#my mother called me out for sabotaging myself by being afraid of imperfection so fuck me i guess

[tardis--dreams]

I can write 5 term papers à 8000 words in 2 months!

[loveiwillsurvivethis]

So, I slept fourteen hours today, and while asleep and after waking I’ve been working on grasping what’s been going on with me health wise.

Not that what’s been going on itself has been lost on me, things such as depression, anxiety, dissociation, now sleep disorders I need to be evaluated for. But how to handle them, has been.

I obsess (and OCD is on the above list too) over fix it fix it fix it. I’ve been able to bring down that obsession, and kicking self pity in the ass has helped a ton with me actually learning things again, rather than the “I know I know - I’m still panicking but I know” response while trying to force solutions into working without fully understanding.

But gods I wanted to say I did. Gods I wanted to stop. And it wasn’t until I very fine lined, nearly nuked one relationship, it finally hit I’m nuking everything, and whining about it. And oh boy I haven’t been perfect since. Every day I make mistakes. Today I made some pretty big ones.

But I’ve started actually understanding what I’m doing and what I need to do. Not what people need to do for me. That was a big one. I wanted other people to make me feel better. Others hurt me, I felt helpless on my own, and tired, oh so tired. So someone else carry me. Someone else make it stop.

Something I’m still reminding myself is that my intentions don’t count for shit. Like I can say I mean well all I want. I can say I didn’t mean to hurt you until the cows come home. That doesn’t take back what I did. That doesn’t help me handle why I did it. I didn’t mean to. But my god the more I say that the more I find I’m feeling sorry for myself, the more I’m convinced I’m out of control, the more helpless I feel, as if intentions and “well I didn’t WANT to hurt you” are enough to just automatically guide my decisions and over-ride the trauma’s that I’ve gone through and put myself through - yup, self inflicted trauma, that was a pill I’ve had to swallow too.

No, it takes work. It takes daily, life long work. And honestly, I don’t want to die, I want the people I care for to know how much I love them, I want to spend a life in creation, sharing what I make and learn with other people, and helping them. And that’s worth the work, even when it’s overwhelming some days. Bad days are bad days. Not the rest of my life.

 Like, I want this emphasized. I’ve changed so much, in a lot of ways for the worse with the friends around me the past three years. I was someone that didn’t know how to take care of their selves but I would stay up until 6 am talking, I clung to hope and worked to do my best, no matter how bad I felt.

And then I got caught up in feeling sorry for myself. It wasn’t immediate. It started with self fear. Things came to surface and exploded, I panicked. I started to get a handle and then got called a liar, got told I needed things I didn’t. I stopped holding onto the people I cared so hard for who had been helping and got mixed up between them and bad advice, bad thinking, bad influences, and then self pity. Mostly as a barrier on because I couldn’t accept things I’d done in that period. So feel sorry for me so it wasn’t my fault. And that stunted me hard. I did so much for the past year to hurt myself, hurt those around me, because no I would never have stolen money, no I would never have shamed you, I would never have sexualized anyone. I know I have related trauma, I know I have multiple personalities, but no I would never, I would never, I didn’t mean to.

It was them.

It was them.

It was them.

I was the victim.

I’m so sorry.

And that thinking stunted me so hard. On one hand that was a lot to swallow. On the other hand I should have been talking more, when I was afraid to. Like you don’t undergo that much with someone with the intention to just leave after. They have told me so many times I’m human, I take time to learn, effort to learn, that I’m imperfect with good and bad and weird and everything in-between, that even with that I should find pride in myself.

And I was stuck over obsessing if I said one more thing, added one more to the pile, it’d be the last thing to break the relationships and they all would leave.

So defense mechanisms kicked in and I left them unchecked, because they felt right at the time.

I have massively shit on their trust, I have strained and tugged and tested the relationships in ways I shouldn’t have, it’s hard for me to look at them and still not remember everything I’ve done to abuse them and my relationships with them.

That, and trauma from past relationships I didn’t want to acknowledge in full. I wanted to be over my exes. I wanted ex friends to mean nothing. I wanted the compounding trust issues to not exist. So every time I got closer to the friends I keep now, I’d panic and shove them away, and pretend that the trauma wasn’t why. It was just me. I was inherently fucked up.

