[crampedhead]

waaaooo i am not happy here

is this going to end like last time?

i don't want it to, i'm scared

but i'm not happy here

[crampedhead]

i hate to say it but there's times i really miss you, or miss things about you -

it's not that you knew what to say to make me feel better, but knowing you'd commiserate/say sorry something happened, and tell me you wished you could give me a hug

sometimes i don't need a solution, i just want comfort, i just want to know i'm still holdable if nothing else

[crampedhead]

dan asked about little things today, little things that i’d sort of resigned myself to because that’s what i was supposed to do, or because it was a sacrifice i was willing to make and avoid establishing agency. he asked about big things too - i was a lil high and nervous he’d know but vermont was the first thing that came out of my mouth. vermont was a huge sacrifice and i think i always knew i couldn’t do it. anyway i couldn’t come up with too many examples but now i’ve been thinking about it all day as i go about doing stuff so i’m going to list some things here so i feel less crazy.

feeling like my say was never as important re: decorating. always having to find some random ass used couch she ended up hating. constant reorganizing without telling me where my stuff ended up. i wasn’t allowed to do laundry. i wasn’t allowed to fold or put my own clothes away in my own drawers. i felt like i wasn’t allowed to talk about exercising, or working on my body and how good it made me felt. i felt like i wasn’t allowed to want better or different for myself because it might make her feel bad. i felt like we always had to be in the same room together. there’s more but i’m tired and i need to finish doing shit. i know i felt stifled. i know i felt smothered. i know i felt held back. all of that is becoming so much more apparent to me now.

[crampedhead]

thots for therapy:

- well it’s over. i feel guilty, but free. i’m still trying to decide if this was the right choice. everything is going to change. being my own person. being a gay man. i haven’t been talking about it - out of guilt or avoidance? i told steph the reader’s digest version of everything and she said i made the right choice. that my twenties are the time to figure these things out. was this relationship ever healthy? have i always been sarah’s emotional lean? was i ever happy or just at base level? her own therapist called her codependent. echo and narcissus. sarah’s unhealthy coping mechanisms - self harm! “you aren’t miserable” manipulation. being home feels bad and i hate that.

- i missed my mom for the first time in…ever? today. i was listening to green day in the car on the way home. i miss the person she was when she was fun. she could have been such a cool person - she WAS such a cool person. i genuinely cannot remember if i’ve ever missed mom. it was a very weird feeling that snuck up on me, curled up inside me for a moment, then rolled away. maybe she was saying hi? i know She’s There but i always view it as a shameful thing, like she’s judging me. maybe she’s in a place where she’s happy and can see things away from the lens of her pain and addiction.

[crampedhead]

ah here we go again! tasked with leaving or staying. she wants out. why am i not ready to? the thought of leaving makes me so sad. maybe never seeing any of my coworkers or friends again. moving out of this sick apartment. having to start over somewhere. i think i’ll love vermont! but so soon? i don’t want to live in massachusetts forever. but i just feel like i should be here. a bit longer? i don’t know why.

are we ready physically? financially? will we ever be ready? no surgery as an excuse this time. i didn’t think about having this conversation so soon. why do i always freeze on big decisions? here we go again!

[crampedhead]

i read a lot about inner child work today. a few months ago dan said he wanted to do something like that when we get to see each other in person again. who knows when that will be! i really want to try it, as someone who used to have characters floating around in their skull as a coping mechanism i think it will be easy to connect to that part of myself. obviously large parts of my issues stem from my childhood and relieving that pain will hopefully make my life make more sense. being productive in therapy is so hard through zoom.

i keep having this reoccurring...flashback? it’s not traumatic, more euphoric or peaceful than anything. i’m alone at the desk in our shared room, probably 8 or 9 at eldest. i’m working on a drawing for hours, the tv shows in the background melting into each other, samurai jack rolls into adult swim, the night dissolves into cartoons, pencil shavings, marker smudges on my fingers. the house is quieter, i don’t think mom or al are home. either way there’s no fighting. it’s summer or the weekend and i can stay up forever with no material worries. i can’t remember too many specifics, but i remember the feeling.

eventually mom and dad will start again and i’ll have to go back to school. the worst years of my life are still ahead. but for this one night, i felt a peace like no other. i want my exiled and real self to know that peace again, to know that that peace exists and i deserve it! i’m allowed to feel good, do what i want, and that’s all i want!

[cowpokeprose]

You hate yourself so loudly. You hate yourself at the top of your lungs. Your loathing for yourself permeates your speech. “Sorry I’m just rambling.” “Don’t worry about it.” “Just ignore me.” “Sorry if I’m annoying you.” “Sorry I don’t make sense.” “Sorry about that.” Sorry, sorry, sorry. You act as if you have to beat everyone else to the punch. As if the punching bag is you. If you hate yourself first, if you hate yourself loudest, then nobody will hurt you. You clapped your hands over your ears and shut your eyes and balled yourself up so that you’d never have to experience people’s loathing for you. And it meant you never heard their love. You drowned it out. You screamed your hatred over it. And you never got to hear it. 

