Reflections — April 21, 2021
This is something I wrote last year and posted on Facebook. Facebook is the space I choose to emotionally decompress with an audience. I don’t worry about how professional I sound, or whether I’m teaching a lesson. This is the space where I just relax and say what I’m feeling.
I love that it stores my memories, even knowing that they mine this shit and weaponize it against me. It would be better if I read my own offline journal more often because I am sure that I relax more knowing my thoughts are completely private. But anyway…
I look back at my memories daily. I want to know the emotional space I’m was in and ponder if I’m carrying it over to the now. Last year was a terrible year but I was so busy dealing with the hellscape of the “convenient” genocide of Covid-19 that I didn’t get into my head much. 2019 was a different story.
This post is from April 21, 2019. We were pre-pandemic. I was still ramping up my convention activities and working non-stop to get my voice out there. I was in the midst of a friend purge that took a couple of years and had a lot of collateral damage as those people worked to undermine me in the spaces we cohabited. It was a stressful time, but then again, when isn’t it? I was burnt out and in the midst of a massive depressive episode that I tried to beat through strength of will. It was a time when having fun felt impossible so I rebranded all my work as fun in an attempt to keep moving forward.
Yet the sadness stayed and so did I, which is why I can look back and appreciate that I’m in a different space today. Which doesn’t mean I disagree with what I said. It just means I’ve found a way to live with it.
From 2019
I just had the loneliest dream. I was at my high school reunion and none of us knew each other anymore. Not that I was especially close with anyone in high school. I spent those years laying low and fighting to escape the low expectations and punitive actions of almost every adult I interacted with in school while avoiding the predators in my neighborhood.
I was extremely lonely in middle school. And high school. And college. And adulthood. And often even now. Sometimes I wonder if that feeling ever goes away.
And I know it’s protective. I know it’s the learned response of decades of being told I don’t belong, I’m not wanted, and few, if anyone, cares what happens to me. It’s years of asking why anyone should care…and why would anyone care. It’s years of telling myself I do matter even when everything around me tells me that I don’t unless I serve some purpose or provide some service to someone…
It’s a life of being afraid to be seen because it’s always seemed to invite punishment, lies, and abuse.
I don’t trust people and I don’t lie about it. I can’t be open. I can’t be vulnerable. And, often, I can’t care because caring gives you too much power and too many of y’all only know how to exploit it to manipulate me. I have a list of those who had to go, expressly for that reason.
And I’m fucking honest. Not asshole honest, just real fucking honest and too many people hate the person they show themselves to be and try to shoot the messenger instead of hear the message and I’m tired of healing emotional bullet wounds from people who don’t know just how much they hate themselves.
It’s lonely and I wasn’t ready to realize just how lonely I’ve felt. But that’s the thing with truth…we’re never really ready. But embracing it is the only way we find the shit we need to change to heal.
I’m scared of liking you, loving you, caring about you, trusting you. I’m scared to let you see me or get close to me. I’m scared of the monsters we mold ourselves to be in order to survive this predatory society because I recognize who and what you are and I love myself too much to be anyone’s prey regardless of how much I think I love you. Regardless of how much I think I need you. I will not willingly be your prey and that has meant frequently walking the hell away.
This is no way to live but I don’t know how to fix it. So I smile, take my meds, and live the to do list I call a life, waiting to numb myself enough that it doesn’t matter or for the day I just don’t wake up.
This is no way to live, but this is the life I live. And I guess that’s got to be okay because I have no idea what the fuck else to do.
And that makes me sad.
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