An Open Letter

By some miracle A somehow is the perfect storm of the unreasonable things I was wishing for. This is insane how this is even possible. Somewhere along the way without even knowing it I’ve bloomed into someone that is wanted, and badly. I’ve gone from being worried about not even having the chance to be rejected, to now worrying about how to reject someone. It weirdly happened after I stopped caring about it. How funny the world is, what is the lesson we are supposed to learn from getting things once we stop wanting them.

Someone asked for my instagram today, and I continued to just be completely honest, unperformative, and trying to make myself laugh wherever I can. It ended up with them saying how bad they wanted me, so I feel like that’s a good sign that I should remember this for the confidence bank lol. I think obviously this is an excessive case, but I do want to be more happy and content with myself where I can be – I know that confidence is one of those things that’s invaluable to have in life so the more of it the better (in moderation of course). That’s kinda funny to say, since both of those things go directly against each other lol. Oh well! To be alive is a beautiful thing.

I built the PC! I spent all of today finishing it and starting the setup, and holy fuck, it’s beautiful. Everything worked first try, and I didn’t break anything. I’m so tired but satisfied.

I'm building a computer for the first time in my life and I'm doing it by myself which arguably may be a mistake. I've already had to force in a couple pins onto some headers because there’s a fan in the way and I didn't put these ahead of time, but so far things have been going not catastrophically. I'm a little bit worried because I haven't tested anything and I kind of was banking on the fact nothing would fail and so I don't really know what I'd do if that happens. Live and learn!

Someone on Reddit had a thread about social socialization. A lot of people said stuff that resonated with me, and one person said something that I had pretty much Word for Word and so I ended up turning on voice to text and just kept talking as a response, ending up with a couple paragraphs. I had someone then reach out to me asking if they could ask for advice. I think it’s so weird how I’ve come from a kid that was not socialized at all and did not really have any friends to someone who is giving people advice now. The weird thing is I don’t even think it’s wrong for me to give advice, I’ve had so many recently talk about how they envy me for being or ask me on tips or how to do things like make friends. And I feel like that’s an indication that I’m doing something right. I also realized talking with M how so comfortable being uncomfortable in new situation and how it’s to go and make friends now in those weird foreign situations. Like I’m now the person that is the social glue. I’m really proud of how far I’ve come.

There's a lot that I would want to say today but also nothing at all. But I did see a couple quotes or posts that really resonated so I kind of wanted to notarize them here.

10 spears go to battle, and nine of them shatter. Did the war forge the spear that would remain? No, all the war did was identify the one that would not break.

I'm going to paraphrase here for this one, but it was talking about the story of Icarus. One of the things commonly is how his father warned Icarus about flying too close to the Sea, because the water would stick to the wings and make it too heavy to fly. What would the world have looked like if the idiom was don't fly too close to the sea.

I really liked that one because I really love the entire myth of Icarus and a lot of the symbolism behind it. But I also really like the acknowledgment of the counterpoint, how it is almost equally as dangerous as driving for too much to strive for not enough. I don't know if this is just a universal human thing or if I have just always underestimated myself, but I think about how many things in my life I would not have done if I did not decide to chase it. It is arguably worse to die to the sea, because the alternative means you get to enjoy the Sun, and the fall.

I feel like I should be more hurt or stuff like that but I only really think about it when it's the end of the day and I'm journaling and I feel obligated to talk about the whole thing that happened with T. I think part of me does the potential of a close friend like that, but at the same time I do feel like I dodged a bullet and also because I am surrounded by other friends and I don't feel like I'm missing anything, I really feel okay. I guess this is the importance of maintaining and working on a diverse social network instead of just being satisfied once a few places fill that .

I surprisingly don't feel that bad today. I talked with a few friends, and I'm also interacting with people normally. I also finally rested and started trying to work out without fatigue, and I felt incredibly good. I want to focus more in my recovery so that I can do this more often.

That chapter is now closed. I want to say that I got closure, but I didn't really, mostly because F had a really good point on how they might have just been trying to find an excuse to get away. I don't think this was something conscious, but I think the conflict and discomfort having to things while already struggling in real life became too much, and I find it reasonable to think that she defense mechanism'ed me and went nuclear. It would explain why this happened without an explicit event but was rather delayed, and also why she didn't try to communicate it or resolve it. She told me her reasons, and they were all things that to me were misunderstandings. But because I did not have a way to know or clear things up before this breaking point, what happens happened.

In the entire time I knew her, she never once mentioned knowing about my blog. But it turns out she knew and also kept up with it. The day we got into a conflict voice-to-texted a lot of stuff, to try to process and vent. If I knew that she might potentially see it I would have edited it instead of just letting it be a continuous stream of emotion. It sucks because whenever people I know mention that they know about this website, I kind of talk with them and let them know that I don't want them to keep up with it and also that anything I write is not what I believe or what I think, it's just meant to be somewhere where I can fully vent and try on different thoughts. It's like a kid getting mad at their parent and saying “I hate you I hope you die”, even though they wouldn't want that at all. I guess this was meant to be my place for that, because I don't want to tell people things that I don't mean. But she read those posts, and she misinterpreted several big things and she stated those as the reasons why she ghosted me. The biggest one that hurt to hear was that she thought I wanted to hurt her. That broke my heart to hear, because I hate the idea of making anyone uncomfortable let alone hurting someone. Especially someone that I care about like a friend. Like even in sparring with L or N, I would constantly be holding back even when they would be rougher, because I just could not handle the thought of hurting someone. But at the same time I see how that’s at odds with the things that I wrote that day.

