Lizzy Benitez

just a girl who wants to write and be known as a writer.

[britneyatseven]

03. "Toxic people attach themselves like cinder blocks tied to your ankles, and then invite you for a swim in their poisoned waters." –John Mark Green

Sometimes I think we stay with toxic people because we had no choice. Maybe because we're stuck. Or maybe because we refuse to acknowledge their toxicity for the reason that we think we could handle it, or worse, we got used to it. In the end, we contribute to their behavior. To the worsening of it. Because the more we stay, the more we fuel their fire.

Then I wonder, does that make us toxic, too?

–L

(05/02/23; 1:48am)

[fixedyourmeme]

[britneyatseven]

02. "I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in." –Virginia Woolf

***

I've always thought about how ironic it is that it's exhausting to be locked in. You don't have to do anything. You're just there, not going anywhere else, not exerting any energy.

But I've been locked in for three years now. I don't know how to get out or if I should. I'm just there, in my own home, doing things that I love—or trying to do things that used to love. It's funny how you can feel stuck and suffocated surrounded by the four walls of what can be considered the safest place on earth for you. I feel so stuck, and the feeling of suffocation made my mind work like a machine that won't ever stop.

Then the day came that I finally had a reason to go out. Internship. And it made me realize how being in public made the machinery inside my head go worse. That even with so many people, who you believed can save you from being sucked up in your thought spirals, can no longer comfort you. Because they're also humans. They're not heroes who you can always count on. They also have their own troubles. And I certainly don't want to burden anyone with anything.

I believe everything will be alright for me. I believe that I will get through this, and I'll learn how to cope even more effectively. I just don't know how at the moment.

–L

(04/30/23)

[redporkpadthai]

The reason none of my wips get finished

[britneyatseven]

01. "Illness is a story told in the past tense." --John Green (Turtles All The Way Down)

***

I just finished reading Turtles All The Way Down last March and I honestly don't know what to feel when I closed the book after reading the epilogue. The main character both comforted and triggered me big time. She comforted me in ways I never knew I could be comforted. Maybe seeing my experiences through someone else's made me feel less alone, added by the fact that the author himself is suffering from the condition.

"Illness is a story told in the past tense."

I wanted to believe this quote from the story, quoting the main character's thoughts, before it, "I wanted to tell her that I was getting better, because that was supposed to be the narrative of illness: It was a hurdle you jumped over, or a battle you won." I wanted to believe that I can get better, that this battle can be won.

How, though? Every single day, I feel my mind pushing me down the spiral, and it's getting worse.

I often have a hard time going up the stairs we have at home. I often have a hard time going up almost any stairs in general, even when I'm outside. I try to keep them down as much as possible in hopes to hide them, but sometimes I just can’t.

A simple rest of my foot on a step feels so wrong, like placing it on a “wrong” part of the step could cause my accident, like my feet would slip through the gaps and break my legs, or simply just “wrong.” I always have to “place” my foot multiple times or even “march” my feet multiple times on a step before that, like I was shaking off the “bad luck” or the “thing” that would make me take the wrong step, before placing my foot on the next step.

It would always make me feel so dumb and weird and I often have to shake my head repeatedly even after I “comfortably” went up to the top step of the stairs. Like if I shook the thoughts off my head, I would easily forget I “need” to do them.

I thought trying to ignore these thoughts while going up these stairs can help me overcome this. I tried ignoring the thought that I have to place my foot on a certain part of the step until I passed through it, but I always ended up going back all the way down the stairs just to retrace them.

I guess trying to learn exposure and response prevention therapy without the guidance of a professional was a mistake. Huh. Surprising.

But that’s only one of my experiences. For me, everything around me feels so wrong, and everything bothers me. My comfort zone— reading—can’t even make me feel comfortable and at ease anymore, because words bother me as well, and that is more complicated than the stairs.

I always check the syllables if they are even numbers in every sentence and paragraph, and when I try to ignore the odd numbers, I always go back to the start of the sentence or the paragraph. (For example, words that felt "right": apple, orange, watermelon. Words that felt "wrong": grapes, strawberry, pineapple.) This makes reading so hard for me.

For someone who lives in her head most of the time, it’s funny how often it contradicts me. This sounds like a ridiculous thing to say, but I feel like my mind has a mind of its own. I can’t win against them, and believe me, you don’t know how hard I've been trying to.

I don’t know how to explain this more accurately because this condition, as I experience it, varies depending on the obsessions and the compulsions, but the feelings are all the same. Recurring obsessive and intrusive thoughts, compulsions to ease the extreme anxiety that was brought by those thoughts, and then repeat.

It is so damn exhausting.

***

Originally written: 11/13/22

Revised: 04/13/23

--L