I don’t feel like I’ve been through a lot in my life, for me to feel so much pain inside of me, but I don’t know why I can’t shake it.
I guess growing up, my childhood (up to now, as a 23yo adult) had been unspectacular. I spent a good amount of time feeling neglected by my own family who were physically right there. I spent a lot of time feeling less-than, like my existence didn’t matter. My family speaks over me, never pay attention when I’m talking to them, most things I say (if I talk at all) are met with disinterest. When I get really sick, I’m chastised for not doing enough helping with errands, not being cheerful enough, and don’t even get to be seen my a doctor. When my older sister gets sick with the same thing 2 days later (after I’ve suffered for nearly a week), we go to a hospital. It’s such a petty thing to feel upset about, but I guess that incident itself kind of explains the role I play in my family. The person whose needs matter less than everyone else’s. Whose thoughts and voice and emotions aren’t valid nor significant enough to be cared for.
I’ve always felt deeply neglected as a person. I struggle now with an unbearable feeling of detachment and loneliness — it’s as if I’m in another pocket of space completely from everyone else, behind two panes of glass with a vacuum in between so that I go unheard and unnoticed. Nobody has to be bothered with me. All of this has, I guess, translated into me feeling like I’m never good enough or worth anyone’s time. I’ve felt this way since I was a young child and feeling unimportant for so long is just so hard and damaging to the psyche. I guess I should add that my mum literally treats me like I don’t even physically exist right in front of her, when I talk to her, whenever she’s angry with me over something that more often than not isn’t my fault — silent treatment on steroids, I tell you.
I’ve also been taught as a child that my negative emotions are inconvenient. If I’m upset or hurt, I’m petty (e.g. when I’ve been ignored in conversation, am upset, and say “it’s okay, it’s nothing” when my family goes “oh what did you want to say?”, and then they get upset over me not wanting to talk about it anymore and say “you’re always like this”). When I’m angry and speak more curtly than usual, I’m being unreasonable and rude, and “why are you acting like that? we deserve more respect than this”. When I share my frustrations about my mum with another family member, my words are disregarded completely and said family member starts talking about another topic, or my words just get scoffed at without so much as being spared a glance.
When I’m suicidal and share feelings of hopelessness and dreadfulness, or make a morbid joke to cope with it, my sister (the person who I’m closest too in this emotionally dysfunctional family) scoffs at it or ignores it too. Imagine how painful it feels to let someone know your most painful thought, only to have them disregard it like that. She says it’s because my suicidal thoughts threatens her idea of how our family is supposed to be (a fixation she has due to her own anxiety). I get it. It’s still really painful nonetheless.
The only way I feel like my feelings would ever be validated at this point, is if I swallow it down and shut up, and act like I’m okay. Having no bad feelings makes me valid as a person. Having bad ones make me inconvenient and undesirable. This has followed me into every single relationship of any nature, that I’ve ever had. I bend over backwards to be okay with what people need of me, at the expense of my own sense of self by minimising my own discomfort.
My mum has been pretty psychologically and emotionally abusive, and sometimes a tad bit physically threatening as well. She’s basically a toxic person with anger management issues. I love her, but I resent everything bad that she has ever done to me or made me feel. I walk on eggshells around her. Her raised voice and/or loud noises in the house make me begin to dissociate. Emotional variability doesn’t exist in our house because her needs and her feelings come first. She never wanted kids, so I guess it’s not surprising that she still acts like one. I’ve been worried for my physical safety around her because there were times that I’d step in front of her parked car to cross past, and worried that she would run me over. I stay away from her when she’s mad and holding a knife in the kitchen while making food. She compared my body to another girl at dance when I was 8 (and our bodies looked the same) and said “why is your stomach so big”, and ever since then it has been a lifetime of fuelling disordered eating habits with family diet fads and internalised fatphobia within the family. I now have an eating disorder involving restriction, and haven’t felt okay with eating 3 meals a day like a normal person would in nearly 10–15 years.
Even my overly self-critical depression voice uses the same tone and the same vocabulary as her. I sound like my mum when I think about myself.
I don’t feel safe in this world. I’ve been sexualised all my life, ever since I was a child. I was sexually assaulted as a minor, in what was a terrifying period of 15–20 minutes of me as a 14 year old panicking excessively on the inside about whether or not this old man that’s touching me now is going to knock me out and have a friend drive a van past and use it to kidnap me, keep me as a sex slave to rape multiple times a day, and then kill me when I no longer have any worth. I was sexually assaulted twice more after that, another one being another 15-20 minutes of me worrying that this stranger trying to show me around town had texted his friends to meet him at an alleyway where they would gang-rape me violently — it didn’t happen, but other stuff did, and my body reacted and I hate that it did. I’ve had experiences with sexual harassment nearly every single day of my life for two decades. At this point my only worth is as a sex object for men to view and use for their pleasure. At this point I think that if it comes in sheer amounts, then maybe I’m the problem, not all of them. I suffer from hypervigilance now and can’t view or hear any content regarding sexual assault without getting triggered with discomfort, and constantly live in fear of the day that I’ll be forcibly raped. It’s going to happen, and not a matter of ‘if’ but of ‘when’.
Yet with this fear, I feel this intense need to actually be raped. I already feel as violated on the inside, and the only way that it’s ever going to make sense is if I get physically violated to that extent as well. I have compulsions to sell my body or simply give it away to people to use me like a rag doll, fuck me in every hole however they want, use and abuse and torture me until I end up in a hospital or dead. Since my rape is going to happen anyway, I might as well make myself want it. Then I’d deserve it, the way I deserve men who use me now in similar ways. I’ll finally be physically as worthless as I constantly feel. I feel like a whore, using sex to harm myself and make myself feel worse. But I can’t stop wanting to be this filthy whore because I keep asking for it.
I live in a world where my community thinks lightly of rape culture and even encourage it with victim shaming and with rape & sexual assault jokes. I have a victim complex, it seems. Nobody owes me anything, to help me feel safe in this world again. I don’t deserve to feel safe in my own country, because it’s inconvenient for everyone else. I’ll never feel safe, and if that’s how it is, I don’t want to be alive.
I’ve been suicidal for 10 years. The thoughts have only grown more active and frequent and intense. I feel so awful and empty and unnecessary and barely there all of the fucking time that it’s just better this way. I want to throw myself into the garbage compactor because of how much my ED brain hates my body. I want to dissociate completely forever due to my sexual violence trauma, so my body and my brain no longer share the same consciousness. I want to be gone. The depression will never go away if it hasn’t gone away with medication, and frequent therapy, and even TMS treatment for treatment resistant depression — how have I managed to fail so spectacularly at a near-miracle cure?
All of this feels so endless and I just want it to end. There have been so many times that I’ve nearly done it, but never ended up attempting. Some as recently as this past weekend. Thoughts as recently as right now. The pills are in my cabinet and it seems like dying just might be possible, and easy even. Yet I never end up doing it and I feel ashamed of myself for having never attempted. I can’t live right but I can’t die properly either. I have no spine. In fact I get envious or jealous of people who have attempted or have completed a suicide, because I desperately want that too. Yet stupid reasons like “you’ll fuck up your family with debt and be even more of a fucking inconvenience” make me hold back — all negative reasons that make me feel worse about myself, nothing positive.
I just don’t know how I’m supposed to live like this every single day of my life, and expect to hold any hope that things will get better. I don’t feel hope at all. I don’t think I ever will. All I yearn for is to feel safe, and okay, and wanted by someone, but that seems impossible right now. Pushing one more day by one more day feels tedious and I want so much to stop.
Perhaps someday soon.
Sorry for the really long post.
super grateful for it all.