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theverytinybird · 7 years ago

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When I said “stop stalking me,” I meant you.

How is it possible to “take responsibility for the impact [your] actions have had” while simultaneously coming to the dismissive conclusion “that it’s okay for our emotional needs to be different”?

When I say you’re exhausting, I’m including this exact interaction now, and how you don’t fully consider your words or the way you handle people. Was responding, was getting your voice out, more important than anything you actually said?

Are our emotional needs different?

What the fuck do you even know about me?

You, who in a dozen years hasn’t taken the time of day to fully consider me a whole human being. You, who could ignore that I was a thinking, feeling being, until you were forced to consider my heart because you had needs; You needed to know why you were met with a wall of silence, why you couldn’t access me whenever you wanted anymore. Now, finally, you had to think of me, when thinking of me wouldn’t actually benefit you.

Maybe you put in a little work, after the fact, but even then, you did it because you wanted answers. It’s always been about what you want. You wanted something, so now I was worth examining.

You’re a cruel thing, you know that?

You casually write to me as though your voice has a weight to it, as though my call out into the void had anything at all to do with desiring something from you. Your commentary is merely another unwanted solicitation.

I don’t care about your revelations.

I don’t care about the person you might bloom into.

I care about who you’ve been and the scorched Earth your lazy, selfish way of handling people has produced. Every step you take creates sunken, decaying indents in the ground. Flowers wilt behind you, but you keep walking towards green pastures, you keep touching the roses as you pass, and you don’t look behind you to see the mess.

You want to improve, you say. You want to build a life where you flourish. Perhaps consider not choking the life out of the things around you. Perhaps let the sunlight reach the starved grass. Maybe let anyone heal.

You are a person who is very caught up in the past.

It will devour you.

But pretending as though you can’t do anything about the past, and that you must haphazardly march into the future and pursue Goodness, is intellectual dishonestly.

You know what you can do for me?

Get your fucking shit together.

You don’t have to be a drain, and you never did. It’s the choices that you make. It’s one of the many bad decisions you choose, while claiming ignorance should someone react in a way you dislike.

Perhaps a mental illness, disorder, or some other disability inhibits these kind of positive interactions. Perhaps. And if it does, then that’s something to consider, and it’s unfair to assume you should be adept in certain ways. But until that’s known, it’s cruel to desire people adjust themselves to your harmful behaviors.

I used to tell you that, while you were harmful, I was also harmful for wanting you to change in order to desire your friendship. I said that was unfair. With that in mind, me having emotional needs that involve trust, commitment, respect, and appreciation are no different from your emotional needs for the same. The only difference is that the way you believe those needs are fulfilled can be extremely harmful to yourself and others, and the way mine are fulfilled are the same way that many introverts have those needs fulfilled, which include time and distance away from others.

My needs and yours are not dissimilar, but the way you desire yours to be met is shitty at times, and the way I want mine met is tedious for you. Please notice that the common denominator is still you getting your shit together, which includes learning healthy coping mechanisms.

Kindly fuck off with your dismissive bullshit.

#SKY #oilsheensky

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theverytinybird · 7 years ago

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There Was a Time for Fear.

I have had a lot of loss in my life.

It started when I was young. Someone touched me and they shouldn’t have. I was too young to know it was wrong, but old enough to know it didn’t feel right. I was scared. I told family about it, and some friends dropped away. It seems people are allowed to hurt you as long as you’re the less desirable of the two.

This happened a few times, and I learned an invaluable lesson: trust your gut.

I was popular, but not popular enough. I made lots of friends, lots of meaningful friendships, but then somehow they never stuck. I knew all of the “popular kids,” but each one of them felt they needed to be friends with me in private. If I was friends with all of them in private, then why couldn’t we be friends in public? It seems that people aren’t ashamed of something until someone important sees it.

This happened many, many times, and I learned an invaluable lesson: don’t give away trust easily, because you can’t know who deserves it.

My mother said I couldn’t have this friend, or that friend, and I was banished from speaking to them. I was afraid of her, so I ignored someone I cared about, and walked high up on the bleachers while they yelled my name and I pointedly looked away. It never occurred to me to talk to them at school and lie to my mother about it.

A friend lied to their mother on the phone. They’re a bad influence and I can never speak to them again. A friend sits on the futon for most of the time they’re at my house, sleeping over. They’re lazy and I can never speak to them again. Friendships gone like flies.

I moved around, but not because I had to. I didn’t feel right where I was. I left friend groups, returned to them. Left them again. Returned again. They were less excited about me returning each time I came back. They stopped caring if I left, assuming I’d come back.

This happened a number of times, and I learned an invaluable lesson: if you ask people to care too much, they’ll grow fatigued. But only about you.

