Smoke-Filled Dreams

List of warnings: C-PTSD, Depression, Anxiety, Somatization, Denial worshipping, escapism, Maladaptive daydream, CSA, COCSA, SA, All As, Self-hate, Compulsive Lying, Suicidal Thoughts, Self-harm... Did I miss any? 

[roboriders]

[roboriders]

FUCKKKK I'm not allowed to eat ANYTHING

[roboriders]

YYYEEEAAAAHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[sadcena]

Making gifs is hard

[sadcena]

All this effort ...for this

[pointnclick]

it's looped so perfectly i feel like im watching them in the microwave

[starlightandtears]

Wow wtf HIV/AIDS was discovered by Flossie Wong-Staal, an Chinese-American woman, and she’s the reason the HIV test even exists. AND THEN she invented the molecular knife that lead to treatments for HIV/AIDS. And she’s STILL ALIVE. We don’t hear about the contributions of Women of Color enough, my word. Madness.

[vodcar]

Flossie Wong-Staal - Wikipedia

Flossie Wong-Staal - Wikipedia

https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flossie_Wong-Staal

[paprikanoir-deactivated20190515]

Thank you, Flossie. 💜💜💜

[lifeattomsdiner]

First you procrastinate on the task because it is not a big enough deal to get done urgently. Then you procrastinate on the task because it has become such a big deal that doing it is overwhelming. You would think that this implies a middle point where it is just big enough of a deal to get done easily, however the inherent perversity of the universe's causal geometry prevents this

[smokefilleddreams]

30th of August 8.11pm

Content warning: r*pe, abuse, flashbacks, dissociating, loop thoughts, cptsd, suicidal thoughts

Bad flashback about my ex looping with other memories.

I was suffocating.

I still can’t breathe well.

Slipping between suffocation and anger and pain.

It hurts.

It all blurred together until I was just saying the same things over and over.

“I can’t” “Stop please stop” “Stop touching me don’t touch me don’t touch me please I can’t I can’t I can’t I cant I cant I can’t I can’t I can’t I can’t I can’t I can’t I can’t no no please sto stop stop stop stop stop stop stop stop don’t touch me please please don’ttouch me anymore”

More of the memory.

I don’t remember how it stopped. I only remember begging and pleading. I don’t remember it stopping. I remember convulsing and shaking and crying.

It’s like the terror never stopped. Like it never ended and I’m still there.

I know I’m not. I know I’m at home and safe and that my ex doesn’t know where I am and that she can’t touch me.

I’m scared that having such visible flashbacks will damage the relationships around me. Not because of the flashback but because I’m not strong. Because it means I can’t keep promises. It means everyone makes their own conclusions about why it’s happening and take it on themselves or feel bad for not helping when I don’t even know what helps. My best friend knows. She’s been around for forever. She’s seen it over and over and I know that she doesn’t blame herself for it and that it doesn’t strain our friendship.

I don’t trust that dynamic to come up with my romantic partners. My partners are highly empathetic and have strong tendencies to get mad at themselves.

I’m scared that they both will be upset now.

I can hope that my best friend talks at least one of them out of a hate spiral.

I hate that I have to hope that but it’s better than hating myself for having a flashback because then I’ll just hide it. I’ll just never share.

I’ll curl up inside myself until I break and killmyself.

I dont wantthat.

Today I was crushed by the weight of what has been done to me.

Crushed and suffocated.

I couldn’t breathe as different hands gripped my throat, as a knife pressed into my flesh and my heart beat out of my chest.

Too many hands.

I can list each abuser by name except one and each memory is a nightmare I refuse to relive.

It doesn’t stop the flashbacks.

They come back again and again.

But this is the strongest it’s been in a while.

I feel sick.

I ate a lot of food. Kind of couldn’t stop since I felt obligated to eat it since I had asked for the food but also because I hadn’t eaten a lot this week.

It’s hard to focus on food and to self care when all the memories are pressing at the door to my conscious mind whispering to me, taunting me.

It hasn’t been this bad in a while but I’ve been recovering.

The center stage memory was one I only looked at properly three weeks ago.

The others were an amalgamation of memories I had gone over with therapists and ones I haven’t even vaguely accepted yet.

I felt broken and shattered and dead, dying. I couldn’t take it. I wanted to die to make it stop.

I now feel bruised.

