My thoughts

I spoke to the woman who made 2022 a torment for me. The one that handed me the worst day of my life on a platter riddled in spider webs and tough, scratchy sponges and dirty laundry.

Surprisingly, it's not myself, this time. Although I of course had a part to play. It was a roommate who used me as her personal piggy bank, then had me punished once I genuinely couldn't borrow her money anymore, a puppeteering that lasted the entire day, worsening and worsening to its climax. The violation of my right to say no and be heard.

I wanted closure, maybe. Even as closure isn't a real thing, just a hope that one last talk will close up the ache a little. She told me I was the rude one. She told me that she was only trying to help me and that she appreciated the money. She told me she had no idea that she'd triggered memories of when I was abused as a child because how could she?

Oh the fear. Oh the horror. The way shame and terror pricked at my skin until the burn became a constant normalcy. All that just for her to say it was a misunderstanding.

Just for me to agree that it likely was.

I wasn't very in control of myself that year. Nor the one before. The depression hit its peak. Nothing mattered, especially not myself. I thought I was a ghost. Drowning and impossible to perceive beneath the waves. So I did nothing. Barely showered, barely ate, hoping for someone to save me while hoping I'd finally have the "courage" to damn myself to an afterlife or the lack of it by my own hands.

She was bothered by me for a long time, though she never said anything kind. And she wanted to "help". It's funny. You know, I think Hitler truly thought he was helping too. I think most cult leaders convince themselves of their own goodness as well. My father thought it was for the best when he chose courses for my sister and I. She thought her force and her commands and the touches I did not consent to were helping.

I get it. They say we're all trying to lift each other up. I think humanity is a mix of things. I think one of the biggest problems we have is leaning towards trying to be good so hard that we condemn all that isn't a part of that. Decide we are only supposed to be one thing rather than accepting both truths. The duality of our own nature.

We're afraid of fucking things up and the fear, the shame, the rage, it only worsens this. All of it. I'd never known depression quite so well till I sunk that low. Till apathy became all I had left. Till the bare minimum became a true struggle for a being that was once obsessed with achieving their father's view of academic success. I've watched people try to help me. Try to love me, even. Use me. Screw me over.

I've learnt that maybe the only way to stop with all the mind-fuckery, all the low self esteem and my old friend depression and my still friend social anxiety? Letting shit go.

My entire life was built on the foundation that I had to be good enough. At first, that was for my father who I hardly saw. It then became a thing I felt towards the society as a whole which is... Difficult, to say the least, for a being who grew to become an agnostic, nonbinary-ish lesbian-probably. Oh! Fat, too. I had this conviction as a kid that once I attained perfection, everything would be okay.

But that quest is a suffocating one. It will chew up the true you and whisper that there must be something broken, something impossible to love, if you're not what you believe the world asks of you. How crushing it was to grow and realise over time that so much of me was different from the standard my parents had set. How crushing to realise that I needed to fake energy because "man is a social animal", I needed to fall for a man and have his babies because it's my duty as a woman, I needed to care about fitting into box after box or I wasn't a human being.

This rant was sponsored by my awakening to myself. And to my own version of the truth, the same way Mother Teresa had her version and Stalin had his. This world can be terrifying. But only when you view it as such. It will only consume you if you let it. The price of trying to be a human is that you will forget that you have always been just that, exactly as you are. You will spend years of your life climbing some great mountain of success that you were already dropped at the top by virtue of simply being alive. You will push yourself off again and again, desperate to mould your mountain to the exact shape of some mental amalgamation of other people's. The perfect peak. The perfect view.

But maybe some day you too will realise that it's... Pointless to hack away at yourself just to fit a specific tune. Humanity has existed in thousands of thousands of thousands. What are we aiming for, really? Why not just stay right here, right now, just ourselves a little while and see how that goes? Even the gods that have been crafted are imperfect, rageful, violent beings at times, just as capable of love and joy as they are repentance and heartbreak.

Hell is other people. Heaven is other people. As a socially anxious fuck whose mind tries to keep them safe from a non-existent, anticipated danger half the time, maybe we're all just human, flowing between both extremities forever.

A blessed, wretched purgatory of a species. And what a purge it's been.