I liked a boy, but so did a friend. I knew her in middle school, all the way through high school, and we were close until our mid-twenties when we were living in a dorm and we both liked the same boy. She told me she didn’t. Multiple times. He and I met in the first place because she told me he harassed her, and I didn’t hide my opinion about disliking him. He approached me about it when I was alone in the cafeteria one morning. He was charming. He smiled at me and told me that I would definitely come to like him.

I did.

When her and my friendship ended the first time, it was because she got tired of hearing me tell her that holding hands together inside his pocket was inappropriate. She got tired of me saying she shouldn’t caress his neck during the entire movie. When our friendship ended the first time, I found that I wasn’t surprised.

She took other friends of mine with her. No, not her friends. Friends of mine, who she made friends with through me--those are the ones she took. I got her back, but they stayed away. She still claims she didn’t sabotage my connections with them, but I find it more than coincidental that they suddenly stop caring about me at the same time that she wanted my boyfriend.

This boy, who we both liked, was not kind. Loving him hurt, and so did his touches. I cried a lot. I was alienated. I was scared. I was alone. The ones close to me were forced to be close to me only when out of sight. Like the popular kids who only played with me in private. Only, this time, it wasn’t because they were embarrassed of me--it’s because they were scared of him.

I retained only a few of those friends from the dorm. I built those friendships from the ground up, with help from no one who knew me before I arrived there.

Fleeing him, she took me in. Despite liking him, and despite our problems, her concern for me was more important than the fighting. I loved that about her. I lose her a second time, but that comes later. It’s more permanent than the first time.

I had multiple groups of friends. My friends from childhood, which because of me, all merged into one single group, connected by the friend who liked the boy who used to hurt me. The second group was my online friends. They weren’t very connected, but they were very important.

Three of them stood out. One, a blunt boy who was very unlucky. Another was a bubbly, seemingly genuine person. The third was a deep, smog-like person, who would soak in through my skin and into my heart for many years. All three are gone, but they go at different times.

The boy disappears after he becomes frightened of the friends I try to connect him with. I lie for him. This lie still stands with some people. I regret it sometimes, but only because there are people who believe I’m cruel in a way that I don’t find attractive. He understood me. We cared a lot about each other. He is probably dead somewhere.

The second is forcibly kicked from my life, and takes the girl who liked the boy who hurt me with them. This is one of many times I remove them. I am a weak, pathetic person who has a lot of love in their heart, and despite my loss--and perhaps because of it, I fear raining that pain down on someone else.

I move into a big house with the second person. We rent out rooms to strangers who become friends. Everything seems fine.

My mother was unkind often. I find a new mother who will love me. And she does. She loves me dearly. She teaches me what motherly love should feel like. She teaches me what it feels like to know that someone exists who believes I am capable of anything, that I have the potential for everything, and--when she dies, I am cold and empty, because no one will ever believe in me like she did.

My mother was unkind often, so when she, too, dies, I find myself in a confusing state. I drive to my father’s and I walk in the house, only to be told that her body is still on the floor, waiting to be picked up. I look at her. I touch her. We watch a movie in the other room while we wait. Days pass. A friend reaches out to me-- someone I was friends with in the dorms, who was afraid of my boyfriend at the time, and who was friends with me only in private--like the popular kids had been. They move in with me, directly into my bedroom. It helps us both: I need help, and she was fleeing someone who was hurting her, too.

I attend the funeral. I’m driving back to my father’s house and I pull over to catch some Pokemon. I catch three. A head ache sets in. It stays. I wake up in the middle of the night and throw up. I go to the hospital. I lie in bed with a migraine for a week.

The second online friend enters my room to complain about their mother. It hasn’t been two weeks since my mother died. I tell them they’re being inconsiderate. They shrink in on themselves and run away. I see them again that week in the kitchen. They have to go because they’re making up some hours at work on one of their days off. When I ask why, they tell me it’s because they left early to come home and be with me when my mother died. Except, I was with my family. So they’re making up hours that they took off because of me, and I wasn’t even there--the implication is that they did this for me. I recognize it for the guilt trip it is, the guilt trip I hear in their voice. I call it out. I don’t hear much from them for the next month.

When I tell them I don’t want to be friends anymore, they want to go for a walk and begin with saying they don’t even know what my problem is, they haven’t done anything wrong. When I tell them that my mother had died and I saw them maybe twice in the following month, they say they wanted to give me space. I said that I’m essentially giving them space, too.

There was more to the conversation, but that’s the part that matters.

They drive over to the house of the friend who used to like my boyfriend. That’s when I lose her the final time. She has been told I had been abusing the friend who was never there for me, and she just didn’t want to be associated with that. She doesn’t tell me this until months later when I’m diagnosed with a personality disorder and I’m excited to tell her about it so we can look back at my life and point out all the times hindsight bias shows us I had a disorder.

