I shouldn't have, and there's this feeling that obviously I should have known better or else none of that or at least less of it would have happened to me. The worst thing anyone has ever said to me was "the reason you've had so many bad things happen to you is because you keep trusting weird men" and I try to forget about that because it was said in the heat of a moment but it does feel true. I have literally thousands of posts on this blog about how much I love people who raped me or abused me or violated me. I was best friends with a person who basically had a real-world meme about them being so cool and good and pure of heart and what they ended up doing is sickening in a special way because of that and god there are so many posts on this blog about them. I got jump-scared by a Facebook memory a while back and it pissed me off so bad, but I can delete a Facebook memory. I can't delete my whole life.
I mean it's a really cool and fun time when almost every memory you have of your adolescence and early twenties is linked to something very fucked up, especially so when you're trying to tell stories or relate to other people and it feels impossible because all your stories are weird and tainted. Like maybe I'm just not allowed to have that with other people, I guess, and it feels unfair and my fault at the same time. And it's so much worse when people pick up on it, because they do. I survived those years and didn't much look back for a long time and now people I newly meet who I spend a reasonable amount of time with tell me they're confused how I never died and I'm like, well, I was just vibing here but I guess. That's embarrassing.
It's embarrassing to know that people think of you as this person who just suffers, or has suffered, or always will suffer. Perpetual state of suffering. And then you have the online presence to back that up because a lot of your suffering is recorded for posterity. A former friend said something to me while she was breaking up with me earlier this year about how I'm "always having a crisis" and that felt like a weirdly cruel thing to say (and honestly the things she then listed were mostly weird misunderstandings -- I like to think I'm intensely private about my real crises), but I guess I can see why she would think that. And what that really boils down to, because I don't ask anything of anyone, is "you are traumatized and mentally ill in a way that makes me very uncomfortable" which is like... cool, I mean, I don't like that about myself either, and if I could choose to be like you or to be more sympathetic as a person then I would, but here we are, I don't know. I don't want that to be the vibe I give off. I don't want that to be a part of my identity. I'm working very hard on making that not me.
I guess what I'm getting at is I think this blog feels like such an overriding narrative of me and my life. It's like a list of all my foibles. It's every time I came on here and said "this is a person who loves me" and then that person then proceeded to do something incomprehensibly evil to me. It's every time I created my own version of self-value by begging for validation by strangers and letting people sexually harass me for literal years so I could feel important. (The number of times I thanked someone for saying something so fucking disgusting to me it made me wish they were dead should be studied in a lab.) It's why I'm thinking about TUMBLR DOT COM at THREE AM on a TUESDAY/WEDNESDAY NIGHT while THREE HOURS into SOME RANDOM MAN'S TWITCH STREAM of a game I have like PROBABLY 300 HOURS IN MYSELF at LEAST when I have a DOCTOR'S APPOINTMENT in FIVE AND A HALF HOURS for my INJURED BACK (extremely thirty-one years old of me!!!) God, why am I here. What am I SAYING.
If this blog wasn't here anymore, it would be easier for me to redefine my life in a positive way. Or at least it feels that way. Something like that.
The really funny thing is that I don't even want to hear from anyone here on this subject at all, so I don't know why I'm writing this really. That's kind of the thing with this place was I was always trying to scream into the void and some random person would scream back, or someone from my real life would read it and get extremely offended about something so posting was basically always a bust. There is genuinely like one person on tumblr I like, maybe two lol. (Not counting anyone who's still here from IRL, but I don't know if anyone is!)
Maybe there's some powerful path of self-forgiveness I need to go on to allow this place to still exist. I know I shouldn't actually beat myself up. It's not exactly useful. I haven't self-harmed in two years this month and I don't plan to ever do that again. I don't even know the last time I felt suicidal, but it's probably been nearly as long. And that's saying a lot because this year has been extremely shitty in a lot of ways, but I'm growing up and becoming a big girl who can Cope a little bit and that's what I want to keep doing is keep growing. I guess realistically my life will be pretty long and these fourteen or whatever years don't have to dictate the whole thing. I'm allowed to be kind to myself and I'm allowed to be happy. Maybe my stupid life is allowed to exist the way it exists, blog and all.
