void!

[Glides]

hey everyone, it's me.

long story short, my contract ended, i am currently unemployed. a lot of shit came to a head. my workplace was really toxic and that contributed to a lot of shit breaking down. in some ways it was the best job i ever had, but a lot was wrong with the place, i wasn't adequately defended or taken care of. the company just laid off a fuckton of people a week after my contract ended so clearly it wasn't just me. i had two relationships start and end very abruptly, one because i just did not have the capacity to be the other person's constant emotional anchor and the other because this was a lesbian who wanted to experiment with a different set of, uh, instruments (not elaborating, it's been weird).

anyway, in the middle of this period of unemployment and isolation, i got waylaid for like almost a month now with what turned out to be shingles, and that absolutely fucked me up. my closest IRL friend also had shingles a couple years ago, and he warned me that it will cause like a full existential crisis because you'll spend a lot of time alone and you will be forced to face every thought you've been trying to run away from. so i did all that, it was absolutely horrible, and a clear sign that i stressed myself out so much that i just needed time to like actually not do anything and survive as best i can.

a lot came from that, a lot of introspection against my will, trying to compare the supremely fucked up life i have had that has made me such a reactive and angry person in the way i write. most of y'all probably don't know this, but in person i am actually way friendlier and bubblier, albeit usually pretty quiet and timid. when i write here, when i've been the most reactive, i just sound unfathomably angry and toxic and furious. you'd have no idea if you talked to me in person, i keep my shit under the surface pretty well IRL. that's no excuse, i've been really trying to confront the pattern of being angry as all hell online and timid IRL. anger stems from fear, and i'd rather be seen as angry than afraid, and thus vulnerable, because i'm always anticipating being attacked because that's been a lot of my past.

and on top of that i had a close friend very abruptly and without warning end the friendship citing a bunch of things i did that i demonstrably could prove i did not do (basically accusing me of neglecting her emotionally and ghosting her, but treating these like i'd shot a puppy). this person also has a huge history of trauma and abuse and health problems and i think we had a mutual crush that we never fully addressed, and the one time we met in person, it just got really weird without anything really happening. she got really possessive of me a little bit and her behavior towards my evolving relationship with my gender was a bit on the fetishy side and now we're never going to address any of it. i also had two separate experiences with two exes who are now friends where their current partners hung out with me socially and then had sort of a public tantrum at the idea of even platonic friendliness between two people i had once dated at the same time. a lot has been going on, a lot of it awkward, a lot of me misreading situations like i always do and feeling left out of the loop on things that are extremely obvious to the neurotypicals. what it illustrates is that the people i've dated are just as fucked up, if not more so, than i am and i don't really know what to do now that my Jerkbrain has had it so thoroughly proven that none of these people deserve to be on the pedestals i built for them. They're not inherently "bad" people, but they are toxic as shit in other more indirect ways and also refusing to work on themselves. I don't want to turn out like that.

ANYWAY, all this to say that in the midst of whatever half-conscious nearly hallucinating state i was in during the shingles surprise (borderline feverish, maybe? idk), I had to finally address that my constant repressed anger intertwined with fear, that's the inner child begging to be heard. I saw a tiktok where this person described self-sabotage as the inner child re-enacting with you the dynamic you had with your parents or caretakers. And yeah, most of my childhood relationship with my various parental figures (long story) was me acting out to get their attention, because negative attention is better than no attention. Having given up on believing that I'd ever get positive attention for being my genuine self, I now try to inspire anger, disgust revulsion and hatred so people will look at me for even a second. It's why I have done everything I've done here, I've been rewarded in spades for it. Not that any of that onus is on y'all, the collective who have watched me grow from a barely functioning child to a barely functioning adult pushing 30 (fucking hell). My self-sabotage certainly isn't at the sheer elemental scale it used to be, I know that my worst now approaches my best 11 years ago.

But namely it's that I was never given the opportunity to develop a personality outside of this state of constant push-and-pull. I don't want to call it Jerkbain anymore. But now here I am with this rampaging, screaming crying thing that just wants to be loved and didn't receive it when it should, and I can barely take care of my conscious self as it is. I feel the exact sensation a new parent feels when their child just won't SHUT THE FUCK UP, and I'm all by myself. I have more patience with other people's kids than I do for myself, where it doesn't know what else to do and it's never felt heard or seen by anyone before. This is a responsibility I really don't want. I know I have to take it on, to fully integrate the Inner Child with the conscious self writing this in order to begin to actually live as a human being, but I don't know where to start. I don't know what kind of therapist I can seek out, because clearly the interns doing CBT and DBT are not cutting it. I don't consider either as legitimate forms of therapy at this point as it is.

I mean, clearly for once this is not actually my fault. The harm I have caused in the name of silencing the Inner Child absolutely is my fault, but right now I'm unemployed and interviewing everywhere so I don't even have the luxury of punishing myself for being alive like I usually do. I am stuck in a survival situation with the one being I have spent my entire natural life trying to avoid, and one I have blamed for the dissolution of every relationship that mattered to me. I don't have ambitions of greatness anymore, just ambitions of survival. I didn't expect to be this old. I fully expected to be dead by 20 and then 25 and at this point, I can't delude myself into thinking I'm actually going to not make it to 30. I don't want to be a grown-up, but here I am, having been one the whole fucking time.

I know this is probably the most confusing thing I've ever written in a very long series of rants, probably the place where i've been as honest as i've ever gotten. I don't even know what help or support can be offered around all this.

[Enail]

Ooof, that sounds like a lot. But also a pretty significant insight into yourself and a clear path to be taking to make things better internally, which is good. And also you seem like you're handling it all in a very mature and compassionate way. So, sorry it's all shitty, but glad it's the good, productive kind of shitty, and way to go handling it so well? Wishing you an easy path through it, as much as confronting and embracing one's deepest self can be easy.

[Hielario]

OK, it may be because I had an unconventional family but I recognize a lot of what you're saying. You're mentioning the basics of Transactional Analysis theory, as stated in the famous essay "I'm OK, you're OK"!. My info about that kind of therapy is probably outdated at this point, but it looks like it's still a thing according to google, and different from the ones you've mentioned.

Maybe you could try to find a therapist or org that does it? Idk how that works, sorry. But it's a style of therapy/analysis that specifically adresses a lot of it.

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