Important Post Plz Read

You know what people don’t talk about often enough? Playing catch up in life after spending your teens or early 20s suicidally depressed. There’s so many more layers than just being able to say “I don’t want to die anymore.”

The difficulty in academia or a career after spending years thinking you wouldn’t be alive long enough for any of it to matter.

The exhaustion that comes from self awareness and self soothing, with the constant voice in your head saying “don’t go backwards.”

How lonely it is to watch the people your age starting families when you’re just barely learning what stable relationships are, and the sudden societal pressure of being “up against a clock” for these kinds of things.

The judgement from others if you change your image or interests this late in the game just because you finally figured out who you really are under the demons.

Be kind to those who are developing and blooming after years of not planning on being here long. We are living a life we absolutely didn’t think we’d have, and it’s hard enough without society reminding us there’s expectations of our age.

We didn’t get to be young; we were too busy fighting battles few know.

-

"The only person who can save you is yourself, don't rely on anybody else!"

Actually, what has saved me is books and my favourite video game and my cats and my friends who I've shared late nights and too-early mornings with and the dew-covered grass I walked on on the way to a competition bus in ninth grade band and the sunburn that kept me out of school for days the month prior.

I understand the viewpoint of how you are ultimately the person who can save you, but don't discount that you aren't an island. You aren't meant to be your sole savior. Let others save you, too. You are worth the care and love the universe has for you.

Horrifying. And worse, accurate.

You can be groomed for more than just sexual exploitation. You can be groomed into becoming someone’s caretaker, someone’s perfect fantasy, someone’s illusion of a partner they want. You can be groomed into being someone’s experiment or a toy. You can be groomed into believing you owe someone to take advantage of you thousand times. You can be groomed into giving all your resources and labour away. You can be groomed into rejecting your own humanity and offering yourself up as a servant or a resource to someone. Grooming can overtake any and all parts of your life.

It is incredibly important to train yourself to have your first instinct be to look something up.

Don't know how to do something? Look it up.

See a piece of news mentioned on social media? Look it up.

Not sure if something is making it to the broader public consciousness, either because you don't see it much or you see people saying nobody is talking about it? Look it up.

Don't know what a word means? Look it up.

It will make you a better reader and a better writer, but it will also just make you more equipped to cope with the world.

So often, I see people talking about something as though it is the first time anyone has ever acknowledged it, when I've been reading reports about it on the news for months or years. Or I see someone totally misinterpreting an argument because they clearly don't know what a word means--or, on the other hand, making an argument that doesn't make sense because they aren't using words the right way.

Look things up! Check the news (the real news, not random people on social media)! Do your research! You (and the world) will be better for it.

trauma doesn’t often feel like trauma is ‘supposed’ to feel. it feels like indifferent detachment, watching from outside yourself because nothing can hurt you there. it feels normal, just how people interact, so why are you making a big deal about it?  it feels like a joke – just how kids play, just how adults tease, just how some relationships work.

you wake from nightmares five years later and still wonder if you made it all up.

trauma can look like bad behaviour. like the stubborn refusal to get better, to stop self-destructing. trauma is putting yourself in harm’s way because you don’t really mean it, or because it’s funny, or because you just want to feel something, or because you just want to stop feeling. it’s wanting to destroy and reassemble yourself into another person entirely, so your real life can begin. because this isn’t real. because really bad things don’t happen to people like you.

trauma is the constant feeling of being an impostor. it’s the drive to survive twinned with the impulse to make yourself more sick in more ways. to hurt yourself to prove how bad you feel, or to punish yourself for exaggerating. you want people to believe what you’ve been through, to tell you your feelings are real, that your memories really happened. but when people do take you seriously, you play it off as a joke, apologize for bringing the mood down.

you go on and on about how it wasn’t that bad. you seek permission to still love the ones who hurt you, because it’s the people closest to us who can hurt us most deeply.

you can feel like the people who hurt you are the only ones who really knew you. in low self esteem, you can mistake cruelty for honesty.

there will always be people who have been through worse. that doesn’t make what happened to you okay.

there will always be people who don’t believe you. that doesn’t mean you are lying.

at some point, you have to take yourself seriously. you have to make a life you can stand to live. it’s the only way to survive.

Things I couldn't do in my abuser's house that I can do now:

Take a bath whenever I feel like it

Leave my room whenever I need or want to

Leave the house and arrive back whenever I need or want to

Play music while I cook and dance and sing around the house

Step on the noisy floor tiles

Walk into rooms without peeking in to make sure no one's in them

Leave my belongings all around the house without worrying they'll be broken

Eat everything that's in my fridge without fear it wasn't meant for me

Choose what's in my fridge

Choose when the heating is turned on

Choose what to watch on TV

Choose how to organise my time

Arrive to places on time because I get to choose when I leave the house

Invite my friends home whenever I feel like it

Feel free to add your own! Let's spread some positivity :)

And for those of you who still live with your abusers and need to hear this: it won't last forever. One day, you too will be able to feel safe and in control in your own home ❤️

Amen, amen, amen.

