𝖄ou carried a different name when you were a child. it didn’t fit you, you know that now. it’s locked away inside your head, hidden deep inside a restricted department in your mind which you do not ever revisit, but it’s there. somewhere. nowadays, your therapist asks you to break it open – you don’t need to, you know where the keys are – but you know the memories are unpolished, scattered on the floor instead of carefully labelled and sorted into equally meticulously labelled cabins. in truth, you don’t want to go back. there’s not much to remember, anyway —– it’s not you.
𝕸other thought you were a fussy child because each morning you would make an ordeal out of your breakfast; only eating the red froot loops first, then the blue, then the orange, then the yellow and the green, and she would have to scold you every day not to leave the purple ones behind. she never understood you had a system. one time she forced you to eat all of them promiscuously and you felt sick to your stomach with all that chaos inside. she didn’t understand that either and when you dared to cry because you felt the ragtag clutter push onto your innocent child heart, she tore onto your ear until you had a ‘ real ‘ reason to, yelling at you not to feign a sickness which you didn’t have.
𝕱ather always said you were defiant because you always wasted his time with your silly little games. he practically dragged you to school every day for years, a tight grasp of rough fingers digging into your thin arm, because otherwise you’d want to balance on the edge of the sidewalk if the way itself was uneven or as you walked across checkered floor you took the extra time to step onto every single tile once — always just once, though, even if it meant you had to jump. he didn’t understand the necessity of it and when you fought against it because you needed to step on a specific crack in the floor – actually genuinely needed to in a way that was anything but a game – his fingers dug into your skin even more until it was impossible to tell what was more painful: your father’s touch or the horror scenarios your head came up with now that you didn’t do what you were supposed to.
𝕿eachers found the need to treat you different to everybody else because it always seemed as though you were a little bit behind your peers. whenever it was time to read a text aloud in class, they decided to skip you because you were always stuck somewhere at the start. they genuinely believed it best to belittle you while in truth, you were probably the smartest in the class and the quickest reader of them all. but each time the kid which read aloud would flounder you had to restart. it wasn’t how the book was supposed to be read, after all, but even though you tried to explain it once, no one ever wanted to listen, let alone attempt to understand where your thoughts were coming from.
𝕮lassmates mocked you for always being the odd one out. you preferred to watch rather than join them play in the schoolyard, you liked it better to sit in the stands, watching everyone’s valuables, while your sports teacher had the others hustle around the field, and in the locker room you stayed far away from everybody else. sometimes they would try to get to you and it was by unfortunate coincidence that they noticed it was the easiest to nerve you, not by lingering behind after school to beat you up like the other bullies did, but by ruining the order you neatly arranged your school supplies in. one time after you’ve had an unnerving night at home the day before, you freaked out because of it. it was the first time for most of your peers to experience a panic attack, but they didn’t comprehend that. they didn’t understand how desperately you needed for, at least, some things in your life to be in perfect symmetry, either.
𝕹eighbours thought you were a peculiar boy because your parents were godawful, no doubt, but with a son as strange as you what parent was not going to lose their mind — it’s the age old question; was the parent first or the child? who is to blame for creating the other? they often watched you on your way home, seeing your lips move as you walked in your own pattern past their average straight white fences. they thought you were madly talking to yourself, but you were not. you were quietly counting fence posts and in a neighbourhood where everyone wanted to be the same amount of normal, mirrored images of each other’s supposedly perfect homes, you were perhaps the only one who understood nothing was the way it seemed at a first glance.
𝕰veryone believed it to be your fault when authorities eventually took you away from your family’s home. some children, they said, are just too difficult to handle and they do not deserve the life their parents continuously and constantly try to give them. it took you a while to stop wondering about all the things you had done wrong, about whether the things you still did compulsively wrong meant you were simply messed up at the core —– but with a new family in your life you began to understand that everyone had in fact been right and you were not wrong. you did not deserve the life your biological parents forced on you. you deserved better, and the athanas – you have no doubt your mind will ever change on that – were the best thing which could’ve ever happened to you.
