#hate that i miss people who've done the most damage to me because we had some good times

[thediktatortot]

Things I wish my brain didn't do on a constant basis:

Immediately jump to the worst conclusions about any change in someone's actions.

Think of things that are triggering and upsetting out of nowhere.

Miss people who've hurt me severely in the past.

Like...come on brain. Please 😵‍💫

[frosnpls]

cw rhory (and suicide) talk again and general mental health talk

following on from that post yesterday i do definitely need therapy because as much as i convince myself ive healed (and to be fair i have, his death may have been traumatic but its incredible how quickly you realise you were being abused when youre... not being abused anymore) i do sometimes miss him and i hate it. ill see things like accounts from others who've lost people to suicide and it triggers that deep emptiness i felt when he first died despite the fact that he essentially ruined the first few years of my adult life

part of me wishes id never even met him but then i dont know if i would be as close to the friends i have now without him having been there (most of them anyway, if we pretend he didnt have one my best friends blocked because he would get jealous of how much fun i had speaking to her) and i also think he would have. died a lot sooner if i hadnt met him. his brother in law once told me it seemed like id afforded them two more years with him alive and i think it was meant to be grateful but in a way it was just upsetting because it made me feel guilty for all the times i had wished i didn't know him. it felt like i couldnt even afford a theoretical past version of myself that release. i know ultimately his death wasn't my fault and in fact i actively prevented it for a long time but it always always feels like i should have done something else. i feel like i shouldve told his brother that he was actively suicidal again but id come to his brother about it so many times that i think he just didnt think anything of it anymore.

and like despite how much i suffered through everything i dealt with with him i. do miss how we were sometimes. not him specifically, but the relationship we had when it was good. sometimes it upsets me that i cant even remember most of the positive times despite there being so many of them for the first two years we knew each other. sometimes i catch a glimpse of the tattoo on my arm when im getting out of the shower. the tattoo of one of his drawings, one of the only ones i managed to save when he deleted every single message he'd ever sent me. and sometimes it makes me feel like shit because i have this constant reminder of the boy who abused me emblazoned on my body, and nobody's first tattoo at the age of 21 should be a memorial to their boyfriend who killed himself, and it just makes me feel like shit because under everything else i really did love him and thats why i never walked away. thats why i didnt give up on him even when i started realising how damaging it all was for me. i loved him so much and i fucking hate saying it because logically i shouldnt have. its. a lot and its so complicated and nobody but me ever, ever saw it because he masked it around other people or would just dm me instead of saying anything out loud, and i could only tell people very nervously in private and i never had a way of proving it.

i think the hardest part is that my aocial circle now is almost exactly the same as it was when he was in it. all of our friends mourned that loss just the same. some of them know about the abuse now, but most of them don't, and the grief they will occasionally express (though never directly around me, which i appreciate) is so plain and easily explained and i almost feel jealous that i can't grieve the way they can. without any of the complicating factors. and that sounds so horrible but i wish my feelings about him were just SIMPLE.

i have a floater in my left eye. when i was with him, i developed stress stims. i would bash my hand against my head or bash my head against the corner of my desk. floaters are caused by head trauma. im consistently reminded of what that time was like every time i move my left eye in the right lighting.

i remember one particularly bad night where i cried for four hours straight because he just refused to talk to me like a normal person, blamed me for everything that was happening between us and told me to leave him alone and never speak to him again. i knew if i agreed to that he would kill himself as soon as he could. i knew i was the only thing keeping him alive, and that he resented me for that. i used to get acne on my nose and sleeve burns on my eyelids from crying so often and for so long each time.

it was fucking horrendous and i can't even vent to anyone because most of them grieved his death too. we don't even say his name - if he comes up it's always "you know" or "someone else, you know who i mean". so i think i... should really do a proper therapist hunt.

[justtogetthrough]

The weird part of this weekend was trying to explain why I lack certain foundational knowledge that most people in our culture have and I realized that the large swathes of memory gaps i have in my life due to near-death/brain damage situations is actually adding up.

I guess I should be gentler on myself for how much I struggle, given the number of brain injuries. My friends were shocked I didn't have basic knowledge of WW2 and asked for clarification about something that was bewildering to them, but I was like no I'm being serious because a) grade 10 History was in French for me so learning the info on top of the language adds a layer and i have vague memories of my teacher pantomiming vocabulary bc he refused to speak a word of English to us first of all, but also b) that semester I was having a psychotic and dissociative episode, and c) at the end of the semester I nearly died and was put on life support and basically wiped my memory for many months before and after. So, the history lessons didn't exactly stick ya know?

That brain injury took me years to recover from and I forgot how much work it took to rehab my memory and other basic functions. And then basically 10 years later I had another significant brain injury and I'm agonizing about the memory loss and my inability to learn new things and I might actually seek OT for it now. I'd forgotten how much I had to rehabilitate my brain the first time. I've done fuck all treatment wise for the second and the refusal to interrupt my schooling and my fairly quick resuming of substance abuse following the injury definitely prevented the healing and recovery I wish I had but if brains are so plastic, maybe 5 years later isn't too late and I can regain some functioning again.

It's weird because all I have to talk about with people is the wildness of my 20s and my life is super unrelatable to most people. But I forgot my adolescence was just as fucked but for different reasons and it's been a long time since I've had to tell people I dropped out of high school 3 times, it took me 7 years to graduate, and I switched schools/systems so much that I legit missed whole ass parts of high school that everyone else seemed to experience. Moving between semestered schools, non semestered, public, catholic, independent learning, home instruction, alternative school, missing weeks and months at a time, frequent hospitalizations, 2 suicide attempts, and leaving completely 3 different times.... on top of 2 serious brain injuries, a couple more less serious ones, a dissociative disorder since I was a child, and rampant mental illness... it was a miracle I graduated from public education at all and I certainly had a ~unique~ and very patchy curriculum lol.

It's really annoying how fucked up my life has been honestly.

And I hate that the only people I've ever met who've been able to relate to what I've been through are the crowd I met in my party phase, people who are in a perpetual party phase, and share none of my goals or ambition and so are really not the scene I want to be a part of. But the scene I want to be a part of? My whole life is the kind of whack shit they've only ever read about and it's weird because all I have to contribute in conversations is weird shit that usually makes people awkward or uncomfortable or just... like a thousand miles away. Open minded and still embracing me, but like we just come from 2 very different places and the more detail I share the more people are like ??????

Idk.

I'll be going to a whole new city at the end of this year and I'm really self conscious that I have no PG or non-alienating stories to tell about my life. Everything makes people feel bad for me or makes them just go "what the fuck".

I always feel like I'm a million miles away from people. I think this is why I want to work in child welfare so badly, even though it is massively triggering and retraumatizing in so many ways. It's the only way to feel like my experience isn't out of place.