Date: 26th Jan 2024
I had an interesting therapy session today. By interesting, I mean I cried for the first time in a while and was actually brutally honest with myself and my therapist. We touched on numerous vulnerable subjects but they all had a thread of feeling anger, grief or fear (or in most cases, some combo of them all). And because I have an incessant need to keep unpicking things and going back over them until they make sense, I want to go over some of them now. Try to explain it to someone else, to see if anything else comes up. Because often, writing on here, does bring me extra moments of clarity. Which I then go back to therapy with, unpack, reprocess and then, come back here to reprocess again and the cycle continues.
Anyway, three main things came up:
The inevitable downfall of my relationship with Nicola VS whether relationships now will fail (or not).
That moment of realising in Oct 2022 that I had someone by my side in a moment of panic and fear.
Anger at a locked door.
Let me explain two of them. Firstly, Nicola.
I was looking back through old screenshots on my PC yesterday. Deleting the ones I no longer needed, squirreling the others away. And I came across ones of Nicola and I. Happy ones. Pictures of us on Zoom together, long before the pain, the hurt, the cruel words, ableism and abuse entered my life. Before I had any idea what was going on behind the scenes. And they made me really sad. I've been so wrapped up in my (rightful) anger towards how Nicola treated me, how she ended things, that I don't think I let myself grieve the relationship we once had. I don't think I let myself mourn the future I pictured with her in it, or the friendship I had (and lost) with her. I didn't let myself sit with the sadness losing her held for me because at the time I couldn't. I was so broken, that my anger held me together. It gave me the strength to stand up, fight and get to where I am today. But it was an anger bourne from a deep seated, heartbroken sadness. Grief. I made a throw away comment when telling this to my therapist, that "things were inevitably going to fail" and he questioned me on it.
At first I wanted to say "no, that comment was wrong, things were fine with us but then something went wrong" when I stopped, thought about things for a moment and realised my comment was made from a version of the truth. You see, while I don't believe anything is destined to fail or succeed, there were early warning signs with Nicola that things between us weren't built for success.
You see, I valued and adored that woman like there was no tomorrow. I trusted her immediately, threw myself at her and let her become my entire world. She was my entire world for pretty much the entire time I knew her. She very quickly became my friend, my trusted ally and confidant. The best way I could kind of describe our relationship was like I was somehow addicted to her. She was all consuming and I wanted more every time I was around her. I was very lonely and she was often there to pick up the pieces. I had nobody else in my life at the time, was living in Wales, alone in a van, with no friends, during COVID and with a family who were reaching breaking points. And she offered me human contact, friendship, distractions from the stress and made everything feel normal. She made me feel like the work I was doing with her, was epic (and it was). But while I valued, trusted and respected her, she didn't have the same notion towards me. She never really showed she cared and what I mean by that is the moments where things went wrong for me, in my personal life and that became obvious to her, she never inquired further than "are you going to be ok to do XYZ for us". If I was ok to work, I was good and that was kind of all she minded. If it was a problem with my life that she could help with, she'd only do it if A: Someone else was around to witness it or B: if it would make her look better. And while I was busy picturing a future with her in it, building my future around her and trying desperately to be all she wanted, needed and more, she was quite happy watching me run myself ragged.
I both loved and feared that woman, much like Sara. And it wasn't until I reflected on why that was the case, that I realised things would never have worked out without her being prepared to change. She liked the power, the control, the feeling of knowing more and when I played into that, all was good. But like Sara, the moment I stopped being useful, she no longer needed me, so I was worthless. I became less than. Not human. But somehow I still miss Nicola, despite knowing she was a piece of crap. I still miss the person I knew before things went bad. Miss the happy moments, the randomness of her head matching the mess in mine. But it was a relationship that was doomed from the start.