I’m sorry.

I’m sorry.

I’m sorry.

And I never got better.

I’ve poured myself whole-heartedly into empty relationships. Most of my past ones were one sided. I’ve been isolated and socially abused most of my life. I don’t understand how relationships work. I don’t understand every cue. I don’t recognize mutual investment. I don’t register I’m cared for, and once I do, I recoil hard.

And I’ve been wanting them to make me feel better about it. As much as I was putting my faith into just being some inherent fuck up, I was also holding them responsible for making me feel better about everything left untreated from my past, my traumas. While pulling them in my back and forth of “don’t get too close - but don’t leave”.

Talking it out helps. But I’ve got to pull my own weight too. So finally, after far too long but finally, I started researching relationship trauma.

And one of the first things I read was not to try and solve the trauma in the current relationships. No one should be playing hero, and I shouldn’t be offering it up for that sort of attention. It’s trauma, it takes time, and my trauma is not my current relationship.

And it’s so simple, so simple but something I completely missed, and it’s something set off by the line of “The brain needs time to process traumatic information”.

In the beginning of these new relationships, the very fucking beginning, I found out a friend I had been with for 7 years was back stabbing me and manipulating me the whole time, hiding things and lying, and tried to sabotage relationships with others as well, including these ones.

And then I broke up with my boyfriend at the time, who I swore I was in love with, and was using me, neglecting me, and abusing me, while covering up for the fact that he was gay, and this was dating him a second time right after another guy abused me, cheated on me, threatened me, and then abandoned me, who I was only dating because in-the-closet “someone please dick me” abandoned me for struggling with mental illness while living in an abusive home, and I wasn’t “happy” enough (nor did I have a dick, and he had lost interest in my “scary” vag). And I broke up with him that first time because I thought it was my fault.

So they help me get away from that, and then help me realize someone I thought was my friend for 9 years, who I had been living with, was out to use me. Nearly getting me killed, keeping me unemployed, leaving me without food or water, watching me as I slept, stealing the little bit that I had, and letting me know he was better than me, he was right and I was wrong, he was all knowing, but he needed me, and don’t I dare leave.

Everyone I thought of as a staple, that I trusted and cared for, I learned better, and I became suicidal somewhere in the mess of all that as well. I am so glad I hung on, I’m so glad I learned better, and got out with such helping hands before things were even worse.

But holy shit it fucked me up.

These new friends then got me a new home, a safe one. And I cried, because I was bought a bed, the first one in two years. I cried because I was offered food. I cried because they were worried about the bruises I woke with. And I was terrified. I was a clashing of realizing this was the safest I had ever been and absolutely confused and fearful of what was going on, how things worked. The relationships being established were so new, there were signals and expectations I didn’t understand, needs I haven’t known about.

And then I got diagnosed with multiple personalities. A disorder I had been suppressing. A disorder I had been abused by. A disorder I was told “there’s no way you could have”. And in a rush, certain things made sense, and in the same stride, the personalities themselves swelled, enraged and bottled, and very well let me know they were here now.

And in the panic of it all I latched onto the woman who called me a child, a traumatized child, and that she would be my mother.

It caused a spiral I’m still pulling myself out of. It’s a spiral that ended with me sleeping in my car again, homeless, of me losing that car, living back with abusive relatives, of shoving the way the friends that got me away from abusers, got me into safety, got me to a car, a good job, shoving them away out of panic and fear because it felt like far too much and I had begun clinging onto the wrong things.

I went from endlessly clinging onto ways I could help myself to wanting to be saved, wanting attention, wanting pity, wanting distractions, and I got told I wasn’t acting like myself anymore.

I hadn’t acted like myself in a good year.

And now I’m starting to step off that spiral, and stepping back into square one of that whole mess - I have trauma regarding trust and relationships and I’ve been wanting them to make it better.