For victims of abuse, it’s almost essential to gain ability to stop empathising with our abusers, not only because it’s keeping us trapped in their manipulations, but because we deserve to know that we don’t have to prioritize the feelings of a person who is actively doing harm to us.

Empathy for victims of abuse is almost mandatory, to the point where we’re punished for every moment we’re not displaying extreme and unconditional empathy for the abusers. We can get called out and berated for simply going about our business and not thinking of what the abuser might want of us in the particular second. We get shamed for ‘not knowing better’ and 'failing our role’ if we take a minute to consider our own needs.

When they’re doing their usual play – hurting us, then quickly acting hurt and playing the victim, bringing out their past trauma, crying about how hard they have/had it, how our feelings hurt them, even in the case we don’t fall for it, and refuse to apologize and accept that our feelings are just collateral damage in their personal crusade, we will get attacked immediately for being an emotionless and selfish person. Fail to react empathetic to the abuser’s guilt trip will get us called out for being horrible, for not caring, for being the most vicious demon, the worst person, the most unworthy and ungrateful human being in the world. That kind of thing sticks. We don’t just get over that. It becomes etched in our brains that displaying empathy, even to someone who is walking all over us, is our biggest priority, that showing empathy is the last thing that might protect us against an even bigger outburst, that might help us deserve to not be attacked for our lack of morality. We don’t get to be mad. We don’t get to stand up for ourselves. We have to put up a display of empathy or endure personal attacks that will make us feel like we don’t deserve to live.

To finally be able to cut the empathy and stand up against the abuser, is an act that fights years, maybe decades of brainwashing and conditioning. To not care if the abuser has it bad anymore, means we faced and fought years of trauma, lies, personal attacks, self doubt, self hatred, pain and injustice. Abusers want to take away our ability not to care, not to empathize and not to prioritize them, and seizing that back means seizing ourselves back, existing in a place where our empathy is not mandatory anymore, where we’re not pure compassionate receptacles of trauma anymore. Where empathy isn’t forced and squeezed out of us under the threat of pain. Where our value and personality isn’t dictated by whether we endlessly forgive and accept people who will only continue hurting us and bringing trauma into our life.

It is not a mark of a healthy and normal human being to offer our entire compassion and understanding to a creature who is destroying us in return. If someone proves to be a danger to us, it’s normal to disregard everything except the knowledge that this is a threat, and nothing else to us. To keep away because our well being shouldn’t be put under a fear of a constant threat. We are normal for following our sense of self-preservation and turning away from whatever is damaging us, regardless of how sad or upset this being becomes. We are not to be a collateral damage to someone’s misery or manipulation. Our empathy doesn’t have to be an opening to accept harm. We can save our empathy for those who also feel for us. We’re not bad people if we close up under a threat of abuse, and want to retreat to safety. We’re not evil, cruel or selfish for extending our hearts only to those who also keep ours safe.

There’s this really specific experience in growing up with abusive parents, because they act so emotionally immature at all times. And when you’re a kid, it just feels normal, right? You’re emotionally immature, they’re immature, you’re on the same level, you don’t know any better, you think that’s how humans are. 

But then later, you actually develop some empathy, awareness of other people’s feelings and their inner worlds and thoughts and situations, and you outgrow your parent’s maturity. And at that point you’re just so used to tolerating their shit you don’t even think twice, you’re the adult now, you let them have their way, you forgive and forget, clean their messes, take care of their feelings and make it all okay for them.

But then at one point, you realize you have adults acting like literal spoiled children, when you’ve outgrown this a while ago, and you ask yourself, when they gonna grow? When they gonna develop some self awareness? And then you go and assume they just never had a mature presence in their life so they had no way to learn (which isn’t true because then how did you learn it?), and you go and try to teach them by showing them a good example. You become extra nice, patient, explain things to them, cater to their inner worlds, try to explain to them that there’s people other than them on this world, who have feelings and hearts and deep inner world and this is significant and needs to be respected. But all they ever respond with is “yes I am those people now cater to me”. 

It is impossible to teach abusive parents by showing them a good example. They will insist you do it over and over again, and then exploit your kindness to the max. Literally the kinder you get, the worse they get. They soon expect you to run after their every need, to jump at their every whim, and in return they insult you for a good measure, call you worthless and lazy, then they go to sleep without a care in the world. 

Do not do this. They’re not growing up because they benefit so strongly from acting like a kid. Once all of their immaturity privileges and tolerations are suspended, and they’re forced to act like a proper human being in order to keep gettinng what they want, suddenly they’ll know exactly how to do it. 

Your parents are not immature, they’re abusive. They’re not childish, they’re manipulative. They’re not silly, they’re self obsessed, selfish and forceful. You gave them enough benefit of the doubt, you do not have to wait all your life for them to grow up. Their due for that was long time ago and they have no business expecting you to be their parent.