Which of course, made my therapist go "philosophically speaking, how do you know this won't happen with people in your life now". And I don't. I have no idea what the future holds. To be brutally honest, I'm still scared of everyone I love leaving and that my taste of care, support and friendship with all the people in my life at the moment, will just lead me to a deeper heartbreak if things end in an unhealthy way. Even at 22, I still wonder if I am enough for my friends to stay, for my parents to love, for people to want to be around. I wonder how long things will last before they break and I break with them. I wonder who else will hurt me, wound me so deeply my entire world shatters into a thousand, tear stained shards of glass, that (no matter how hard I try) will never quite fall back into place the way they should. I wonder what lies in my head, which unseen, unprocessed traumas will make themselves known in the next few months and I worry that I will not cope if/when the unspoken becomes known.
I'm scared I will end up alone, that no matter how many friends I make, they will not last the test of time and that I will inevitably end up hurting the people I love, like all those ex friends, ex tutors and ex relationships in general, that I 'failed'. And I worry that the people who are my friends in London, because we are so far away from them, will forget about us. Move on without letting us know and we will have to watch in real time, something dying and have no ability to stop it.
But somehow, this led me onto point two:
That pivotal, poignant moment of suddenly not being alone anymore.
I cried when I told my therapist this. Burst into tears and sobbed levels of cried because I hadn't realised how ridiculously powerful this little, simple moment was for me. I hadn't grasped that it was somehow everything I had wanted in my entire life, summed up in one simple act. The act of staying. I mentioned this moment in detail in literally the last post I made here. The moment when Jack and Luna found me in tears, on the floor and stayed. I also mentioned that was the first time in my life, someone had stayed. And that's true.
In the entire 22 years of my life (21 at the time), nobody in the history of ever, had seen me in the kind of state I was when Jack and Luna found me and then stayed. This was partially a combo of me picking my moments to breakdown but also partly the people in my life choosing to ignore my pain because it wasn't something they wanted to see or help me through. Growing up, when I got scared, angry, frightened, bar once during a thunderstorm, I was left alone to deal with those emotions. Or scorned for losing control. I was made to feel smaller, weak, stupid, ignorant and like I was a burden for crying, for seeking comfort. So I self soothed, I grew up far too fast and I learned who I could lean on when I felt scared out of my mind (and the answer was nobody).
Everytime when I'd broken down, cried, got angry or lost control in some fashion, somehow, even if it wasn't my fault at the situation that caused said reaction, it became my fault. I was "too much" and was punished in a variety of creative ways for said "too muchness". The whole "too much" thing is a concept I still don't get and I'm years into therapy. It's also not something I likely will share here. Probably ever, as it's associated with years of neglect, abuse and trauma from my childhood and said shit, runs very deep and is incredibly hard for me to openly talk about - though many of my friends know what that dreaded phrase holds for me (bar Luna and Jack because how does one explain to people you admire and are navigating new uncharted waters of relationships with, your childhood trauma and its ongoing impact on your life today?).
Anyway, I essentially grew up feeling and being very alone. Limited friends, limited care and compassion from various people and then people like Melanie (family friend who found out about the self harming back in 2018/19), Sara and Nicola using my moments of terror, vulnerability as moments to get me to agree to something I wasn't ready to do (nor wanted to do half the time). So you can only imagine the sheer earth shattering terror my little (very recently traumatised at the time) brain felt when it twigged that two tutors I barely knew were headed by way and I was crying!? It almost made everything stop and I almost ran away. But then the scoldings and the harsh words never came and the two nutcases I now call friends, stayed by my side and have never left. People in power in my life were not supposed to stay. People in general were not meant to stay and up until that moment in Oct 22, nobody ever had stayed. People stay now, my closest friends have seen me in tears more times than I care to count but Oct 22 was the first time in my life, I felt like I wasn't alone when the terror came to claim me. And it calmed so many versions of me, so much of the trauma reactions to simply not feel like I was fighting a battle in my head alone anymore.
There's lots more to it, but that's between Jack, Luna and myself and again, boundaries, not going to share every single thought in my head online until I have had time to process how I feel about everything and what I feel comfortable sharing as well - progress eh?
The 3rd one I will not talk about as it's linked to a lot of neglect, abuse and trauma for me but to put it simply, I hate feeling trapped in rooms and unable to escape them. It brings a high degree of panic, fear and anxiety.
So yeah, interesting session. I start work soon, so I wonder what chaos that will bring? Guess we shall have to see come Feb eh?
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