It’s not their place, and it’s not what helps. Friends are support to lean on, never, ever cures. I’ve got to step back into pulling my own weight again, every day, day in, day out. And work on the fact that as much as I know I can trust them, there are times I’m going to panic, and they’re there to help while I learn to recover from what’s past.

All of this set off by this one line in this article.

I’ve been wanting to say I’ve been overwhelmed for two years now as well, and it felt true, but I didn’t know how to say it, I didn’t know why. That transition, that overwhelmed me, I don’t feel I was ready for that much change at once. But it’s past tense now. I was overwhelmed. I had lost control. Now it’s picking myself back up. Properly, this time, and taking the time I need.

[daydreamingnightdrinking]

The Sea of Ice

Caspar David Friedrich, 1823 – 24.

Do you recall the split second between the moment when you slightly loosened your grip on that fragile object and the silence before the break?

Starting from that specific brief wave of of time, an overwhelming sense of emotion swallows all of us up, from dread to exasperation to anger or even to sorrow.

Then,

there

it was,

…

…

…the shatter.

The swift and crisp cracking sound echoed throughout the vacuum you were at, and after that instant, you were left with nothing else but the broken pieces to pick up.

No matter who we are, what we identify with and how we were brought up (till this day), we are all broken one way or another. We trot along the the paths that were paved and given to us in life while occasionally finding ourselves muddled within sticky situations or crossroads that force us to make a choice that we don’t necessarily want to make.

It was said that without pain, there will be no gain, and that experience is the mother of wisdom.

We used to run with such carelessness that evolves into treading with carefulness, because of our unique wears and tears. The temporary wounds, that may or may not leave permanent scars, serve as our individual warning signs to protect and prevent ourselves from alarming situations. Sometimes we become too overprotective of ourselves to the extent that it may be sabotaging anything genuine and organic to develop. Life is pretty fucking difficult.

We’re shattered and hurt.

Sometimes we tend to lose a little part of ourselves that we cannot ever retrieve back from these fractures, just like the microscopic parts of the broken pieces of glass and ceramic wares that we’ve (accidentally? or perhaps, in a spur and flash of rage, incidentally? – definitely not judging here, despite never doing so) smashed. We only realize what was lost at that time when we tend to step on the shards that we’ve neglected to sweep up. After all, it is so, so hard to pick up all of the bits amidst all the pain. Occasionally, there’s a blunt bittersweet sensation that comes with it. Introspection and perhaps some objectivity accompany this feeling as we teleport back to the past and reach out and hang by some lingering, specific memories.

I’m imperfect.

I’m aware of my imperfection, and yet I still claw onto the notion that maybe, if I were to try hard enough, and be good enough, I’d reach perfection.

“(In) sufficient”.

“(In) adequate”.

“(Im) perfect”.

I consistently wager all of me on unfeasible bets. I strive to be the brand new, or if not, at the bare minimum, the pristine and mint condition.

It seems absolutely ridiculous to settle for less.

That way, perhaps the people who have left, or whom I have left, would have wanted to stay, or would have let me wanted to stay. I, or maybe we, wouldn’t lose and experience agony…so to say.

I break and it seems like a part of my heart gets cut and stabs every single time someone leaves. As we mutually, or forcefully drift, it feels as if that person managed to hollow out a chunk of me. My facade, however, will always look complete.

In plain sight, it seems absolutely ridiculous to aim for something that is nonexistent. It just took (more than some) time for me to notice that. I still tumble, then trip and fall back to the infinite prison of perfection frequently. It’s quite simple to self-loathe and to convince myself that I’m nothing more than a broken record of fuck ups. A little too easy, perhaps.

Usually after these tough farewells, I try, and oh, I really do try, to maintain and sustain myself. Ultimately, all I manage to do is to crash, burn, and fall apart. I’ve placed more effort than I’d like to admit into keep up and remain identical, yet always somehow end up to obliterate.

It’s impossible to persist in the same form in the face of destruction, so all we can ever do in the face of ruin is to realize that we will never, ever be the same as before.

