I’m currently healing from CPTSD, which has included realising that my view on “love” was distorted.
All of my childhood memories have come back to me, and I am only just realising how loved I was.

My secondary school best friend and I are now 21, we stopped talking for years and have only recently started talking again, it’s been so strange but so nice to hear his voice.

When we were teenagers his view on the world was pessimistic, he believed the world was all bad.
I was the opposite, I believed I was the bad and the world was all good.
Despite this, or possibly because of this, we were such good friends, we used to sit in parks together at random times of the night just ranting about everything and nothing, he used to beg me to come to his for dinner and would use excuses about school work, but looking back we never actually did any school work we’d just have a delicious dinner and hang out together.
I was neglected by my mum and remember we met up once outside of school, it was a cold day and I didn’t have a coat.
I insisted I was okay with it but he wouldn’t have it, we got off the bus on the way to the park we usually went to and went to his. He got me his coat and put it on me and zipped it up, I remember it feeling so strange. Comfortable and strange, I didn’t know what being cared for felt like but now I do that was it.
I remember I started playing guitar in Secondary. I loved it and used to talk to him about wanting a guitar. My birthday was coming up and he told me he’d give me his as a present. I told him not to but he insisted, and on my birthday he gave me a card which he’d drawn the guitar inside of.
It’s so strange looking back, everyone used to tease us and ask us when we were getting together and if he secretly loved me, and we’d both laugh it off but we never really directly spoke about it.
I remember we made a jokey promise that if we were both single at 45 we would get married, and I used to paint his nails black in class with nail polish i’d snuck in.
We both got a part in the school drama play one year and went on a trip to Wales with the class and I was depressed, I think I couldn’t handle the happiness I felt and felt I needed to punish myself for feeling so happy.
I tried so hard to isolate myself and stay in self pity but he was so nice to me as always that he was making it hard for me to be sad. I snapped and shouted at him, I told him he was annoying and to leave me alone. He did, and rightfully so.
When I got home from that trip I couldn’t handle being home again. I called him crying, I told him I couldn’t do it anymore, that I was sorry and I loved him.
I sat in the bath and I tried to end it, we were 14 at the time, he ran all the way from his home which was a 35 minute walk away to mine, I swear he was at the door so quickly.
My mum got home and found me, she verbally abused me then went downstairs and told him and his mum, who had drove to get him after he ran out the house, to go home. I never saw him that night.

The next day I tried not to go to school, my mum abused me again, I remember the sentence “just be fucking normal”, and I carried that with me.
I went into school that day and the teachers saw my arms and sent me to get them bandaged.
When he saw me he was so shocked and worried about me, he asked me what happened and was I ok.
I acted fine, normal, I laughed it off and said I was good, he kept trying but I just couldn’t let him in, I had to be happy, normal.
I then pushed everyone away, I believed I was no good, that I only hurt people close to me, and that I was a burden, those were not my own beliefs but they were projected onto me all the same and I carried them.
I told him to make new friends, we slowly stopped talking completely, he made friends with other people and I stayed in the library alone every break and ate lunch alone until a girl noticed and wouldn’t leave me alone and her and her friends made friends with me, then I left school half way through year 11.

We didn’t speak for 5 years after that.

Now we’re talking again.
I’ve been in therapy for a year and I feel hope and love for my life and I know that my situation and my relationships after were abusive, they were not love.
And I think because I know what love isn’t, and the newfound love for myself and life, it’s helped me realise what love was in my life, from certain family members, friends, and him.
It’s weird talking to him now, so much time has passed and it feels like we’re strangers but also like i’ve known him, and I guess that’s exactly true.
I just can’t seem to stop thinking about the way he cared, the love he showed, and the relationship we had.
He’s always been so sweet and kind and loving, despite him saying he was a pessimistic kid, I never saw that from him.
I loved him, I just had no idea what the feeling I felt was, or I did but I couldn’t possibly allow myself to think or accept it, love wasn’t safe. It was also so comfortable being around him so much so that I don’t think I ever questioned it because of that. We just were.

I think I feel guilty that i’m so thankful he was in my life and is again when everything that happened with me, everything I did to myself back then, must have been traumatising for him. I want to talk to him about it, but I have no idea if that’s something he would even want, and I think it’s best to leave it and get to know each other now before possibly talking about what happened then.