[crampedhead]

i don’t know how to say i don’t think i’m ready for this. i would have been under other circumstances. and i still want it, but i don’t know how to tell you without breaking your heart. every time i’ve tried to bring it up you get so sad. i just don’t think it’ll be stable. i’m scared of hurting myself in recovering from surgery. i’m scared of ending up jobless and homeless. i’m scared of not really being able to say goodbye to my friends. i’m scared that you’re not considering how taxing this could be on us - on me - in exchange for living somewhere a little bit prettier.

vermont can wait. can our safety? our security? my mental and physical health?

[damesho-deactivated20210114]

part of becoming confident with yourself is just… posting it anyway. writing it anyway. even if you feel like it won’t be recognized, the process is just as important as the results. if you like what you do and who you are that validation will come naturally. shit won’t feel forced either.

[crampedhead]

5/8 - another thing

i’ve been thinking a bit about how isolated i’ve been basically my whole life. sarah and i have uncanny backgrounds, and even though she’s an only child, i feel like sometimes she was less isolated than i was? her parents split way before mine did, at the very edge of her memories, so she wasn’t there for all of the fighting. i think i’ve pushed down how lonely and terrifying it was being utterly disconnected from my parents because they chose to have horrifying arguments about their failed, dysfunctional relationship in devastating earshot of the children they were supposed to be raising. not only did i not have a healthy, adult relationship as a model, but my basic human needs were neglected! i barely left my room, i barely ate, and i never got to see my friends when i wasn’t at school. it only got so much worse when my parents did split up, because of the monster that my mom is! everything she did was an attempt to isolate me further from the outside world and bring me closer to her. i wasn’t allowed to leave the house! sarah had friends she could escape to - if i even thought about leaving the house, my mother accused me of trying to have sex or do drugs or run away - all things i never did! i wasn’t allowed to have internet friends either, and when i did have them and didn’t tell her, she tried to kill me! 

i just can’t stop wondering who i would be if i knew how to be a human being that didn’t have to hide all the time. when the turpin “house of horrors” case broke over two years ago, i was glued to every update, trying to figure out what could have happened to make those kids - all fourteen of them - end up being so disconnected from the entire world. one of the neighbors who tried to talk to some of them outside one time said, “it’s as if their only defense was to become invisible.” and that’s stuck with me ever since. 

how do i become visible again? how do i let myself be seen? how do i reconnect? how do i stop being scared of seeming weird or unrelatable? how do i just be myself?

[crampedhead]

5/8

here i am again, beating myself up for not creating, not doing anything. i know things are hard right now - but what was my excuse before? there was none. i can’t help but think about where i was 10 years ago - going back through my old work and remembering how i always had some inspiration, some drive to create. i was incessantly doodling, drawing, and wrote poems almost on the daily. why can’t i do that now? where has my head been? 

maybe the issue at hand isn’t that i’m not as productive as i used to be - though that’s true, i think i’m expecting too much of myself. i really can’t go from not writing anything for weeks or months to pulling something polished out of my ass every day. (that’s not to say that anything i was writing ten years ago was polished, but i digress.) “i set the bar real high, then come up just shy, and pound my desk with the utmost frustration.” always and forever have i set these impossible standards for myself, and then get pissed when i can’t meet them, so of course i wouldn’t even try! what’s the point in even writing anything if i can’t shit out a full fucking poem every day!

i don’t know at what point, but somewhere along the way i developed a real issue with executive dysfunction. is it the trauma? is it something undiagnosed? is it the result of oft shitty circumstances and a tendency toward instant gratification? probably all of the above. there’s a post i’ve seen on tumblr somewhere - maybe it’s in my drafts? if not i’m going to put it there the next time i see it. it says something along the lines of, “you’re not bad at the thing, you’re just a bad project manager.” and that’s where i am, i think? i *know* there are things i want to do, projects i want to complete, but where do i start? what are the steps? thinking of that in and of itself is exhausting. but so was top surgery! so was finding a new job! how is this any different?

i need to show dan that donald duck comic.

[crampedhead]

5/1

deviantart is dead. they’re making a lot of changes to the site that aren’t conducive to the already threadbare lit community so a lot of veterans are jumping ship. i guess i jumped ship a few years ago. in archiving the last of my poems today i realized how much my posts dwindled toward the end. i didn’t post anything at all in 2017. what was i doing in 2017? all this comes on the heels of two writing groups: a discord chat last year full of lit people clinging to the sinking platform, and the facebook Group Where We Pretend It’s Writing Deviantart 2010-2015. i don’t feel like i belong in either. it’s so weird how much has changed in ten years - i was so naïve at 15 to think dA would still be at the center of my life for well, the rest of my life. we’re all destined to drift off, to get on with our lives. that’s just how shit goes.

but all these folks have kept ties to writing - some publishing their work. and me? i keep beating myself for “not writing.” but as i go through my notes, i see so many things - mostly unfinished, but still writing nonetheless. it’s not the endless stream of thought i channeled for years - and i think i wanna get back to that - but it’s still there. i need to get back to a healthy relationship with writing. one where i’m not expecting everything i write to be publishable right off the bat, because most everything i used to upload to dA definitely needed to be edited. (14 year old me thought i was too good for that! ha!) but also i need to let go and not edit something to death because i’m scared of it seeing daylight. my writing is..........good? and i want to share it? and speak with the voice i’ve been so afraid of hearing?

i really just need to be okay with opening my mouth again.