Kintsugi © tsugi.de

I’ve always been fascinated with art, but as we all live, learn, and branch out, I managed to stumble upon a type of traditional Japanese art called kintsugi (金継ぎ), also known as kintsukuori (金繕い). Obviously, I can’t type Japanese, so I’m relying on Wikipedia, an article on Lifegate (always cross check your sources), as well as copy and paste over here.

Kin translates to “golden”, and tsugi to “repair”. So kintsugi here is the art of repairing broken pottery with materials such as liquid gold, liquid silver, or even lacquer dusted with powdered gold.

Pretty neat, huh?

I’ve done some digging and found out that kintsugi is also tied to wabi-sabi, which is a Japanese philosophy that essentially (in a nutshell) embraces imperfection and celebrates the beauty of it.

Wabi translates to roughly “simplicity”, and sabi to “beauty of age and wear”, and if you want to read more about it, refer to this page.

Needless to say, I am in utter love with the serenity and simplicity that kintsugi and wabi-sabi embodies already, despite the rudimentary knowledge I have for them.

It brings me an inexplicable sense of tranquility as I look at the works of kintsugi. Is it a bit presumptuous to compare each and every single one of us as some sort of kintsugi? We are all work in progress.

It’s impossible to keep ourselves whole and unscathed from all of the experiences and memories that we went, are, and will go through in our entire lifetime.

So here I am, telling you that it is okay – in fact, more than okay to allow complete obliteration. It could be the end of any of anything that holds dear for you. It could be an organic or inorganic destruction, really, whatever floats your boat.

There comes a time where we will stand still, observe, obsessively ponder, and be afraid to take a step. No one wants to deconstruct what he / she has built just to scrutinize every part to precisely see what and where it all went wrong. No one wants to figure out which part was fucked up. You see, to open and touch that part is to inflict pain on oneself. It’s not the typical, passive criticism that one casts onto him / herself of how worthless he / she is. It’s recognizing what part or what belief and value that he / she has that led to the final demise.

We all mess up one way or another. A lot of us don’t even have a heart of gold. We dive into actions that will stir up future regrets, and we swim within the depths of remorse fabricated by our own memories.

It’s okay.

It’s the cliched saying that it’s the matter of time. It’s always with the assistance impartial time. What we all deemed impossible to do eventually gets done.

The biggest remnants get picked up and pieced together first. Those are your core values and beliefs, and incredulous or not, you as a being that remained mostly or partially intact despite the harsh collapse. The salvageable smaller bits are the relationships and differences that you tinker and adjust to after the breakage. Those take some more time to connect back together after the damage.

The parts that you can trace and piece back together are important, but we tend to forget tiny pieces that we sweep and throw away. Those are the outlines of our individual works of kintsugi.

Allow yourself to recollect the people, experiences, heartbreaks and aches that broke – or is currently breaking you.

Without them, you are devoid of the golden silhouettes that fix you back into one whole (and perhaps a little more resilient) piece again.

There is no end without a beginning; there is no growth without pain.

No more harboring ill-will and keeping counts of the past, for darling, these old and new repairs are what truly makes you stand out.

I’m able to see the imperfection in others and distribute a part of me, and a part of my love to them. It has and never will be because of some savior complex. I’ve recognized my incapability to fully save myself, let alone anyone else.

They say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I truly believe that the most breathtaking parts are your unique golden mends.

Don’t ever intentionally hide your flaws and fractures, because there are people out there who will love you irregardless.

Those are the ones to keep, as they are gold. Just like your individual cracks.

And yes, the dear past and present beings who were / are involved in my life – you’ve all made some sort of fissure, some sort of impact. Some positive, and some negative. Some of you shattered and broke me into multiple, miniature pieces. It took more time than I’m willing to admit to pick myself back up. In fact, I’m in the process of doing so now…yet again. Ironically, you have probably forgotten about me already, but that’s okay as well.

However, I still think of you as golden.

You will always be golden.

And I? I will not always be broken: thank you for the cracks and the lessons.

Obliteration as a Last Resort (and how this is completely, or even more than okay). The Sea of Ice Caspar David Friedrich, 1823 - 24. Do you recall the split second between the moment when you slightly loosened your grip on that fragile object and the silence before the break?