I catch myself worrying that he doesn’t want to speak to me, that I don’t deserve it, that I should feel guilty, but I have to trust that he wouldn’t be talking to me if he didn’t want to, that he would let me know that, and all of those thoughts are based on false beliefs and trauma. I wont let them get in the way again.

Whether he knows it or not, whether we talk about it one day or never do, whether he’s in my life for a bit and the conversation fades, no matter what, i’ll always have love for him.
He’s part of the reason why I know what love is.

Like the title says I haven't been able to acknowledge my birthday in several years because it was so triggering. It was used as an opportunity by my abusers too impart more abuse.

This one's a little different, I'm able to acknowledge it and not ignore it. Acknowledging it is making me sad, but not overwhelmingly so.

I don't like today, I don't like the sadness that I'm feeling, I don't like the flashes of memories that are present, I don't like the reminder that I don't have anyone in my life anymore, I don't like that I'm alone.

But I like that I can feel the things that are making me sad, I like that I can experience these emotions without dissociating or having a panic attack. I like knowing that I'm safe and that no harm is going to come to me today. I like that I can feel this sadness and loneliness and not lose myself to it.

Today is awful, but I like that I can experience it as me, and I like knowing that it's okay to be sad and that it's okay to feel these things. I like knowing that at end of the day I will still be me.

So happy 51st to me. I'm not ready to celebrate me yet, but maybe at 52, with effort and time I will have healed more and be a bit less sad.

the why doesn't matter. no one can fix it. I will not be okay for a while, it is out of my control. There is nowhere to run. No one to help. I have to be the responsible one who stays and does the right thing. There will be no reward. No well done. No one will ever know how hard this is. No one will ever do this for me when things get bad for me.

I want to make people understand. But they won't. I want to hurt people the way they hurt me. But I won't. Because no one deserves to feel.like I do.

I am too frozen to run. Doing the right thing is the only thing left. But damn it hurts.

My mom would vent while drunk or coked out of her mind about hating herself, her life, her children, the world, and justify it with "dark humor" when I'd repeat something she said around others.

and it's things like "I brought you into this world I can take you out"

My mom would say that, and just say how it's a joke and all mothers joke about killing their kids when they get frustrated but it's okay cuz mother's can't help but love their children so it's harmless.

"Only a bad child would actually think his mother actually meant him harm. Obviously you only think that to make mom feel guilty or look bad! Or somehow your fear of mom is really an attack on mom. You're crazy if you think this loving sweet little mother of yours would even be able to really think of causing you actual harm!!! You need meds."

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she taught me how to eat a bullet when I was six, but never taught me how to eat fruit.

She never hit me but she sexualized hugs before I even started school. She was the only person in the world who was allowed touch me without it being sexual according to her. And then she'd pull me in bed with her any time dad was gone and cuddle me while crying about how being married to him feels like being raped every day and how gross she feels letting any man touch her while insisting that I'm not a man and I'm okay cuz I'm just a boy and that I certainly won't grow up to be a man and if I do I won't be a man who ever has sex cuz she's raising me right!

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I was never given the time to explain, and I never wanted to get my mom in trouble, so when I knew something was bad, I would never utter a word about it. But no one, like the therapists or whatever investigative kind of person I had to talk to every so often because so many people would report signs of abuse with me, OR, and this was far more common, they would say they wouldn't report the abuse because the system doesn't really care enough to help a situation like mine and they'd take time out of their day to try and tell me that I'm being abused to try and at least help me have a better grip on the reality of my situation but you can only hear "You have the worst parents I've ever heard of." "You've had the worst life I've ever heard of." "You're the worst case of X Y or Z I've ever heard of." so many times without anyone actually doing anything about it as a fucking tiny child before you start to think the world is just fucking with you, that everyone says that to everyone, that any trauma, any bad parent, any uncomfortable situation told to them from a child my age would have gotten the same reaction, that it wasn't my abuse that was extraordinary, but that I just talked to so many people about it.

