howdy

Your life just changes on a random thursday sometimes I guess

There was a guy in university who would stalk and harass the women on campus. He'd often corner them and demand creepy things of them- like that they leave their boyfriends because he wanted to be their friend. Major incel type guy. I once caught him cornering a girl in the library and stepped in. I pretended to know her and to be her friend, and he recognized me (because I'd told him to GTFO before) and got pissed & left. I offered the girl my phone # and said if she needed help again to call or text me. We left the interaction at that, and I went on with my day.

I was super proud of myself. I don't tolerate abuse- especially not in public settings- so I was excited that I stood up for my morals and tried to help. I told my mom about the interaction, and I remember feeling so deflated when her reply was "She probably thought you were some weirdo trying to get with her because you gave her your number." I couldn't imagine saying that to my kid after she did something good, man. Wtf >:'DD

Another memory. I was sick as a dog with chronic lymes disease during the height of the pandemic and decided I couldn't travel. I wasn't sleeping, I wasn't keeping food down properly, and was dropping weight like crazy. (She joked that she wanted lymes so that she could also lose weight that quickly. Dad outright told me that I was faking it, despite the symptoms and heavy dose of antibiotics I was on.) They had to cancel my plane ticket- which I felt bad about. When they got back, mom said not once, but twice that she told her side of the family that "I was done with them." I remember the smile on her face as she said it.

I later told her that I felt like I didn't belong in the family. She told me it was all in my head.

I once was eating a bowl of ice cream (finally found a brand that I could keep down on the antibiotics,) and it was in one of those tiny single serve cups. Both my parents chided me for eating "too much" and that if I kept at it, I'd be wearing a gastric bag in no time. I'd lost sixteen pounds in about a month because I was so ill.

Since properly cutting the cord from my mom I feel like I am no longer afraid of people attacking me over innocuous things. My worst fear used to be having my intentions misunderstood or warped, that people knew about some evil thing in me that I couldn't quite see. I realized that when someone gives you grief about something innocent, it has everything to do with them and nothing to do with you.

Don't ever internalize it when people twist your words into something that perpetuates their own warped self-perception. They aren't particularly good people, just bullies. I've gone my whole life afraid that I'm a predator or an abuser, this evil bad no good person who needs to be kept on a strict moral leash at all times. That constant monitoring turned into OCD.

Abusers will project their own reality onto you. Learning how to look critically at your own actions versus theirs will help break the spell. I was accused of being a predator or s*x pest from a very young age. Completely innocuous things were warped into something grotesque. That was only the surface of our odd, toxic codependency.

When I let her go, I didn't feel sadness. I did feel some guilt for the rupture of our already tenuous relationship, but that was the extent of it. I feel... secure in myself. This is my life, and I will no longer go through it feeling like an alien. I didn't even cry.