glorious dinosaur steed

I've been away, for all intents and purposes, for more than a decade.

I try to come back, sometimes, because this place is unbelievably important to me, and because I adore you all and I miss you immensely. But I think I'm trying to step back inside of a person who doesn't exist, any more. I'm never going to be a twenty-six year old version of Jay, ever again. And I don't want to be. I wasn't even calling myself Jay, back then. I didn't know who I was.

And I never actually told you why I left.

I had a friend, at the time. A friend who I loved very much, and who I would have done anything for, given anything to, should they have asked.

I did it because I wanted to. Because I loved them, and I wanted to show them how much I loved them, how loveable they were.

But the more I gave that friend, the more they wanted.

I gave more, and more, and more. They loved the way that I made them feel, and slowly, one by one, there were reasons why I wasn't allowed to give that attention to anyone else. X person had wronged them, Y person was bad for me. I had to be available for immediate contact from the moment I was awake, until the moment I slept. I stopped taking naps during the day, for fear that I'd miss a message and wake up to an angry spiral too far gone for me to fix it. I woke early and slept late, constantly vigilant. I remember being so exhausted, in the end, that I once turned up to a psych appointment and paid $200 for them to just let me sleep on the couch for an hour, just let me rest, because the appointment was the only valid excuse I had for being out of reach for more than a few minutes in a row.

I find it difficult to talk about how it felt at the time, I can only talk about it through my retrospective eyes, now. I think, at the time, it felt like I was special, like I was their chosen person. Everyone else in their life had hurt or abandoned them. I had to prove that I would never do that. My job was to do whatever I could to make their life better, to make them happy.

But I wasn't special. The only selection criterion for my role was that I tolerated cruelty longer than anyone else. I was just the only person who didn't know I deserved better treatment.

I learnt not to be too friendly with people we interacted with. I learnt that my friend would be bubbly and effusive in public, and that I would often not know I had done wrong until we were alone. I would not know what I had done, only that I was being punished. They called it punishment.

Eventually, when there were no more threats to our relationship in the real world, no more connections to sever, the online world became a target. I was posting on Tumblr, they would tell me, for attention. They would tell me that I was doing and saying things because I thought I was better than my friend, or I was deliberately doing things that I knew would make them angry. Because I wanted to make them angry, I wanted to upset them, I wanted to hurt them.

I never knew. I never knew what the right way to avoid their anger was. I never knew the right thing to do or say. Maybe there was no right thing. Maybe that was the point. I know that they would lie, about anything, for any reason, or no reason, about what they did, or said, or liked, or about what I did, or about my own thoughts and feelings, until I started to keep notes, because I couldn't trust my memory any more. Maybe the point was that I was always wrong.

I couldn't learn the rules, so eventually I gave up. And I left you all.

And I have regretted it ever since.

I don't think there'll ever be a version of me who will come back here regularly, because a lot of the person I used to be isn't available to me, any more. Maybe I'm wrong. I'd love to be wrong. But I can't try to be a dead version of me, any more. I can only try teach myself to love the version of me that I am, now.

I don't have the words to tell you about how I got out. Somehow, it was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life, and yet the simplest action. Years and years and years of professional planning and support, only to end with a text message and the block button.

I'm trying to be happy, now. I'm trying to do the difficult work, every single day, of rebuilding my broken connections with the world. I'm putting myself out there, making myself vulnerable, asking to be loved. It's terrifying. I'm trying to recognise my tendency to lean towards unhealthy relationships, because they feel more comfortable, more familiar. I am trying to learn to embrace discomfort.

I'm back at school, now. I'm pursuing art. Fuck it, you know? I sometimes... I sometimes, every now and again, feel flashes of what my life could be like, from now on.

But I miss you all. I adore you, and I miss you.

I've debated doing this, what I'm about to do, for a while, now, because it's a scary thing to do. I don't know if it's the right thing to do, because it opens a door that I've kept closed for a while. But I guess I'm trying to be vulnerable. I guess I'm trying to embrace discomfort.

This part, this part I'm writing right now, is somehow much scarier than talking about the bad times. Asking for kindness and support is much, much harder than accepting cruelty. And yet the only purpose of this post is to offer a way to reconnect, if you'd like to? It's nothing beyond that.

I'm scared to link my two worlds, the old one and the new one. I'm scared of what the old world will think of my new one, and what the new will think of the old. I'm scared that I won't be good enough for either of them. And I know that it will give access to someone who has been a ghost to me for a while, now.

But I miss you all, and I'm trying, so, so hard not to let fear of that one ghost govern everything I do, any more. So.

Fuck it. You know?

If you happen to want to find me, again, for any reason, if you ever need to, I am here. You don't have to follow me, there, I'm not looking for attention, I'm not asking for your time, or your energy. I just. I am sick of ghosts, and I don't want to be one, any more.