She says she doesn’t want to be friends, and she won’t change her mind, but we can still be people who sometimes message each other to see how they’re doing. I tell her I don’t care for relationships like that. I also tell her that I haven’t trusted her the same since she stopped being friends with me the first time, so she could chat up my boyfriend, and I also tell her other issues I have and then I block her on Facebook because she said she didn’t want to talk about it, and I’m tired of people leaving.

I somehow stay friends with the inconsiderate person who isn’t there for me when my mother dies. They tell me that after I blocked her (the girl who liked my boyfriend) on Facebook, she complained that that was “so like [me]” which is funny, because I never told her anything that bothered me, and she hadn’t been a real friend in years, so how does she know enough about who I am to know what’s like me?

The third person, the smog, leaves when I refuse to let them stay.

We were friends for nearly fourteen years. We liked each other for all of them. We are very close. She cuts people out of her life. Burns bridges. Through all of it, I am unscathed. We love each other in ways that only lead characters in indie movies do. We talk about how ‘love’ is a bad word for what we have, because it oversimplifies something complex. Only we understand us.

I still believe that.

I still love her.

I will always love her.

I loved her even when I blocked her on every social media I could think of, after sending her a text, telling her, in different words, that she brought this ending upon herself.

We had a lot of issues in the past couple years. We started dating, too, and it went downhill. She hurt me, too, but not in the same ways the boyfriend used to hurt me. I once cried on a couch with no blanket, in a freezing house, with two pugs at my feet, trembling in fear because of something she had done. Just barely a month after my mother had died.

But this is what finally did it.

It all came down to two text messages.

The first text was from me, telling her about how someone had been abusive to me just following Christmas dinner. In short, I went home early, sobbing, and shaking.

The second, was her sending the words “how horrible.”

This message was unaccompanied for two hours, until she added “were you close?”

That’s how my internet friends were gone, in addition to my growing up friends. At this point, I had the dorm friend that I was still dating, and I had the friends I lived with.

I lost them both at the same time.

I moved someone in with us. I drove from one coast of the U.S., alone, and then back, with a passenger and their things. This person was the catalyst. I was working two jobs. I was taking care of the finances of three people, not including myself. It was difficult. The person that I moved, however, sexually assaulted one of my roommates.

I moved them across the country because they were very ill, and my state has great health insurance. I was worried about them. I brought them here, knowing they would have no resources or income, so even though they sexually assaulted this person, I told them I would pay for their rent and utilities at wherever they went next. I told them I’d help find them people who they could relate with, and who they felt comfortable and safe with. I said that I was moving out, and that I wouldn’t be living with any of them.

I told this to everyone I had been paying for, including my girlfriend.

The three people I’d been paying for all got together, and they shared everything I had ever said about any of them, as well as some things I hadn’t said. They told me they never wanted to talk to me again. I was a horrible person. It was posted all over their social media that I was a bad person who abandoned them. They were posting Gofundme pages for money, saying I had left them homeless, when in reality, I was moving out with the person who had been sexually assaulted, and I had agreed to pay for each of their rents.

The person who was the catalyst happened to be black. The people we had chosen to live with us were progressive liberals and feminists, as we were left-wing queer people. The catalyst was livid at me, so when they called me a racist in a house full of White Feminists, I lost that final friend group as well.

Over a month ago, I decided that enough was enough, and that if someone was detracting from my life, they don’t need to be in it.

I blocked the person who ignored me after my mother had died (who had cost me a friend group as well) from my social media. They had called me, wanting to chat because they were driving and bored and we did this often. I wasn’t feeling well, so after they talked for quite some time and they asked me how I was, I said I didn’t want to talk about me. They moved on easily, and I was relieved.

Then they backtracked. They wanted to know if it was forever. Or if it was just them that I wouldn’t talk about me to. I realized they would never stop being exhausting. That everything would always be about them. My roommate, the one who had been sexually assaulted, had cut this person out of their life, too. This person had been afraid that I would bad mouth them to my roommate, because they were hoping to become friends again, and didn’t want me to ruin their chances.

It always bothered me that this person assumed I would be hurting their chances with my roommate, when in reality, my roommate was the one hurting that person’s chances of staying in my life. With enough encouragement, I felt like cutting that person out of my life was the right thing to do, and when I accepted that the friendship was bad, I let it go.

Now, I have three friends: one online who lives in Hawaii and cherishes me, my roommate who was sexually assaulted and has an incredible mind, and a third from when I was living in the dorms--who also had only been friends with me in private, like the popular kids had.

I have had a lot of loss in my life.

But I’m not afraid anymore.

#personal #i hope if you see this you cry #also stop stalking me

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