Letters to Myself
Everything will be better eventually 💙 It always is. No storm lasts forever and by now, I should basically be a professional storm surfer.
If you take control of your pain and your healing, you can make it happen. You don't have to be hurt all the time. You can be carved from stone without destroying your ability to be vulnerable, empathetic, and compassionate.
Your mind isn't trying to kill you. It's trying - in its simple, misguided way - to protect you. You need to teach it that you aren't in danger. You need to teach it that there are people in the world that will return your kindness and patience, rather than foaming at the mouth for the chance to eat you alive.
There are people who will not resent you for your accomplishments, there are people who will not side-eye you for your looks or weight or gender expression, there are people who will celebrate your hard work and personal growth, rather than looking for any way to passively or actively abuse you for your attempts to feel a normal human level of self-appreciation and love. No matter how complicated and traumatized and misguided people are - no matter how hurtful and cruel they always seem to be. Yes, there will always be crabs in a bucket (and sometimes they will be your loved ones), but you need to find the people around you who value cooperation over competition and who are capable of giving you the same level of compassion you're willing to give.
I've poured myself into cups full of bullet holes until I forgot that cups could be any other way. Until giving myself to people who do nothing but take and manipulate and abuse felt like the norm. I've let walking, talking Black Holes suck my soul dry until I forgot that people could be anything but Black Holes - until I couldn't even see stars anymore - and then blamed myself more harshly than anyone else because they had convinced me that they deserved to treat me that way and that I deserved to remain in abject suffering all the time for it.
It is never your fault that someone else is using their mental illness, triggers, or trauma as an excuse to berate, belittle, mock, stalk, snap, cop attitude, or otherwise abuse you. Their lack of self-control, compassion, boundaries, and maturity will never be your responsibility. You do not deserve abuse, no matter how much abusive people will insist that you do, but it is your responsibility to separate yourself from them - even while they kick and scream that it's your fault, your fault, your fault that they're perpetually incapable and feel they deserve to treat everyone else like shit for it. Some people will just always be desperate to blame everyone else for their own faults. Just because they're blaming you doesn't mean that you're actually to blame and it's not your responsibility to fix them or convince them otherwise.
I am excruciatingly aware that some people will be nice to you or do you favors or would-be kindnesses not because they're genuinely compassionate or honest or even care about you as an individual person, but because they want to manipulate you or want something to hold over your head. They will pretend to care about you while hiding an ulterior motive (eg. "Let me pay for that", "I'll help you with that", "Move in with me") while resenting you for it. The real motive is actually completely self-serving and this faux-friendliness will melt away to reveal the cruel, abusive face beneath once they realize they won't be getting what they really wanted (eg. control over you, your sense of self-worth, and/or dominion over your attention, all of which they would like to manipulate to be all about them, them, them - even at terrible personal cost to you).
When you experience too much of this behavior or let those sorts of people manipulate your good and trusting nature for too long, it can destroy your good and trusting nature. You stop being able to trust anyone - least of all people who smile, say they love you, and try to offer you help. You become bitter, closed off, ultra-independent, and suspicious of everyone. Smiling teeth look like fangs and the tongues behind them tell only lies. They don't like you, they just want something from you. Which of course isn't always true and you need to be open to that possibility in order to make real, genuine connections with safe, responsible people.
So do yourself a favor: When people tell you who they really are, listen to them the first time.
When their behavior is screaming at you that they feel very comfortable disrespecting/abusing you or upholding a perpetual double standard of behavior where they get to be abusive and out of control while everyone else is always expected to be the bigger person - leave them behind and don't ever feel guilty about it.
If they really loved you, they wouldn't have abused you until you left. If they really wanted you around, they wouldn't have lied about you to make themself look like the victim after treating you like shit. Rest soundly because anyone who spends enough time around a person like that will see the truth for themself. The truth doesn't need to be believed in - it will exist no matter who accepts it or not. Additionally, you will never ever be responsible for the fact that an abusive person is miserable and alone now because they burned every available bridge within burning distance with their deplorable behavior.
You have the power to choose to not to be hurt by others - in spite of everything. No one else's misery has to be yours and no one's attempts to destroy your happiness or self-worth can even come close to nicking your armor if you refuse to give them that power.
I don't know much about your life beyond these walls
The fleeting sense of love within these God-forsaken halls
And I can hear it in his voice, in every call;
"This girl who's slept a hundred years has something after all"