black butterfly (Patreon)

There she sits. Firmly planted on my door. Ushering in a new era. 

In no hurry to be anywhere, seeing me through this process. 

Lately I've taken every possible chance to heal. And after years of pushing forward with no conceivable end in sight, today I've reached a critical threshold. 

It's the end of a cycle for many of us. If you could have any life, what kind of life would you want to live? 

I'd have a life free from trauma. Now that I can see... Now that I've started to wake up from the grip my complex trauma has had on me for over two thirds of my existence... Now that I  can see everything I took for granted, as gospel, that turned out to be just an emotion, just an intricate coping mechanism - everything I thought was the stuff the world is made of... Nothing but an emotion. Nothing but an illusion. A broken record of pain and suffering, skipping endlessly, playing but one song for all eternity.

And suddenly it was quiet. 

See, the insidious thing about narcissistic abuse is that it makes you want to disappear. Because it's not safe to exist. To feel excited and hopeful. Because if you have anything, any joy, any hope... The narcissist will stop at nothing to take it from you. To beat you down, make you small and convince you that you don't deserve to have anything and will never achieve anything... To ensure you are as miserable as they are so that they never have to face their own envy... To maintain their control over you. And after a while you forget what it's like to be alive. To be free. You don't remember the last time you felt free or alive or happy. It was for your own good to suppress these emotions and maintain an outlook of gloom and misery. That's how you survived. Because if you were already at the bottom, there was nothing they could take away. The darkness was the only place where they couldn't hurt you because you already embraced the hurt and cloaked yourself in depression and became the nothing they wanted you to be so you could never be better than them. It was for your own good not to try. It was for your own good not to move forward. Because you were a child and you had no power and your only way of coping was to stay low so that even if they tried to put you down, they couldn't. You wore depression as a safety blanket and confused it for your self. All the while your self has been stuck inside, frozen while you were left to navigate this life through a myriad of coping mechanisms, unable to see the light of the world for your own trauma and pain. Waiting for the day you would heal and finally see... everything.

My drive is the liberation of self. With the end goal of stopping the seemingly eternal downward spiral of needing to escape from myself through countless coping mechanisms that I can't begin to understand but I try. And from here, overlooking the path of darkness behind me, I can see why I couldn't go on. 

It was to keep me safe from harm and the abuse I suffered. It was completely out of my control. Decisions made by a part of my brain that doesn't listen to reason but only responds to threat. And all the yelling and gaslighting in the world couldn't convince it not to feel what it feels. Because it always knew the truth even when I, even when others tried to convince it it wasn't the truth. It always knew. 

That in secret, the person who was supposed to love me the most in life, wished my downfall. 

And that energy stays with you, eating away at your soul as they all pretend they are saints and make you wrong for everything. 

Now I am looking behind me at where I've been and know that I survived. And I mourn the time I spent walking dead, not realizing the fighting was over. That my abuser was far away in another country. That I didn't have to spend years waiting for the other shoe to drop. I mourn not having realized sooner that I had outlived the pain. That I had lasted through the storm and even though it broke me and kept breaking me through countless instances of re-traumatization, I was on the path to healing. Somehow I just never believed I would get there and for good reason. But now I'm not afraid of remembering. The feelings I thought I couldn't take are no longer my enemy. I'm no longer my enemy. 

As I find myself ready to embrace the life I was given rather than escape from it, I see that this is what I had always craved. What I had been searching for in all the wrong places. I don't know what convinced me I would find this satisfaction in a certain way of living and being - I mean, I was close. But if I'm honest, every previous attempt at getting my life together came from extrinsic motivation... And was deeply tangled in low self-worth. I told myself I 'had to' get my shit together because I was a disgrace, a disappointment of a person otherwise. You know, the same thing my parents have beat into me year after year. I had no motivation to do it for myself because I had no desire to live for myself. All I had was but a desire for a desire to live with no earthly idea how to go about creating a life I don't hate. A life that meets my needs - where maybe, potentially, every part of me has a place. 

My downfall was my own projection of self. 

You see, at a very young age I lost the ability to just perceive myself... Instead I replaced this perception of myself with a projection of what I felt other people saw when they looked at me - and I hadn't been able to shake it since. I judged myself by how I appeared to others and this coping mechanism made it so I couldn't express who I truly am for fear of rejection. I couldn't express what I truly felt as I had learned from a young age that the truth of me is not only unwelcome but also makes mother dearest look bad in front of others. And you can imagine that that was a very bad idea! And even when I wanted so desperately to say what I really think, I couldn't, as part of me was utterly terrified of backlash for speaking my mind. I wanted so badly to express anger and frustration and sadness but because I was fighting myself trying to show feelings I learned were unsafe to show, it came out forced and awkward and weird. I didn't know how to just not filter myself. I didn't know how to look at myself without this filter of seeing myself through the eyes of others. It's a curse. It was meant to keep me safe by helping me adjust my behavior to be accepted, nay, tolerated - but instead it kept me stuck in perpetual self-rejection and self-doubt as increasingly more people were looking at me and I couldn't process all this conflicting information about who "I am". At this point at least I'm able to tell the difference. Yesterday, in fact, was the first day that I was able to perceive me... from the inside. Not the outside. Not who I told myself I am, not who anyone else told me I am, not who I thought I was before I realized the traits I identified with were but the karma and trauma of my blood line... Just me. And that was the thing that gave me hope. 

I didn't know that I didn't know who I was designing this life for?! All my ideas and decisions were, for a lack of qualifying information, based on "should"-s and "good"-s and it would trigger me every time I failed at keeping up with this "ideal version" of my life because it reminded me that I couldn't conform... I couldn't conform then and I can't conform now, even when the idea is my own design. Because I'm not a robot, I'm a breathing, feeling human... And my needs now are not the same as my needs an hour ago. But because my parents couldn't account for my needs, neither could I. I never learned how. I'm learning that now. 

Because all this time I was holding all these shortcomings over my own head like a humiliating flag raised up to demonstrate to the whole world how I'm not good enough. Undeserving. Scum. And even though no one apart from me saw, it made me feel like I was failing at life. And one day I just thought to myself... What if this is all I want? What if all I want right now is to lie in bed and do shadow work and what if all I want in 10 minutes is to drink cider and watch a spooky show and what if all I want tomorrow morning is to stay in bed until I don't want to stay in bed no more and what if all I want is to be who I am right now and not have to live up to some "improved" version of myself that I told myself is the minimum requirement for being worthy of breathing air? What if I don't want to judge my worth based on how much I produce, how little I eat and how frequently I exercise? What if what I'm feeling now isn't wrong somehow? What if all I want out of life is just to live? 

This is what made the tower fall. 

Illusions that were never meant for me. 

A path where only I remain. 

And what if it is good...

What if we all could return to our humanity and make the world a better place that way?