𝕸aia, your real mother and the only one you accept as such, calls on you when she starts to cook dinner for the family. she never expects but always asks whether you’d like to deck the table. it takes a while but she knows you’ve got a system and she never gets tired of voicing how perfectly placed everything looks in the end. when you go on walks in the gardens she lets you set the pace, arm hooked into yours, allowing you to lead the way like the young gentleman you are. sometimes, when you seem especially distracted, she asks how many flowers there are – red ones on one day, then blue flowers the next, orange, yellow and at last she asks about the ones which are green – and she’s delighted every time with the number you tell her. it’s more than she expected, she’ll say and you smile because it’s exactly what you expected of her.
𝕾iblings, which you suddenly have and who are the only other children in your life, accept you do not want to play with them. to tell the truth, some of them don’t want to play with you either. you’ve never been given the opportunity to make friends but watching from a safe distance, at first, you actually start to grow a little fond of them. your hands are warm when you finally dare to actually approach one – you’ve been fidgeting with your fingers out of nerves – and still young, you are a little too shy to look at her for a long time. in the next few years you’ll sometimes wonder if you’d approach her again if you knew then of the nuisance she’d turn out to be — but deep down you know the answer to that one. you’re the older sibling to most of the others, if you act too adult for your age it almost seems like a thing you’re supposed to do. you’re your new father’s son, anyway, and perhaps the one who wants to be his son the most.
𝖁idal sees potential where no one has ever seen it – in you – and you want to make him proud. it’s the least you can do for the man who has gifted you this life. he gives you extra lessons, teaching you of things not all of the others may know but which he knows will be safely locked away inside your head, and he assigns you a task which you are perfectly shaped for. there’s no one who has a better overview than you do, over your siblings, of course, but perhaps even the house as well. you know how many tiles the floor in the entrance hall is made of, how many books are standing on every shelf, how many little spoons are neatly stacked in the kitchen drawers — you counted them, you probably touched half of them as well to rearrange them to sit in the perfect place. it’s one of the few things you still have to do. in the comfort of a real home where your life is sorted in a way which does not force you to grasp at every bit of control you can have, your compulsions have gotten better. so much better your siblings don’t even know how much you used to be – how much you will be – struggling with them under the pressure of stress.
𝕹o one blames you anymore for the things you’re not —– you are horatio.
many mornings i wake up with this overwhelming feeling of nameless dread, and some of those mornings it’s also tinged with an overarching feeling of guilt
of course, i don’t know WHY i feel guilty - is there something i did recently that i need to make amends for? who do i need to apologize to? how bad was my transgression? should i just start apologizing to everyone in my life - maybe EVERYONE is mad at me? but no, apologies seem hollow if i don’t know the reason for the apology… hmm.
and i just start running through possible things i did wrong, or ways i hurt people without meaning to, and oh man i wonder how far back i can go - maybe that time years ago i felt bad for saying something insensitive? wow i’m a bad person
and then my brain goes, “wooow, you don’t even know what you did? smh… bet you’re feeling even more guilty now… how self-centered can you get? y i k e s at your lack of self-awareness”
so anyways my mind is a rumination hellscape with too many lights on and i have a therapy appointment today and somehow it’s more comforting to me to share with a bunch of strangers online than to my therapist lmao
I don't think that this is like... at the level where it is Clinically Significant, because it has never gotten as severe for me as how I have seen excoriation disorder described in psychiatric literature, but... are there people out there who are actually able to not compulsively pick at scabs and uneven texture on their skin? Sounds fake.
You’ve heard of raptor arms, now get ready for surgeon arms, when you hold your arms/hands like a surgeon because OCD brain says they need washing but you can’t get to a sink and you’re trying not to touch anything so you’re just shuffling around like