[crampedhead]

as much as i beat myself up for dropping out of school, i would be just as stressed and broke as i am now, if not more - and i don’t think my credit score would be much different, which is what i’m beating myself up about today. ~*~*~if only i was more responsible about my debt~*~*~ is tantamount to the poor millennial experience and of course it could be worse - i’m about to make it worse - but it hurts nonetheless! my dad always said “money comes and money goes.” but does it? will i have the same luxuries he did? will i ever get to financial stability? or will i be forever drowning in what i owe others, endlessly adding on to a debt that only swells and never shrinks? and should i pursue something more responsible to chip away at that, or follow what my heart wants? why is it that this is what being a human being has amounted to?

will things change for my generation or only get worse?

as much as i’ve recovered from being suicidal, it would have been so much easier to have died before i owed anyone any money.

[tufffgenius-deactivated20190503]

[maggierogers]

ive been SAYING this but growing up gay is a traumatic experience in and of itself

[maggierogers]

like not that anyone asked BUT to expand on this but despite the obvious interactions with homophobia that every gay person is bound to encounter its just like…your family/even some close friends never ~truly~ know who you are or what you’re interested in because the Gay Experience is about protecting your identity/interests before everything else so by the time you grow up even your parents - no matter how accepting they think they are - have absolutely no inkling about who you really are as a person and thats just a super lonely and exhausting way to exist within a family or a social circle broe! 

[crampedhead]

after

- being neglected by both parents from a young age

- being gaslit and punished when i tried to point out how destructive my parents constant fighting was

-being removed from advanced classes due to extreme anxiety when i couldn’t figure something out/got something wrong and thus being labelled “too emotional” - something i’d continue to hear for the rest of my fucking life

-being gaslit again when i got sick (pots) and then any time i had an opinion about something, the answer was “did you take your medicine?” because why else would i be acting like that?

-being forced to be my mother’s physical and emotional caretaker from age 12 onward - which entailed concealing my own feelings so i could tend to hers

-being bullied from middle school on, having nothing be done about it, and then being bullied harder when i tried to retaliate

-developing a quickly worsening anxiety disorder which, again, was treated with “did you take your medicine?” (not even psychiatric medicine either. fucking salt pills.) as well as mom taking me to the doctors when she’d “get fed up” with me and then talk for me the entire time

-the entire experience of having a violent, narcissistic, borderline, drug addict for a mother

-coming out as bisexual to my mother, who quickly shut down my queerness, only to try to kill me when she found out i was truly involved with a girl (over the internet, not even in real life)

-falling in love with/becoming attached to people who used me for my emotional vulnerability, willingness to comply, and lack of understanding of sexual boundaries

-being sexually assaulted, then stalked and harassed by my assailant, as well as the experience of not being able to trust my friends since he’d befriended them

-having my ex almost immediately re-befriend my rapist after we broke up, presumably so they could both shit talk me

-holding several jobs under near constant surveillance from higher ups, having a mean and manipulative boss, and experiencing workplace discrimination based on my gender identity

and probably much more i’m forgetting...

why would i want to feel feelings? why would i want to continue to be in pain? being numb to everything seems so relieving. shutting the whole thing down instead of fixing what might be broken.

but there are so many good feelings. and i guess there’s ways to control the bad ones. i’ve already decided i wanted to stay alive, but putting in the work needed to make sure it’s better than it’s been so far has to be the next step.

[heavyweightheart]

skills for coping with harsh negative judgments about the self, even something like the practice of asking “who profits off of this emotion?”, are not meant to make the experience just go away. they’re meant to interrupt our automatic thought processes, to put some space between us and our programming. they make the cracks which let a little light in.

it took many years of messaging to fill us with shame about ourselves and our bodies, and to indoctrinate us to blame ourselves for failing to meet oppressive standards which we were never given the choice to assent to or reject. it will also take years, and a different kind of messaging, to undo that damage. 

the new kind of messaging–like critical-theoretical questions and honest affirmations–can become habitual with time and practice. even then they might not always feel true, tho you know intellectually that they are. it’s okay and in fact very productive to say “i know one thing, but i’m feeling another”. that’s all we can do. it’s this process thru which our sense of self and embodiment moves toward freedom