i don’t know why i thought better of you. or why i thought you might see me the way you see people on screen, with grace and understanding; but you see a past version of me – one that you barely knew to begin with. i wasn't looking to jump, i was just trying to reach out and connect. you don’t owe me anything, but i wish you would’ve said more. it’s selfish, i know.
fwiw, i still think you’re pretty cool. i’m just mad i let myself hope.
time heals, and then it repeats
you will never be complete
i wrote this back in 2023 when i got my laptop and never posted it. i read it again, and i thought it was still worth posting now. a lot of it still resonates with me. hope you're doing well, whoever you are.
i haven’t really been active on social media in years, which is funny because i would legitimately breathe tumblr on a daily basis. do you know how many side blogs i ran?? just for making gifs and geeking out about a ship? and how i would constantly watch shows and go "i need to gif that!!” 50 times while watching a new episode of something?? even just going through some old text posts on here is strange. i shared like, all my thoughts on here, and it’s kind of hard to believe that used to be me.
but i digress. life happens, the depression comes and goes, and you eventually realize and start learning to accept and work through all your trauma at almost 30 years old. amiright?? where my children of immigrant parents at? shout out to the eldest daughters!! i see you.
for real though, working through that has been the biggest challenge of the last whatever-amount of years. there isn’t anything new that I can say that everyone hasn’t already said about the 2020s. it’s been shitty, it’s been hard– and it’s also been, in many ways, necessary and gratifying… which can get so confusing to process because they are such opposing feelings, but i guess that’s the point?
in short, life hard. generational trauma is real as fuck and things aren’t always black and white. you’re allowed to acknowledge the struggles and trauma your parents went through, and you’re also allowed to acknowledge the struggles and trauma that you went through as a result of their upbringing. how much it hurt, and can still hurt. and sometimes all you can do is sit with yourself, with the feelings, and give yourself grace while you learn and unlearn. and blog about it, i guess, cause the fuck else am i supposed to do with all the shit inside my brain that i can only get out in writing? i used to BLOG, for god's sake lol.
i didn't really know these things were happening as they happened. like a lot of people, i’ve experienced an awakening of sorts in the last few years. i felt so disillusioned that it felt like the entire floor had been pulled from under me. i didn’t know the feelings i harboured all my life weren’t “normal” - so there’s this enormous backlog of unprocessed feelings that i’ve been trying to work at. like so much of my relatives, i only knew how to suffer and suppress. and now that i see it all, i feel it all, too. everything i've suppressed. i hit a point where any time i saw healthy mother/daughter relationships in art and media, it made me feel sad and hurt. and if i saw a broken relationship, it made me feel angry and hurt.
i feel for the younger version of me, i feel for my inner child - i didn't know how to protect her. she was obedient to a fault and listened to her parents without questioning anything. she learned to keep all her feelings to herself even as she got bullied, and she thought that was what you were supposed to do. she didn’t learn to open up to the few friends she had, so she often felt like she was on the outside, and i've stayed there all these years.
i am always feeling everything all the time now and i know it's all part of the healing, but god is it fucking hard to work through. but god it's made me grow in ways i never knew i was capable of, too.
i finally got a job that i don't hate that i got all on my own. it wasn't through connections or favours, it was based on my merit. and it felt so good. i was miserable at my old job, and i decided to send in one application somewhere just to test the waters, and it worked out. i got a call the next day, i had another interview, and i got on so well with the person who would be my manager. it was like the universe was rewarding me for the work i'd done. then while driving home on my last day, i got rear-ended and my car was totalled. LOL. seriously though, i know it sounds bad, but i was still grateful. i was safe, and that was a day that my mom didn't go to work (we worked at the same place at the time) and if she had, she would've sat in the back - so the universe was still looking out.
despite the new routine and the job reset, i still felt so empty. there was a deep ache that i couldn't understand about myself. and there were honestly just a lot of things going on in my family that just constantly had me feeling hopeless and helpless. so last year, on a crisp october weekend, we stayed at a cottage and i went on my first psilocybin trip. i was very intentional about this trip and i had thought about it for a couple of months. 6am, no breakfast, just one gram of mushrooms.
it wasn't until that trip that i understood what self-acceptance really meant, what self-love meant. i saw a lot of different things. i saw familiar and unfamiliar faces, but one visual that stayed with me were hands coming towards me from all directions. it was so creepy at first, but then the hands sort of cradled my face, comforting me, as if they were reassuring me that everything i am and everything i am not - it's okay. it's okay, it's okay, it's okay. i felt it in my bones: everything mattered and nothing mattered.
i cried so much on that trip because i felt this unadulterated joy and relief about myself. i felt this understanding that never reached me before. there was unconditional love all around me– it was tangible and it was overwhelming, and at that point in the trip i spent all my energy just taking it all in. i remember telling my brother, "it's like they've been waiting for me to get here” to which he replied, "they have been" – which sent me bawling. i will admit the come-up was scary and uncomfortable, but i swear to you, once i got there, it felt like what i imagine heaven feels like. it felt like peace. it felt like home. i belonged, and nothing felt out of place. it was a brain reset.
i won't lie and say i never fall into depressive bouts anymore. i still do. it is very much a part of me, and i’ve spent so much of my life rejecting and shaming myself for it. i’ve learned to forgive myself, and how to give myself grace. suddenly it became easier to look at and acknowledge pain, while also letting it go without it occupying too much space in my mind. there’s only so much i have control over. it's about being aware, but it's also about accepting the things you're aware of. once those two work in conjunction, you're able to start reconfiguring yourself.
anyways. if you made it this far into whatever this post is, then shit, thank you. i've pushed people away and grew apart from everyone. i really don't blame anyone for giving up on me. my anxiety was in the driver's seat for so long and i acted out of fear that people didn’t say what they really meant; that people would just wake up one day and change up on me. i don’t know, dudes. it's just nice to come back to tumblr and write into the void, even if no one is really here anymore. i just wish i could've trusted the people around me more, wish i gave people the chance to be there for me. but instead, i thought i was being selfless whenever i disappeared and suffered in silence; thought being resilient was the be-all, end-all. it's not. it never was.
pushing through adversity on your own is important, but you're not meant to go through all of it alone. you just can't… because you will break. i never thought i would, but i did. and i’m still putting myself back together.
--
2025 mariel here, and i'm still putting myself together btw. still sad a lot, if i'm being totally honest. but i'm still here.
you will never be complete– and that's a good thing.
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