Tw: Ideation type things, mental health type things
It really disturbs me to know how close to āļøć” myself I was. For over 20 years, I was convinced that I was just fundamentally flawed; destined to do something stupid and irrevocable. I'm stuck between mourning for my younger self, and desperately scrambling to build my adult life back together so I can have a reasonably good future. I get this feeling of absolute repulsion when I think about my sickest weeks/years at the moment. Like I physically gag thinking about what I was feeling, wondering how many years I shaved off from my future. How much cognitive reserve was spent just trying to make a number on the scale go down? What damage did I do to my brain? I mourn when I think back to 4th grade. I would get home from school and "act out" what I saw my classmates doing (how they were walking, how they sat in their chairs, how they talked to each-other). I would rehearse it religiously, moving around the kitchen or standing in front of the mirror. It hurts me deeply to remember this. I was so desperate to just be and feel "regular". I would wish for it every day. I mourn when I think of 6th grade onward, battling this unrelenting and confusing urge to inflict pain on myself. How "coping skills" was confusing as a term for me because I didn't know what I was coping WITH. Therapists would tell me what to do when I felt "angry" or "sad", but that wasn't what I was feeling when I wanted to [whoops] myself. Instead it was torment. This unrelenting, unholy friction and INFERNAL NOISE. Like everything is wrong, and the wrongness just stacks, stacks, stacks. Pain releases enough of the wrongness to get me through the next moment. Now I'm having to train that impulse out of myself and identify what it was that dysregulated me in the first place. I'm... I don't know what I feel right now. I literally excelled in ELA, yet I didn't find the language for my anguish until I was nearly 31. I can't even describe what it felt like to unmask for the first time in....as long as I can remember. I didn't know I was masking, that the crushing weight I felt in all my muscles was the mask. I didn't know that Normal Things were Extremely Hard for me because my expectations were SO HARD. Its like learning myself for the first time, I guess. I'm learning my limits, how to regulate/make accommodations for myself (Like man its 2026. I don't have to go into the supermarket if it burns my wires. If looping the same song for 2 hours, wearing the same hoodie for 5 days and avoiding infernal noise is what keeps me from spiraling it doesn't matter if I feel judged doing it).
