The Way Home

She/her. i am a domestic violence and sexual assault survivor. I'm demisexual, poly, sumbissive, and healthen. I have 3 kids and the youngest is autistic. and i am very very tired.

[theconcealedweapon]

The assholes openly admit it. The whole point of college is to enforce the hierarchy. When those who were supposed to be low on the hierarchy started going to college, the assholes get angry and want to make them suffer for challenging the hierarchy.

[lleiandra]

The problem with growing up around people who wanted no part of your pain is that pain and lonely become synonymous.

And now I don't even know how to share it.

I dont know how to comfort it

All I know is how to endure it and I'm so fucking tired of endurance.

When everything you feel has made you a burden to others how do you even exist???

[lleiandra]

Repeat after me- I deserve to have relationships that don't hurt me.

[lleiandra]

Sometimes it's a love hate relationship with the survivor story romance novels.

I love to read about people who've gone through things like I have getting support and healing for their recovery.

And I hate that even years of safety hasn't been enough to allow me to ask for what I need beyond holding me when I cry and telling him that I'm struggling.

I used to not be able to do that too so it's not like I've grown

Just sometimes I feel like- how sick do I need to be to deserve help???

[lleiandra]

Every now and then I have an "I never would" moment where I realize someone who could have helped me abandoned me and walked away like it was nothing.

I never would have, I would have stayed in hell for my siblings to help them break free and not be alone ...

....and I'm so fucking sad that I'll never have that. It just feels like I was cheated out of what should have belonged to me

[lleiandra]

Ya know

Sometimes I need to scream out that it's not fair that people keep asking me to take care of the sibling that allowed me to be assaulted under his care before I was even school age.

Then I remember. They dont know.

Which leads to a whole different level of it's Not fair because I grew up in a time and place when that's just what happened and if I'd have said anything then I would have just been blamed for destroying my family and if I said anything now they'd just gaslight me and accuse me of being a liar.

And I'm just so pissed about it sometimes

[liberalsarecool]

Every small government anti-tyranny phony in the Republican Party has been exposed.

Abolish ICE. Trump sending Proud Boys and Oath Keeper criminals to Blue Cities to incite and provoke violence with legal citizens is abhorrent.

[theconcealedweapon]

[lleiandra]

Add to the reasons I like mafia romances because in the Valentino world men dont let people disrespect their girl.

I've had tons of men offer me protection at one point or another but it seems fantastical to believe that someone would actually do it and that is what's supposed to be normal.

My partner would. I have faith that he would because he always does what he says.

But you know who wouldn't protect me? My dad. You know who wouldn't physically protect me let alone emotionally protect me was my dad. My mom.

So I feel like I have a point.

This is badly written and not exactly what I mean. I wanted to note it though so I can make sure I remembered to think about it.

[liberalsarecool]

Republicans are dying on a hill for a narcissist who would do nothing for them.

This rampant misjudgement of character is exposing the terminal level of paternal submission in conservative politics.

The flunkies are trying to pass off extreme loyalty to criminal rapists as admirable.

[lleiandra]

And sometimes anxiety feel like your.bones have been breaded and deep fried .. making you want to crawl out of your skin but also your bones sometimes

[lleiandra]

Today is breaking me. It's a thing that has been happening to me lately. The weight of the world just being too heavy to shoulder even with help.

And I shatter, fight with every fiber if my dissociated brain to keep from crying, from wailing, from making any of this inside noise outside.

The country itself is tearing me apart with all the funding for mental health dwindling down to a trickle and working of switching over to a for profit model.

And beyond my job, which is important, it's the hundreds of people we are just abandoning on the street to die. Or worse.

It's everything I have to keep trying to help anyone.

But then my life and the growing pains of new support needs and while systems are in place to help, it takes time.

And that time is chewing through us. Myself and my partner, clinging to making this life better for my son and the pain of watching him struggle until we get to the next level of needs.

And trauma feeling the tension ratcheting up as our ability to accommodate battle with our limitations. Our budget. Our everything.

So I'll break today, feel the shatter, scoop myself into a pile and start again tommorow.

