(I just reached chapter 4 of this game and this song comes on... I like.
The final section almost reminds me of the last section of the Heimdallr theme from Trails of Cold Steel, although it doesn't actually get there or have any relation otherwise lol.)
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I know I said I was going to do less serious posts... but psyche.
(Or as an old high school friend once wrote, "sike.")
Today was actually a decent day, but this has been on my mind for too long now.
Where to start.
I realize I haven't really been tracking the progression of my "recovery" in the past year and a half, so to speak, if you could even call it that. I have called it "learning to cope" in recent months, only not the happy kind of coping. It's really more like "meh I'm coping" if anything, because it has meant learning to accept situations that I've never really wanted to accept in the first place.
...the side effect being this ever increasing insecurity that I've been struggling with of late: the sense that my voice, or my sense of self, has no meaning or power. That I have no real agency in my life.
Well, I technically still have agency in the ways in which I can respond to situations I have no control over (until I stop trusting my mind, that is), but I don't have agency in the areas that matter to me more.
For lack of a better term, I'm sick of compromising.
The way I'm describing this so far, it makes it sound like I haven't really accepted anything yet. But really, I acknowledge that there are battles in my life that aren't worth fighting, things I want that might actually be unhealthy for me, people whose behaviors I have no control over, and dreams I have that will probably never realistically happen. I've said my peace with those things already, and I'm being purposefully vague here because I don't really have the capacity to elaborate in detail right now, nor do I really want to.
It's more that the process of "making peace" with those things has kinda drained me of a lot of the optimism I used to have. If anything, I was probably too naively optimistic about things I could do with my life in the past, and even now I still find myself having random bursts of wanting to re-initiate those things, though not as strongly as I used to.
But eventually, when situations turn and people don't live up to my apparently unrealistic expectations, I end up reinforcing behaviors and thoughts I never really wanted to have in the first place:
- "I have to keep a distance in order to protect myself."
- "It's not worth my energy or time to argue over this."
- "Just deal with it."
I never said my means of coping was healthy.
I bring up memories that have irked me in the past with multiple people in my life, situations that have actually triggered me (and God, I hate using trigger as a verb or the fact that it even applies to me), and they don't even remember saying what they said or doing what they did, so it's effectively as if the thing never happened in the first place. Or worse, they call my memory of the account into question, so it's basically as if I was getting upset over literally nothing. Then why did I get so fucking upset about it in the first place?
One person told me it's because I'm too "sensitive."
Please, learn how to empathize with and understand victims of abuse, even if you don't know anyone else personally who has experienced it, because that language is one of the worst things you can say to someone who has experienced abuse. Even if it's just "low level abuse over a long period of time," as my therapist has called it. Just like how my dysthymia isn't as severe as real depression, but still persists long enough for it to affect my ability to function at work and in my day-to-day at random moments when I least want it to.
It's abuse that's made worse by my own mind repeating those words over and over again, long after their originator has stopped saying them, to the point where I've internalized their voices in my head and still subconsciously torture myself with them mentally when I'm not self-aware enough to realize it. And people will never know when that's happening because I never voice what I'm thinking in those moments until it's too late and I explode and then they think I'm suddenly overreacting over nothing.
This is what it feels like to feel powerless, to feel like you're being silenced no matter how loud you try to scream. Because what you're screaming might not be worth screaming about anyway.
That time a year and a half ago when I screamed into my pillow in the middle of the night, in the midst of one of the worst nights of my mental life, asking for God or someone else to come, and no one came. I stopped believing in hope that night.
Well, it was my fault for expecting anyone to come in the first place, because I never actually asked anyone else for help in real life like I was supposed to.
But I was depressed, so I literally didn't feel capable of asking for help at that moment because that's what depression does to you. And I couldn't trust my mind either, as I didn't know how I would react if the people I went to for help responded in a way that might actually make me worse, as has already happened before. And has still continued to happen to this day even after I supposedly got better. So why would I still trust people after all of this?
It doesn't matter what your intentions are, even if you never intended to hurt me, because I still feel consequences from your actions anyway. I just have to fucking deal with it. Like I deal with everything else in my life.
I realize that I've been making large-scale generalizations about people, and that most of my friends and family aren't the way I've been describing, but my mind has this tendency to magnify the worst of my experiences until it's all I can ever think about. Such that when I do experience a legitimate negative moment or interaction, it becomes all the more worse instantaneously and I literally don't know how to process or react in that moment, and end up living with two+ weeks worth of depression instead.
I have to ask myself everyday if what I'm thinking or feeling right now is reasonable, because at any given moment the thoughts I'm having could suddenly become "unreasonable."
(That said, it's nice to have someone validate your thoughts once in a while so that you know it's not you who's going crazy.)
omg i always thought it was sike
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