#... including the tags people leave when rbing my posts

[mamawasatesttube]

the thing about kon-el is that. more people should read kon comics (konmics, if you will) (and i mean like beyond yj98). they literally have kon in them

[broodsys]

rbing that post about communication has me thinking about so much of my past

so! this will be p heavy but the tl;dr is what i said in the tags: open, honest communication is fucking hard. it's really, really hard for a lot of people, myself absolutely included. but btwn therapy and consistently working on it and knowing what kind of person i want to be, i've managed to make a lot of progress towards it - but it's still so hard

just thinking about the big why of my being like this, and it's a pretty obvious answer: i was abused so much as a child. my dad was abusive in nearly every way a person can be, and his mood needed to be constantly monitored, so i existed in a state of endless hypervigilance as a child. as a neurodivergent, disabled child, at that.

the slightest thing would set him off. he'd break furniture. he'd physically abuse us. he would call the cops on us. in fact, he called the cops on us so often that our apartment managers threatened to kick us out, and we were so fucking poor that there would have been nowhere else for us to go.

and my mom... well, she had no ability to handle anything more than him. when i would break down, she'd yell at me, she'd blame me, she'd guilt-trip and condescend to me. i had to be perfect and quiet, to take every bit of fear and despair and anger - again, as a child, throughout my entire life - and bottle it up. nothing could leak out, because if it did, then i was the one making a problem. i was disrupting the household. i was risking another full-on fight.

so i had to control control control. i had to control myself. i had to control the behavior of my friends, both bc of my family and bc of the apartment managers who blamed me - and by extension, my family - for literally everything that happened, and kept threatening us with eviction. as a child, i had to exert control over my friends so i wouldn't lose my home bc they were being too disruptive.

i was never allowed to react. i wasn't allowed to cry. i wasn't allowed to be angry, certainly. every expressed emotion was punished, guilt-tripped, was met with blame for any further disruption my emotions caused the household.

open, honest communication was such a far-fetched idea. in a lot of ways, it still is. i still have a deep-seated recoil reaction. but i deal with it. i understand its origins. i understand that it is no longer true for me, and that it is no longer serving me. i work to dismantle it, and work to express myself - and not just my feelings, but my boundaries, something i was never, ever able to do when i was younger, bc it wasn't permitted.

it's not like i'm over it. i spent the formative years of my life being so controlled and so abused that i'm like 90% sure it's why i have one of my chronic illnesses. like that situation and the endless, inescapable stress of it worked hard to destroy my body. but i'm trying! i am trying. and i am learning, and growing, and i am able to express myself and able to discuss things and i only freak out sometimes, and when i do freak out i tend to just leave the situation until i settle. i can recognize my reactivity. if i can't control or stop it, well, that's okay; but i can recognize it, and recognize when to step away, and that's the important bit, really