Not broken but aching and sore like I’ve done a massive workout, my eyes stinging, head aching as if I tried to cram for an exam.

It hurts but I don’t feel like death is the only way out.

It still hurts to breathe. I can’t tell if it’s the asthma or the feel of so many hands around my throat.

What really ticks me off is that I didn’t /do/ anything. There was no trigger.

It just built for three weeks because I was busy doing so many things.

Busy helping others and doing uni and housework and shopping and community things and fun things. I just went to take a nap because I was tired.

I woke up a little stressed to get the door to let my fiancée in and I was aware I was shutting down so after we chatted on the bed I tried napping…

It didn’t work.

I got halfway into a dream state and stopped breathing. I couldn’t draw air in.

I recognised I needed to overload my sensory processing centres to get through the shut down but music wasn’t enough so I went to shower before the urge to throw myself off the balcony got too strong.

And I broke.

It’s been so long but it wasn’t like the usual dissociation.

I was home in my shower and I was in a thousand pieces in hundreds of memories where I was hurt.

And I had the awareness I could turn it off.

I could but I knew I would hurt myself or someone else if I did so I stayed in the shower and broke.

I needed to break.

So I did until I was ushered out of the shower and onto the couch with a warm blanket and food and tea.

I rambled a little about what happened since I couldn’t keep it all inside. I wanted and needed to explain because I was in no state to keep up with the plans made.

I’m so tired.

I want to keep crying but I’m a little too dehydrated.

I don’t know what I need but I guess I’ll rest for now. Drink some water.

[smokefilleddreams]

Content warning: Physical abuse, gaslighting(?), emotional manipulation, guilting, flashback

So three days ago I had a flashback. 

Probably contributed to the panic attack I had on Saturday evening. 

My fiancée had been playfully trying to kick me off the bed. 

And I had been immediately sucked back into a flashback. 

I didn’t respond to the flashback and just tried giving random reasons for why I couldn’t play like that. Stuff like “There are things on this side that will get damaged” “I’ll get injured” 

So we stopped playing and just hung out instead. 

But I couldn’t shake the flashback. 

It stayed so I pushed it to my subconscious even as it kept trying to surface. I guess that’s why I had a panic attack that night. 

So I’m writing it now. 

To put it somewhere else other than my head. 

May had been over one day when I was 16. 

We were play wrestling on the bed but at one point she decided that I wasn’t allowed on my bed. And she kicked me off. 

 She kicked me so hard I flew off the bed and hit the fan. There was a pause for a bit as I shrugged it off and she apologised in that weird way she did, as if explaining how I could make it not happen. 

Then we went back to playing but she wouldn’t let me on the bed. 

She said the bed was hers now. 

I, of course, thought this was playful and tried to get back on the bed. 

Over and over and over. 

Only to be kicked every time I tried. 

Eventual I gave up. Feeling sad. 

It didn’t feel like playing anymore. 

I felt like she was angry at me and punishing me. I’m almost certain now that she was. 

So I crawled under the bed thinking that maybe she’d crawl under with me since i still thought that it /had/ to be playing. 

I stayed under there for about five minutes until I realised she wasn’t going to come under. 

I started to cry. I cried for about two minutes before she told me to come back up on the bed. 

And we talked a little but I don’t even remember what was said. 

Something about me being too sensitive. Something that made it my fault. 

 My memories about her are a little inconsistent. Blurred.  

I don’t think I’ve ever dissociated as much as I did when I was with her.

[smokefilleddreams]

Caution

Be careful It’s a motto A caution Since I’ve hurt so many people with my carelessness I get caught up in whirlwinds and the less stable and certain I am The higher the risk For others As I am unlikely to hurt myself for anything other than stress or a belief of being bad And fact is I spend a lot of time on the cusp of believing I am a bad person because i an accident prone In the worst sense As it is distress for others that I am responsible for There is a tendency to enact behaviours that are upsetting, distressing And I must confess That it is like watching a car accident happen As if there is nothing I can do to stop it Partly this is because when I am letting myself be, exist, and breathe I move in fast forward My words too slow to satisfy and my actions jolted and jumbled as they don’t line up neatly with conciseness Because I in my entirety am not concise I am reckless I am wild I am free A forest fire out of control So I smother and suffocate my flames to be more like a candle, a single small lit flame Contained And that way the only harm I cause is when someone leaves their hands too close I can’t seem to find the balance to be a hearth found in a fireplace Or a campfire It seems to just be suffocate or burn Though the suffocation almost always comes after burning Suffocating as I watch the smoke rise from the corpses I created Corpses that were once trust Wounds that will either heal Or be forever scarred By my mistakes