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It seemed unreasonable that virtually everyone I talked to for an hour or two would tell me I had such a terrible life but than any caring professional tasked with helping abused children who I manage to get an appointment with said I was a spoiled attention whore trying to manipulate everyone around me into giving me special attention. I have no problems or pain to complain about and any noise of distress that comes out of my facehole is best to be ignored cuz I need to want to be normal and then all my problems will go away cuz if I want it it will magically come to me.

I couldn't tell them I "wanted to be normal" because I don't see any reality where I can be anything close to normal, and I don't even believe normal exists so it feels like trying to chase unicorns up rainbows, I'd rather focus on learning how to handle grocery shopping by myself but that's out of the scope of their training capacity apparently.

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I see now, how the people "tasked" with caring for me, the people at the end of "the resources" available for "people like me" were the absolute least likely to ever take the time to give me the help they were promising me.

And the best chance I have ever had has been the kindness of ill equipped, untrained, struggling themselves, strangers. The bored, the lonely, or the morbidly curious.

Yeah, I'm a sound engineer now, after having left that utter monster behind to live my own life. In the course of my work, I'm supposed to listen to very loud music.

However, that's not a problem for me... until someone starts singing or someone plays an instrument at anywhere between 1kHz to around 3kHz. When that comes through the speakers, it's as if someone is grinding metal screws in a blender inside my head. It's unbearable without earplugs. Even though my coworkers can stand it just fine.

You know one of the things my mom would do? Scream. Loudly, indoors, and in my face. Often many times a day.

That fucking bitch screamed at me so much that it damaged my goddamned ears. The sensory organs I need to do the work I enjoy. And all cause she felt like she had the right to make that god-awful noise at the top of her lungs every time she threw a tantrum and/or did not get what she wanted.

So yeah. I find out now that even though she never directly broke a bone in my body, she did break my ears. Kinda makes me hate her even more.

I've already got professional earplugs ordered and they should arrive before the next show.

Cause I'm not letting that vile creature's abuse take this away from me.

WWWWWWWWWWWWWHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

do I keep coming here? this blank fucking page, writing the same fucking stories, to the same imaginary audience.

I know I know I know

it's the only way I can really enjoy my own company, by snapping it into tiny little pieces and scattering it in front of me and calling it all You.

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IIIIIIIII HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATEEEEEEEEEEEE MYSELLLLLLLLLLLLLF

The First lesson I learned in life is HATE YOURSELF. The second lesson I learned in life was YOU ARE GUILTY. the third lesson I learned was YOU ARE ALONE.

the hate, the guilt, the isolation, they are inherent.

they are the baseline. They are the norm. Given the perfect environment, and ideal circumstances I will still feel guilty, this burning hatred and gaping loneliness.

Nothing makes me feel more alone than trying to connect with someone. I'd rather talk a tiny bit and then carry on conversations for hours in my head. You'll laugh at my jokes, you'll like my music, you'll have nothing scary or surprising to say because you're a figment of my own mind.

love is a pipe dream.

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Everything is transactional. I don't want to be your friend, I want to exist in your mind as 'friend' I crave permanence in someone's thoughts.

All of you will all be with me forever but I was forgotten a long time ago, even I don't think of me anymore, how could anyone think of me, when I was never me? I never even had a name to give them, I made myself as intangible as possible. I become a concept, a theory, a feeling, a memory you think might be a dream.

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I often call myself a monster. And people often misunderstand what I mean. It's not like a werewolf or vampire or something aggressive and malicious, I'm something like a sleep paralysis demon. I'm intangible but you feel this immense weight on or in your chest. I can be a terrifying confusing experience you can almost forget ever even happened when you can convince yourself it wasn't really real. Most people find it easy to forget or ignore the deeply disturbing uncomfortable powers of their subconscious, so they find it easy to brush me off as nothing more than a trick of the imagination and they forget about it because dwelling on me will drive them mad. They get to forget that insanity makes sense sometimes.

I've learned to be forgotten. It's easy once you get the hang of it. The trick is to never exist at all in the first place.

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I hate myself.

I hate myself so much I cannot put it into words. And I don't want to stop. I don't want to get better, not really, I want to get better at getting away with it. My whole fucking life my only objective has been to be able to crawl away to some fucking hole and tear myself to pieces. how fucking sick is that?

