#foreshortened future

[asofspades]

I'm turning 24 next week and I don't know how to deal with the flow of time (I think I haven't processed a bday since I was 16 because I was genuinely convinced i wouldn't make it past that age, every year and threshold I've crossed since then hasn't felt real)

Like, what do you mean I'm going to be 24, I've got a degree, 2 masters degrees and I'm on the 3rd and somehow I've become a small artist and a pseudo content creator, I've come out of the closet and everything wtf

[ifwebefriends]

The Dark Evil Fucked Up Side PTSD side of my brain: all I wanted for so long was to go to college and finish college, I’ve honestly had a great time at college and now it’s ending. When I was going through chemo during my gap year, college represented the warm sunrise at the end of a frigid seemingly endless night. I’m kinda excited to graduate and move on and I have some plans but they don’t feel very concrete. What if things get worse? And if my cancer comes back, will I be able to find or make a sunrise bright and warm enough to make enduring treatment again worth it? I try my best to believe that there’s a long bright future ahead but I can’t help but worry sometimes that there’s nothing really left for me after this.

The cool friend part of my brain: dude what about all the fanfic that you haven’t published yet

PTSD part: omg wait ur actually so right what about all the fanfic I haven’t published yet?

[icarus-suraki]

I love giving my psychiatrist pause when I tell her that, no, I don't have a five year plan. I don't even have a one year plan. Hell, I barely have a one month plan.

[canary0]

So the "foreshortened future" post made me reevaluate my entire life in the context of "holy shit, I've has PTSD since third grade." But I'm also really glad, because you can't fix a problem you don't know about. I have a path to heal. I'm going to teach myself how to trust again.

This week, my goal is going to be to ask someone for help at least once.

Even just that, even having that future, makes so much difference I want to cry. I have a meaningful future.

[dragonheartstring360]

That anxious attachment moment when something just feels off and you just physically can’t believe people when they say everything is fine and the foreshortened future is through the roof, so now you’re waiting for everyone to inevitably leave you and alone feels safer, so you just wanna fuck off to the middle of the woods and never come back out and become a little forest hermit witch.

[karowl]

oh....

[b1unt-teeth]

if your whole life was riddled with trauma, and it shaped your every thought, every action, every aspect of your life.. would you ever be on the same level as someone who was born happy? is there any hope, that years to decade to decades later, that you’ll ever catch up to what you’ve lost?

would you have had the ability to feel love, to laugh wholeheartedly, to cry without restraint or shame, to know who you are and what you want, or be able to effortlessly develop long lasting friendships?

trauma makes you an outcast. no matter how much you try to fix yourself or blend in, it’s like they know. something’s off about you. something’s ever so slightly off.

[adventures-in-asexuality]

Maybe I am a bit more prickly on this at the moment.

I try not to talk about this too much, because it sounds whiny and kinda entitled (and I am also already sure I’ve always talked about it too much), but I’m always kinda convinced that I’m never going to have a romantic or significant platonic relationship with anyone. Like - that’s just how life is. I try to move on and accept it. It’s whatever. (It’s not whatever.)

I don’t know how much this has in common with the whole foreshortened future thing, which is apparently a recognised trauma thing. It definitely feels similar, in the type of no-questions-allowed bone-deep certainty - so maybe I’m just traumatised (not that that really helps the whole mutual caring thing). But then - I don’t know how much of the foreshortened future thing isn’t true either. Is it #trauma? Is it just a realistic assessment of my prognosis as a disabled person without social support or a decent welfare or healthcare system? I don’t know. (It’s probably a bit of both.)

It does vary, of course, on how much this bugs me. Some days I’m really glad for what friendships I do have. Some days I even manage to believe that they are real and that they might last, even having me in them. Some days I am sad somewhere deep inside (though of course that’s not an acceptable sadness to show). Some days I really wish that, if all my feelings are useless and pointless, I could just stop having them. Sometimes I can believe that it’s good and pure and part of this world to have strong feelings about people who will never care. Sometimes I hate it and wish I could burn it out of me, so that I never have to expend energy on it or get hurt by it again.

I don’t know what’s true and what’s #trauma - but it’s also not like #trauma actually helps you form relationships or makes you a nice person to know, so it probably doesn’t matter much. I try to pretend none of it matters. Sometimes I just fail, I guess.