[smokefilleddreams]

My Room

Feel tense in my chest I think it’s anxiety Maybe worry Or maybe just guilt I don’t think it’s self hate Though I am a little preoccupied with how I feel like I did something very bad and have wounded two people I understand that’s not how it works And that mistakes happen And I get that ... But I don’t really I feel like it is my fault Because if it is then maybe somehow I can fix it That if it’s all because of me I’m all that needs to be fixed I’m worried Because I know it’s not just me That things won’t be fixed That nothing will progress because of the hurt And because although I’ve made progress with accepting mistakes No one else has So the guilt I feel I know I can manage But the guilt of the person dragged into it I can’t do anything about It’s not a me and them thing It’s a them and them thing Something only to be worked out when I am not around And I’m stressed I am so stressed I feel like I can’t sleep Even though I’m so tired I’m so tired that I was dozing off on the couch But in the comfort of my own room All I feel is my fear My guilt My worry That I’ve destroyed something before it could start And I feel sick Again I get that i am spiralling But I feel like everything isn’t going to be okay At all I was excited and reckless And I fucked up But this time I fucked up two people as well I’m so emotionally fucked over right now that I can’t even process this I’m too busy pushing away the urge to hurt myself To jump off the balcony To go for a walk Or move Or leave Or go somewhere Anywhere except my room Because my room feels like the sickness in my chest And on nights like this I’d rather sleep outside Anywhere other than here

[smokefilleddreams]

Winter

How do people deal with being so cold all the time.

I feel like no matter how much I fill up on emotional warmth that it’s not enough. That I’m starved, overstrained, and just unable to keep up with the demand.

It is like I want to bury myself in the warm comfort of another human being but I haven’t the foggiest clue of how to actually achieve that.

I like to imagine that I am brave enough to wrap myself in the arms of my friends. That I could snuggle up to them.

But then what? I don’t think it’s enough.

I’m so fucking hungry for love and affection that, even as I’m drowning myself in it, I feel physically ill.

I got close to feeling comfortable on Saturday.

The morning was me kissing and cuddling my fiancee until I went home, then talking with my friend for hours, then talking to two other friends and listening, then sitting next to them on the couch and physically touching and ending the evening with more physically contact until I stopped to be in my own bed.

How do I ease this tension?

How the fuck do I deal with this?

Do I just get to a point I can hug and kiss my friends when I see them?

Do I need them nearby?

What’s wrong with me?

Even as I keep trying to think of solutions I can’t come up with anything.

Today in class we spoke about flourishing and mindfulness and enjoying life. And I do, all of that but…

No matter how much joy and enthusiasm I have for life and relationships and the world, it’s not enough.

I feel hollow.

And I’m so tired of telling my friends that I feel hollow. Or wrong. Or complaining to them.

I feel like I’m relying on them too much and not enough.

Two conflicting needs to pull away, to be alone and isolated because of some misguided belief that I don’t deserve them. But also needing them all the same because I am so desperately lonely and isolated.

What do I need?

[smokefilleddreams]

Too Me

I am constantly trying to outrun my past

A hapless void I can not seem to outpace

But something I had thought I had left

Whilst I was fleeing for my very life

Has popped up its head

From within the warm coat I had shielded myself with

It is a belief I could never look too closely at

A phantom I thought to be part of myself

A part that I was ashamed of

But it is not mine

It is not me

It is an idea sewn into the fabric of my being

By many, many hands

A failsafe perhaps

Or maybe just a side effect

Of their attempts to keep me a willing slave

But I found it

I finally found it

And today?

Today I see it for what it truly is

A lie

A falsehood

A twisted fragment that was forced

Into my reality

It is an angry, vehement mess

That whispers

And screams that I

Am a bad, horrible person

It tells me that I will hurt

And destroy

Everything

Every single thing that I hold dear

It tells me to isolate

To hold back

To be less me

And to be more what others /need/ of me

It tells me

That I will never succeed

That I will never be a good person

That I will never be good /enough/

It tells me that I am too much

Too emotional

Too draining

Too creepy

Too…

Me

It tells me that who I am

Is not what I should be

It tries to break me down

Quietly

Precisely

And it worked for so long

So fucking long

That even though I now see it so clearly

I’m...