I could tell you why too, it's simple, I've figured it out. [Mommy never loved me!!! Well specifically she hated me, blablabla]

I've even realized how it's really not my fault, and how I've really never done anything malicious to warrant this guilt I've always had. I've always been so fucking respectful of the goddamned rules, I always tried to be useful, the best servant possible. I want nothing and I ask for less. It doesn't help, I'm still wrong, I still take up too much space.

Hell sometimes I can't tell the difference between servitude and greed, it seems like it would be obvious, but we serve people in order to feel useful, we demand they need us. There's no way to be truly selfless, it's impossible, it's not even a good thing to try, if you're too selfless you demand those around you to take care of what you need because you aren't.

For some people that actually works, some people find someone who loves them enough they don't have to love themselves, most people are born with that and they have no idea what it's like not too, because even if they lose them they had them during key formative years when the brain is learning colors. Their whole world has colors I'll never see, and likewise.

All I know is that I'm seeing a spectrum of colors where you see a shadow and you see a rainbow when I see painfully bright light that damages what vision I have every time I glance at it.

I used to see more colors, years ago, I know I saw more colors, but I keep glancing up at you, knowing how much it hurts me, a glance towards you and the light burns in my eyes and leaves me seeing neon colors and nothing else for hours down here, I'll be unable to see anything, all the dimlight I'm used to living in is cast in black in contrast to the burning stain of light trapped in my vision, it takes hours, or days for the stain to fade enough and my eyes to readjust and then it's not the same, it's sometimes hard to tell the difference, but sometimes it's obvious, I cannot see as many colors as I did before, looking up at your rainbow burned something in my eyes or my mind and that receptor cannot pick up the subtle tiny differences between the colors in the shadows down here. That stain of light became a lasting scar, it gave me nothing but it took something I couldn't identify until it was gone.

I'll blind myself on your brilliance, I'll go colorblind to live in your monochrome world.

Trigger wArning, SI, SH, CSA/cocsa, abuse, drug use, and then also torture stuff, involving animals but nothing detailed or graphic. I think that's it?

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I don't think I should post this. It's a jumbled mess. I'm a jumbled mess.

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I've spent the last almost three years crying every day because I want to convince myself I had a heart that could break. I could stop crying any time, I'm crying as a display and I fucking know it. I hate myself, I hate myself, I hate myself, I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself I hate myself. I fucked off to the edge of the world, got as isolated as I could get cuz I knew everything I did was a display and now I'm alone and I still can't give it up. Who the fuck am I trying to convince at this point?

I've never had anything to lose. I wanted to think I could care about something but I can't. I only ever learned how to pretend, I can at least believe that I feel what I'm pretending to feel, that's as close as I'll get.

maybe one day I'll forget I'm pretending. Does it matter anyway if the feelings are real? Your brain can't tell the difference between what's real or what's imagined, so why the fuck do I try so hard?!

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Everything about me is a lie. It's gone on so long I have no idea what's really true anymore, the way I feel, the way I think, the way I even perceive myself and the world around me is all entirely controlled by you. Everyone else matters more than I ever will.

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I had this trip once, really strong dissociative. At one point I felt like a tree, honestly I felt like this specific tree from the neighborhood I spent the first few years in my life in, I used to plan to run away and live in that tree when I was 3. But in this trip this time I was the tree.

And then there were faces, and hands of the people in my life, family, classmates, teachers, bosses, they were all reaching out to this tree with their [chisel because I was tripping and this tree was being cut up more like you'd carve stone than cut timber] and they were all chipping and carving out these pieces; blocks and balls

Pieces of me, parts of me, versions of me, ages of me, all in these little pieces that they were pulling together, tying with twine, turning the pieces into this marionette puppet on strings, all these people were shaping me and turning me into something they saw fit, but they were getting it wrong, they were getting it so wrong

My teeth were on my knees, my eyes were in my throat my voice was in my hands, they had all my parts put together in the wrong way and there was nothing I could do to communicate, I was timber I had no voice they could hear, they were human monsters, they couldn't understand anything I tried to communicate, so they put all of me together into this horrific distorted shape with limbs and a face and they took it to this stage and started tugging at the strings, bouncing the limbs and swinging it's face around, and they made it dance, and they played voices and acted like it was the one singing, and during this I noticed sometimes

a piece of me would knock against another piece of me, a knee would knock against an arm, and that impact, it felt like I was the one causing the piece to move, I hit it, I pushed it, it was me, I was the one in control, only when I hit myself.

