#kryptonie

it’s not very hard for me to cut people out of my life. i’ve never really given it much thought but i can decide that a person is dead to me and i just slowly and effectively let him go, to only be thought of seldomly if ever. i sometimes thought my ability to make that decision can be alarming. quite frankly, it’s scary. to say to yourself, i don’t want to have a relationship with my sister anymore and just like that never think of her or imagine a life where she is part of it. 

i usually do this with people who hurt me, justified or otherwise. growing up, my defense mechanism to not get hurt involved suppressing my feelings and just not feel anything at all. i can talk about the times as a teenager i would cut myself because i would be in situations where i would think to myself, “right, this is a sad experience but why am i not? this is a time of feeling sadness or longing but why do i not?” and so to generate that sensation, i would cut myself with scissors or a knife and pour alcohol on my bleeding arm. but that is a story for another day.

i don’t think i ever planned to just think of cutting people out of my life. on a certain level, it was done consciously but the change happened on autopilot for the most part. i guess my mind realized how convenient it was to just pretend the person i despise, the person who hurt me is no more, never to hurt me again or be given any thought thereafter. it’s pretty convenient isn’t it? for the longest time, i thought of it as my superpower. and it was. i will always be grateful for the times it saved me from myself or from other people. 

but i am no longer in that situation; my experiences with people that i interact with are different. no one is shouting at me every day. there is no criticism or ridicule. there is no anxiety that at any point, my day will be at the mercy of someone else’s bad day. that i will be subjected to emotional, mental and sometimes physical torment. i am now healing slowly: understanding what boundaries are, realizing the environment i had growing up was not what other people experienced, learning to love myself, trying to forgive myself. in all this, i realize that my superpower has become my kryptonite. 

the kind of relationships i want to cultivate and grow in my life will not happen unless i stop finding faults in people so i can come up with a reason to cut them out of my life. isn’t that amazing? years of being away from a life that is toxic and problematic and my eyes open to this level of awareness. of who i was, who i am and who i want to become. 

in the past month, i stumbled upon this gem of a realization. the reason i cut people and play it off as my way of removing negative people from my life is because i didn’t have the tools or the agency to address it in a healthy manner. and this is a whole different ballgame because now i have to reassess which relationships really required my drastic action and which ones i can revisit and see if i can now act on it in a more positive, more understanding state of thinking. 

since this is a new way of thinking, i cannot fully explain quite yet how it has affected me or how it will affect how i will deal with negative experiences moving forward. but i will think about it some more and talk about it once i have a better grasp of this golden aha moment. 

i’m grateful to know that there is hope for healing and growth for me. that it’s not too late to put in the self work and be better. if anyone is reading this, i want you to know that our situations may be different but we can all take the time to do this important work of healing ourselves like our lives depend on it. 

because they do. our lives depend on it.

i love you,

You know what? I think this could be a great story. I'm not even hesistant to say that, like with GOTHAM. I think the TV show about the fall of Krypton could be cool as hell. - SM