Right now is a bad time for anything.

[lleiandra]

There's nothing like having a partner who absolutely won't make fun of you when you need to bring a stuffed red panda named Theo Valentino with you for thanksgiving.

Besides he never comments on my round chair I've basically turned into a nest.

[when-november-ends]

"i asked ChatGPT", "i asked Grok", well i asked Odin and he raised an eyebrow at me and told me to figure it out myself

[lleiandra]

I'm so overwhelmed right now that it feels like dying. I've got so much going on and right now it just never seems to stop.

There's always just one more thing when I've finally got a grip on myself.

Unmasking means I haven't pushed myself past my limits for a long time, it's just sometimes there's not a choice.

My work isnt a job, it isn't even really a career, it's a CALLING, working with the unhoused, abused, and invisible population I do, I can't just not do it.

So I'm doing my best as the world burns around me and people decide that another person's humanity is not worth as much as destroying personal autonomy with anything that doesn't fit in the very straight white church lady box. They don't want their children to know there's another way to live.

They don't want them to seethe "abnormality" being perfectly happy the way they are, even with all the public conflicts with their identity.

I don't know if you can really understand it if you haven't had a personal experience with the subject. The things about myself that I had to amputate to fit in never actually went away and I have no interest in cutting myself off from myself again. I'd rather die who I am than live a stranger.

And at home, I'm a mom of two autistic children and trying to get them set on a path that allows them to be authentic and self determining and it's hard sometimes.

Not because of the kids- because of the systems. The kids are worth every second of it so it's not really optional

So I'm tired and I want to curl up in a ball and lose my shit.

But my shit cannot be lost now so I'm just drowning in it. Breathe in... Breathe out

... And have faith that my best is good enough.

I wish there was help for this but the world doesn't help people like me, not really.

[lleiandra]

So in the front of my system for a large chunk of my life was named a slur for travelers. That me did not have the knowledge that this me does and emotional attachments aside me not knowing better is still my responsibility

I've been thinking about renaming her. Which, begs the question of why because at some point my system got significantly more covert than it was when I was younger. I thought they were gone.

But now I think maybe they aren't. Now I think they were hiding from me because he was trying to kill me with them.

It sounds so dramatic until I remember all the times he drove me so close to the edge where I was switching through whole cycles in the space of a minute again and again.

Then drop me off somewhere I'd have to walk home. (I self injured so much that day)

Until he made me read the fountainhead and I'd never been more suicidal in my life. He was so upset, not that i was suicidal but because I missed the point of the book.

Until I was begging him to touch me one more time because he was going to leave me for someone who was engaged to someone else (he didn't)

Until I remember him forcing me to get so high that I was begging God or anyone to let me come back down.

Until my life was a series of strobe light memories I couldn't hold onto.

He threw me off balance so many times. He destabilized my mental health so many times.

At any rate, welcoming back my favorite me now called Alina. Sorry bestie I have no idea how we got here.

[lleiandra]

Being undiagnosed autistic is spending your whole life from the time you got your own personality being taught that it is wrong and weird and you will never deserve love even if you learn how to fake normal.

Being undiagnosed autistic is being taught that every instinct you have is incorrect and you can't trust your own judgement.

Being undiagnosed autistic is falling in line and fitting in and trusting others perceptions of reality more than yours but still getting shamed for getting into an abusive relationship because "you're smarter than that".

It's being taught that what you want from love is unrealistic and you'll be alone forever if you don't compromise, only to find out years later that it can be exactly that and it really isn't love if it isn't that.

Being undiagnosed autistic means being on the outside of your own family because you cannot manage the trauma and loss on your own and it just pulls you farther away from them every day.

Being undiagnosed autistic is realizing that 9/10 being diagnosed young meant the same kind of gaslighting as above only they call it therapy.

That the game was rigged.

You were never going to have a safe and healthy childhood because people never knew what to do with you.

That even if you won it would come at a price that only meant I lost in another direction.

That nothing was ever going to be fair and you'd have to fight for every accommodation you needed then outperform your team because you have to prove the accommodations were worth it.

It's being so fucking tired.