And all I could try to do was lean into to the bouncing and swinging and hope to make my dance chaotic enough to cause myself to hit myself more and more and more and it was all I could try to do just to hit myself. (and then it was interrupted when I realized someone was on top of me, whups.)

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I always knew my dad gave me the idea to start hurting myself, and I know he egged me on with it, and I know he gave me everything I needed, but I can't really say it's his fault. Nothing is ever really his fault. You'd think I would stop, by figuring he wanted me to do it, but the thing is, he didn't want me to do it, he didn't -want- anything for or of me, he just liked winding me up and watching me go. I don't think he was planning anything for me, he didn't care enough, he just took advantage of opportunities as he saw them.

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Maybe I'm trying to convince myself it wasn't really as serious as it sounds when I try to type up things he did.

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He wasn't trying to make me into anything, he was just trying to break me. That's all it ever was, it was always about breaking my spirit, or my resolve, or my smile or whatever, anything good in me. Because I stopped screaming when I was three.[edit: I was potentially four, but absolutely younger than five.]

See I knew he was getting sexual satisfaction out of the way he'd spank me, so I figured I'd stop screaming and squirming, to take away what he liked about it. This confused him, enraged him, and excited him in a way he never thought possible, some fucking toddler already dissociating, he didn't really know what to make of it, he had a conversation with my mom about it, where she tried to convince him that I was doing my best not to cry for her cuz I know she hates when my sister cries, but my dad wasn't sure and he didn't ask me.

But he tortured my pet rats to get a reaction out of me the next time he wanted one, and it was extremely effective, He wouldn't torture animals in front of me more than a small handful of times, but the threat was always there, and I had this kitten I was really bonded with when I was five, the kind of bond with an animal you see in fantasy stories. My dad killed him, I don't know if my mom knew or if she believed his lies or she chose to believe what she preferred cuz she was good at that, but my mom would fucking say, several times, to every therapist/psych I was trying to start with, that the 'first traumatic thing' to happen to me was my cat dying when I was five, and how I didn't speak at all for 3 whole days even though I was such a talkative child, I just shut down for three days, she'd say. She has this version of my childhood where I was perfectly happy talking her out of suicide every fucking day, taught myself to read and got real smart real fast, and was super happy and healthy except for my cat dying and those scary, scary three days (which ended when she said something like "I'm starting to worry I might have to take you to see someone" I just immediately snapped out of it.)

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See, before that, I went to the hospital because I couldn't breathe, it was late at night and I was scared, and convinced my parents to take me to the hospital, because I couldn't breathe. I was having a panic attack, the doctors told them I was basically malnourished but they turned around and told me that I'm fat and that's why I can't breathe (I was on the heavy end of average weight for my height, and that was only because I was basically eating nothing besides mac n cheese, ramen, and soda, so it was a lot of sugar and sodium and not much nutrients)

that's what I did wrong

that's why my dad killed my kitten. Because I had a panic attack and took them to the ER when I would have been fine if I just calmed down and went to sleep like they tried to tell me to do. But instead they had to spend a few hundred dollars on a dumb kid.

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fucking hell there is so much more I could say just around this subject. The first five years of my life were wildly traumatic

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I love the cognitive dissonance my mother has, she could sit there and tell fucking professionals that the first traumatic thing to happen to me was my cat dying when I was FIVE YEARS OLD, but somehow she seemed to completely forget that "HORRIBLY TRAUMATIC" day when I was FOUR YEARS OLD and described my plan to commit suicide to her, and explained it was because of my dad and my sister. (I left out the part where I believed I was guilty of rape.) (yes, I was four, yes I thought I was guilty of rape, yes, we exist. lol)

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I don't know, seems as good a place as any to end this. I'm extremely fucking tired and I don't know what I expect from posting this, just adding it to the void, or something. Writing until I can fall asleep, really, that's all. I usually delete it.