Lost

It’s so deeply woven

Into my being

That I fear untangling /it/

Will untangle /me/

Because I have always been trying to do what it says

To be /all/ that it says

That now that I am trying not to

I am confused

I do not want to be a bad person

This insecurity of mine

That I know it holds tight

Is blackmail

But it isn’t really

I do not need a shadow

Of a thousand lashing

Telling me how to

Not be a bad person

Its teachings are wrong

Have always been wrong

Made to shackle and torture and maim

Like its creators

So I can’t listen to it

Not anymore

They have taken enough of my life

They have taken enough of me

No more

No more! I will shout and scream and cry

Because I /will/ be me

I can only be me

And I?

I /am/ enough

[smokefilleddreams]

Hard Nights

Today the paper scrapes against my skin

Like nails against he chalkboard

And similarly I will grit my teeth

And bare it

My burdens, I feel, are endless quandaries

For once I have the answer they will crumble like so much dust

Some are simplistic, unagreeable, unstomachable thoughts that I unravel

From the yarn, and the knitting needle and toss away

Others are truths that I have the option to accept, to sew into the tapestry of my life

Permanent

If I don’t accept them, they go back to the yarn, the threads too tight, too integral to throw away

And then

Then there are the feelings

Tangled and raw

Named and unnamed

Empty and whole

These I do not know what to do with

Or can’t do anything with

I just taste them

like the ache of an electric shock

Or a burn settling over my skin

I am sick

Filled with these somethings that I wish to be nothing

If only so I could simplify the tastes, the aches, the pains

I am tired

It feels like every time I settle one into my pores

A new one leaks out

Scalding me

Scolding me

Reminding me

That if I’d been kind to that child

That I had been

That maybe I wouldn’t be here

That maybe I wouldn’t be hurting

Until I remember

Over and over and fucking over

That I had been that child

Hurting

Alone

Burning

And that kindness is not a salve I had the luxury of

That kindness was not something I could have afforded

Was not something I could have allowed

Because feelings and acceptance in that place

In that time

Would have killed

[smokefilleddreams]

Progress

I have been moving forward.

I realised that completely avoiding my feelings under the guise of acceptance didn’t solve anything.

It gave me the platform to breathe. For drama to effect me a little less.

But it didn’t heal.

So I decided to let myself feel, to try and express.

And I have been. 

It’s been a near four entire weeks with minimal breaks from emotion.

I’m exhausted.

I have been it almost since I started.

But now I’m also anxious.

I have all these feelings and thoughts that I used to be able to hide away.

Or hide from.

Now they run through my mind over and over like a broken record.

So many anxieties and insecurities.

And I know they’re normal.

I know I’m not alone.

But I can’t help but feel it sometimes.

Especially when guilt kicks in. And shame.

“You aren’t good enough,” it will whisper,

the words gun shots fired into my chest,

one after another.

I feel like I’m constantly worried I’m creepy, or weird, or upsetting.

Even for normal or mundane things.

Like wanting physical affection.

Or eating.

And it’s fucking ridiculous.

The voices in my head shouldn’t have this much influence over me.

I know /why/ they do but fucking hell am I sick of it.

Like, cool, okay I said one thing that wasn’t worded properly that I was so proud of until I was told what it actually sounded like.

And then I thought about it and realised I had fucked up.

It should’ve ended there.

But it’s been almost a week and the shame and regret isn’t lessening in my chest.

The message, the words, taunting me as they pick at the edges of my thoughts.

Reminding me why I shut down in the first place.

It’s like I’m being punished for wanting to heal,

for wanting to feel.

Oh.

I am.

Years of trauma and abuse don’t magically fix themselves overnight just because I want them to.

I’m being punished by the part of my brain that protects me.

It’s entrenched in the belief that feelings are Bad. 

Feelings made me want to self harm.

Made me believe I had to be punished and suffer.

So I have to shut them off.

But I can’t now.

I have never felt so alive as I do when I’m drowning in emotion.

Bad or good or neutral. Feelings are feelings and I’ve been so terribly desperate to feel like I’m allowed to have them.

But I can’t regulate them.

And I can’t self-monitor as well with them.

So I hurt people.

I make mistakes. 

And I feel like I /have/ to go back.

Or else I am Bad and Horrible and Unforgivable.

But even that is shut off to me. 

