is this going to end like last time?

i don't want it to, i'm scared

it's not that you knew what to say to make me feel better, but knowing you'd commiserate/say sorry something happened, and tell me you wished you could give me a hug

- well it’s over. i feel guilty, but free. i’m still trying to decide if this was the right choice. everything is going to change. being my own person. being a gay man. i haven’t been talking about it - out of guilt or avoidance? i told steph the reader’s digest version of everything and she said i made the right choice. that my twenties are the time to figure these things out. was this relationship ever healthy? have i always been sarah’s emotional lean? was i ever happy or just at base level? her own therapist called her codependent. echo and narcissus. sarah’s unhealthy coping mechanisms - self harm! “you aren’t miserable” manipulation. being home feels bad and i hate that.

i keep having this reoccurring...flashback? it’s not traumatic, more euphoric or peaceful than anything. i’m alone at the desk in our shared room, probably 8 or 9 at eldest. i’m working on a drawing for hours, the tv shows in the background melting into each other, samurai jack rolls into adult swim, the night dissolves into cartoons, pencil shavings, marker smudges on my fingers. the house is quieter, i don’t think mom or al are home. either way there’s no fighting. it’s summer or the weekend and i can stay up forever with no material worries. i can’t remember too many specifics, but i remember the feeling.

i’ve been thinking a bit about how isolated i’ve been basically my whole life. sarah and i have uncanny backgrounds, and even though she’s an only child, i feel like sometimes she was less isolated than i was? her parents split way before mine did, at the very edge of her memories, so she wasn’t there for all of the fighting. i think i’ve pushed down how lonely and terrifying it was being utterly disconnected from my parents because they chose to have horrifying arguments about their failed, dysfunctional relationship in devastating earshot of the children they were supposed to be raising. not only did i not have a healthy, adult relationship as a model, but my basic human needs were neglected! i barely left my room, i barely ate, and i never got to see my friends when i wasn’t at school. it only got so much worse when my parents did split up, because of the monster that my mom is! everything she did was an attempt to isolate me further from the outside world and bring me closer to her. i wasn’t allowed to leave the house! sarah had friends she could escape to - if i even thought about leaving the house, my mother accused me of trying to have sex or do drugs or run away - all things i never did! i wasn’t allowed to have internet friends either, and when i did have them and didn’t tell her, she tried to kill me! 

i just can’t stop wondering who i would be if i knew how to be a human being that didn’t have to hide all the time. when the turpin “house of horrors” case broke over two years ago, i was glued to every update, trying to figure out what could have happened to make those kids - all fourteen of them - end up being so disconnected from the entire world. one of the neighbors who tried to talk to some of them outside one time said, “it’s as if their only defense was to become invisible.” and that’s stuck with me ever since. 

here i am again, beating myself up for not creating, not doing anything. i know things are hard right now - but what was my excuse before? there was none. i can’t help but think about where i was 10 years ago - going back through my old work and remembering how i always had some inspiration, some drive to create. i was incessantly doodling, drawing, and wrote poems almost on the daily. why can’t i do that now? where has my head been? 

maybe the issue at hand isn’t that i’m not as productive as i used to be - though that’s true, i think i’m expecting too much of myself. i really can’t go from not writing anything for weeks or months to pulling something polished out of my ass every day. (that’s not to say that anything i was writing ten years ago was polished, but i digress.) “i set the bar real high, then come up just shy, and pound my desk with the utmost frustration.” always and forever have i set these impossible standards for myself, and then get pissed when i can’t meet them, so of course i wouldn’t even try! what’s the point in even writing anything if i can’t shit out a full fucking poem every day!

i don’t know at what point, but somewhere along the way i developed a real issue with executive dysfunction. is it the trauma? is it something undiagnosed? is it the result of oft shitty circumstances and a tendency toward instant gratification? probably all of the above. there’s a post i’ve seen on tumblr somewhere - maybe it’s in my drafts? if not i’m going to put it there the next time i see it. it says something along the lines of, “you’re not bad at the thing, you’re just a bad project manager.” and that’s where i am, i think? i *know* there are things i want to do, projects i want to complete, but where do i start? what are the steps? thinking of that in and of itself is exhausting. but so was top surgery! so was finding a new job! how is this any different?

deviantart is dead. they’re making a lot of changes to the site that aren’t conducive to the already threadbare lit community so a lot of veterans are jumping ship. i guess i jumped ship a few years ago. in archiving the last of my poems today i realized how much my posts dwindled toward the end. i didn’t post anything at all in 2017. what was i doing in 2017? all this comes on the heels of two writing groups: a discord chat last year full of lit people clinging to the sinking platform, and the facebook Group Where We Pretend It’s Writing Deviantart 2010-2015. i don’t feel like i belong in either. it’s so weird how much has changed in ten years - i was so naïve at 15 to think dA would still be at the center of my life for well, the rest of my life. we’re all destined to drift off, to get on with our lives. that’s just how shit goes.

but all these folks have kept ties to writing - some publishing their work. and me? i keep beating myself for “not writing.” but as i go through my notes, i see so many things - mostly unfinished, but still writing nonetheless. it’s not the endless stream of thought i channeled for years - and i think i wanna get back to that - but it’s still there. i need to get back to a healthy relationship with writing. one where i’m not expecting everything i write to be publishable right off the bat, because most everything i used to upload to dA definitely needed to be edited. (14 year old me thought i was too good for that! ha!) but also i need to let go and not edit something to death because i’m scared of it seeing daylight. my writing is..........good? and i want to share it? and speak with the voice i’ve been so afraid of hearing?

will things change for my generation or only get worse?

- being neglected by both parents from a young age

- being gaslit and punished when i tried to point out how destructive my parents constant fighting was

-being removed from advanced classes due to extreme anxiety when i couldn’t figure something out/got something wrong and thus being labelled “too emotional” - something i’d continue to hear for the rest of my fucking life

-being gaslit again when i got sick (pots) and then any time i had an opinion about something, the answer was “did you take your medicine?” because why else would i be acting like that?

-being forced to be my mother’s physical and emotional caretaker from age 12 onward - which entailed concealing my own feelings so i could tend to hers

-being bullied from middle school on, having nothing be done about it, and then being bullied harder when i tried to retaliate

-developing a quickly worsening anxiety disorder which, again, was treated with “did you take your medicine?” (not even psychiatric medicine either. fucking salt pills.) as well as mom taking me to the doctors when she’d “get fed up” with me and then talk for me the entire time

-the entire experience of having a violent, narcissistic, borderline, drug addict for a mother

-coming out as bisexual to my mother, who quickly shut down my queerness, only to try to kill me when she found out i was truly involved with a girl (over the internet, not even in real life)

-falling in love with/becoming attached to people who used me for my emotional vulnerability, willingness to comply, and lack of understanding of sexual boundaries

-being sexually assaulted, then stalked and harassed by my assailant, as well as the experience of not being able to trust my friends since he’d befriended them

-having my ex almost immediately re-befriend my rapist after we broke up, presumably so they could both shit talk me

-holding several jobs under near constant surveillance from higher ups, having a mean and manipulative boss, and experiencing workplace discrimination based on my gender identity

and probably much more i’m forgetting...

why would i want to feel feelings? why would i want to continue to be in pain? being numb to everything seems so relieving. shutting the whole thing down instead of fixing what might be broken.