#trauma vent

to the body i inhabit. like i'm at that place in healing where i can now discern the child-built-fantasy from the very real and horrifically uncomplicated it was for those men to do that to a child. to children. to me.

i have to live with it being real. there's no fall-back of "maybes" that i can dissociate to, to hide me from it really happened. to me. and i still live in this body.

it's vastly different now that i'm 30+. but it's still my body (was it ever?), still me. there's no dissociation where i can put down the weight of it. of it being real. of it really happening to me. any other lens is symptomatic.

and i have to handle that. all of this realness of things so horrifying, i have to keep even the hint of it happening from 95% of the people physically around me at any given time. and everyday i wake up now like oh god. it really happened to me. but i also wake up now know that i can handle handling it. i'm capable now.

like, don't get me wrong, the agony persists. like i still genuinely wanna kms sometimes over the memory-load alone lol but i can just... i dunno. i got the tools now and when i use them as intended, they work lol (imagine that). anyway i'm 31 and if things don't get better around you, take the good and learn from it, watch the bad and learn from their mistakes. bc you really do live and then you learn from living and i hate that but it makes sense.

give yourself and others the slack to make mistakes ffs. give people a chance to learn on that basic human-to-human level (rarely possible online, but still). fuck arguing your nuance like we know we all know anyway shut up and listen and learn.

do you wanna be right? do you want to engage? and be engaged with? and possibly learn? i mean, afterall, the more you know, the more you know. right? so, by that logic, aren't mistakes intrinsic? allow space for that for others. to unlearn, before they learn. and make sure you give (or MAKE) room for yourself to make mistakes. so you can learn. foster the environment for growth. but take no shit. balance.

revisit basic thoughts and memories in the privacy if your own physical head. learn about yourself, question yourself--if not to kill time vs algorithm doomscrolling. ai wants you to stop thinking for yourself; very literally. best thing we can do is log off.

log off of the fantasy or mask or whatever. sit with your thoughts--shut up about meditation--whatever thoughts, and follow their path. or i dunno, just try something to get your brain moving in new directions. does that make sense? (rhetorical lol but does it).

Your emotions elude you. You try to figure out how the situation at hand could’ve caused that much of an reaction in you. You don’t understand the logic behind it up until you go all the way back to memories of where the feeling first emerged. Usually it will trace back to a traumatic instance, and a small detail, wrong sentence or other sensory input was enough to trigger a flood of emotions.

You get that sense of impending doom, like smth will absolutely go wrong even though you have no rational explanation for it.

If you usually enjoy touch, you’re suddenly averse to it and the idea of it becomes uncomfortable.

You might suddenly feel the need for someone to comfort you even though you’re not sure for what, or what you’re even feeling.

You suddenly get the strong urge to isolate yourself and hide, flee the situation or social interaction and burry your head in the sand until it feels “safe” enough to come out again.

You feel the excessive need to daydream and to escape reality suddenly but you don’t really know why.

You might notice symptoms of dissociation in your body. Your hands feel unreal. You feel disconnected from yourself all of a sudden.

Your sense of time changes.

Your emotions feel like they don’t really belong to you all of a sudden and you feel a strong need to keep that seperation up.

Intense gut wrenching shame right after the emotional flashback hits. Even if you can’t identify the emotional flashback, you can definitely identify that sudden shame.