People know.

People I /care/ about /know/.

So I can’t go back,

for fear of disappointing them.

I feel wild.

Reckless.

Dangerous.

I am consistently fighting.

Fighting my dissociation.

My depersonalisation.

My cognitive dissonance and dysfunction.

My body.

All so I can feel.

So I can be present with my partners.

So I can be present with my friends.

So I can be present with myself.

I’m trying.

I’m trying so hard.

And I /have/ to remind myself, 

That it’s enough.

That I’m enough.

And that to err,

is human.

And most importantly,

I am human.

[waiting-to-sleep]

[delightsmaur]

I don’t know

[purrypixel]

It hurts my heart how true this is

[smokefilleddreams]

Nightmare 2

TW/CW: r*pe, CSA, nightmare description, vomiting, police, murder, trauma

Okay, so lately I’ve been having nightmare after nightmare almost every night and I would wake up between 6 and 8am to get out of it.  The only nights without have been nights where I cry myself to sleep either reliving trauma or just mourning my childhood. 

Last night/this morning was fucked up and I just... need to put it somewhere so I can stop thinking about it.

The memory of the nightmare is fairly patchy, as most of my dreams are. It followed the same pattern as most though, where I’m someone who is not me but feels like me (it’s weird I guess) and then a string of events happen leading up to a finale, a point where I either get bored, confused, or scared.

I haven’t had frequent nightmares in a while, and normally I’m not scared, just confused but this past two weeks I’ve been waking up exhausted, terrified and desperate for distraction from my mind.

In this one I was a cop. I can’t recall if I was trans or cis in the dream but I was a guy and I felt short for my age but bulky. 

I don’t remember the events leading up to it but I run through some bushes on a side street and beat up two men, I tie them up, tell them they are disgusting and monsters. I scream “WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?!” 

Then a separate part of my mind that knows it is not me and that I am really dreaming gets curious. What did they do?

So I turn to look. And immediately regret doing so.

On the ground is what I assume used to be a small child. Maybe seven or eight, by this point I can’t tell. The crumpled, curled up form is grey, skin no longer elastic but looking almost threaded, inhuman, their eyes just empty gaping sockets the same as their mouth, without teeth, torn, matted. 

They didn’t look real. Like they were human once but were no a broken, distorted doll.

The me of the dream, the police man threw up, away from them, averting his eyes, horrified. He kept throwing up over and over, knowledge filtering through my head the way dreams to fill missing context and I knew. That child had been r*ped and beaten and mutilated by those men. 

I felt my stomach clenching nauseated in the dream and out.

Until I woke up, shaking and on the verge of throwing up outside of the dream, stomach clenching with nausea as the image assaulted me again and again.

I had to distract myself so I thought of friends, of fun things I like to do of anything as I kept feeling my consciousness trying to drag me back under, back into the dream as I struggled to stay awake just long enough to forget so I don’t go back. I couldn’t go back there again.

Eventually I calmed down enough to sleep dreamlessly and now I feel disgusting.

And angry.

I’ve already started piecing together the dream, why it happened how it did, who the kid represents, the meanings. I didn’t want to think about it but every time I’m not doing something I remember, I think, I question... I hurt.

I still feel sick.

Anyway, thanks tumblr for being the dumping ground for my horror stories. I’d be scared to wonder what it’d be like to keep all of this in my head all the time.

[nonbinarypastels]

shoutout to people with “strange” or “unusual” triggers.

people who are mentally ill, neurodivergent, or who have been through trauma or abuse don’t get to choose the things that trigger us or remind us of what we’ve went through. sometimes our triggers are things we have to deal with on a daily basis, sometimes they’re common triggers that many people have, and sometimes they’re something totally “weird” that no one would think would be a trigger at all.

no matter what your triggers are, what you’ve experienced or are currently experiencing are not made invalid by them or how uncommon or “strange” they are. your feelings are valid and your desire to avoid your triggers is as well.

[palevirgin]

I hate the sense of foreshortened future that comes along with PTSD because not only was my childhood robbed away from me, but so was my future as well. 

[naaaaaaaaaah-deactivated2020112]

Generic authority voice: what’s causing all these problems hmmM?

Me: I have ptsd

Them: so what’s been bringing these thoughts and feelings back into your life?

Me: the ptsd

Them: yes but what causes you to have these emotions?

Me: ptsd

Them: I know but wh