I wrote about how I sometimes get dreams about getting in fights or being in situations where someone attacks me first and it is morally justified to defend myself and in the dreams I'm overly aggressive and I struggle to sleep because my heart keeps racing but my brain keeps going back there. And I like those dreams, it's not like it's a nightmare. It's not something where I want to dream it or I try to, but whenever I do it feels good for a lack of a better word. And so I sat there thinking about where is the dissonance between me being a non-violent person and having these violent fantasies. And I think I kind of figured it out.

I only have these dreams whenever I start to feel triggered or a lack of control over my own well-being. Plenty of people have had it worse than me, but at the same time I know that you can't compare struggles but I at least wanted to say that first. But I grew up in a house where I was emotionally neglected, sometimes physically abused, and also sexually. It's not something I really like to talk about for very obvious reason, but also mostly because I don't want people to feel uncomfortable or to look at me any differently or with pity. I'm pretty well adjusted, and I'm really thankful to therapy and introspection for that. But there absolutely are plenty of scars, including ones that I keep finding. And one of those is I think my issue with emasculation. I remember when things happened to me as a kid, especially the SA, I always blamed myself because I could have stopped it and I just wasn't strong enough to. It wasn't a question of physically, but I just kind of mentally shut down I wouldn't think about it and I would just go along and do it. I also didn't have any trusted adults or people I could talk to and so I just kind of dissociated and as a result I don't really remember my childhood at all. That was all I could do because I was hurting so badly and it's not like I could have done much else. I was a kid. But I always blamed myself for it, and so a consistent narrative in my head has been that I will never be that weak again. I will be strong enough to be able to protect myself. And it's irrational because it was never question about my physical strength, or my masculinity. But if I'm what I always see of men, of being emotionally strong, independent, resilient, and not victims, if I'm that, then I am safe. It's really hard to write this out. Whenever I would feel emasculated, I would feel weak, and I would feel vulnerable. Like if something was to happen to me again I would need someone else to come and save me or help me, and the only thing I learned growing up is that no one will come. The only thing they would do is make it worse, and so I need to be strong enough to deal with it by myself.

I remember with T, it wasn't the homophobic comment that she made towards her ex. That of course sucked, but I would have been fine. It was me taking a risk and telling her that what she said kind of hurt me, and her responding saying I don't care, and that she will keep doing it. And when I told her I don't think she understood what I was saying, she said she did understand and doubled down. This is one of those things where what she did really isn't the worst thing in the world, but I just have my scars in exactly the spots she hit. That immediately made me feel like I did all the time growing up, where if I ever said that I was hurting or that I was struggling, it was met with aggression and indifference. There was never any empathy from my household, because my mom and my sister were always struggling with their own mental illnesses. But that's just been burned into me, that if I beg someone to help me, the response I've been trying to unlearn was aggression. And thankfully the people I've surrounded myself with have been great for that, I have plenty of friends that I'm so incredibly thankful for that have been there for me. And so trusting T in this situation and having it go right back to what I was trying to unlearn was too much. And so it hurt me so much deeper than it should have.

I'm thankful for the silver lining of this scar being pushed on hard enough for me to know it's there and to give it a name. I can talk with my therapist and more about this so that hopefully I can start to let it heal properly. But it really does hurt have someone who was a really close friend block me on every single platform, remove me from our mutual server, and even have other friends block me and take sides without me getting any say. I'm happy that they have people that will be on their side no matter what, because I know how important that is. It just really sucks that I don't think it's a good idea to just do that, to fully block someone and exonerate them without any communication. And I also always try to make sure no one has to choose sides, which is why I didn't mention any kind of conflict or the things that she was doing what was our mutual friends. But because of that I'm left defenseless and out in the cold. This is such an ugly pity party of a last few sentences, I'm sorry for rambling with voice to text again. It just hurts that her friend that I became friends with didn't even give me a chance as a person. I'm glad because that means she has people on her side to support her, and I have other people and I'm strong enough regardless now. I'm still sad because it hurts me way more than it needed to. But maybe it's a good thing, the whole thing about comfortable discomfort.

I can't believe I wrote all of this shit when I really only meant to write this last paragraph. I think this blog has been a really cringy stupid idea that I somehow have not gotten backlash over, or enough to motivate me to stop. But at the same time this is now the third time someone close to me has utilized this as a resource during conflict against me. And that makes me feel really unsafe writing, because it no longer feels like a journal but rather like I'm going on the record and that it's going to be scrutinized and leveraged against me later. I don't really know why I want to have something that's public in the first place. I think a big part is because I truly do believe that I am not perceived enough for this to matter, and that no one is going to notice this in a way that actively affects me. But I absolutely hate lying and so people close to me usually find out about this in some way or another, and then in the conflicts with some people they then have access to this one way glass into my mind. And I think that's something I'm not really comfortable with anymore.

I like the idea of somewhat documenting my emotional progress throughout my life, and it's pretty nice to be able to look back and see how far I've came. And I've had a couple people reach out to me and say how been helpful or nice to see what I'd like to think is just a very intimately humanizing view into someone else. But I find myself more and more becoming worried about censoring things from a stream of consciousness which defeats the purpose of journaling. My current idea has been to rewrite my own blogging platform so that I can change it from a traditional feed into instead a random post. I think this way people can see small little windows, but I don't have to be afraid of someone peering into my mind without me knowing, especially when I'm struggling. I'm not sure though, I feel like an overall net negative to have this be something publicly on mine, but I still want to do it which I don't get. I'm glad I have this journal though, it really helps beyond belief to be able to have a place to just yell into the void.

I was hoping it was some kind of weird fluke but consistently T is online and also responding to other people in the server we share without responding to my messages. This really caught me off guard because this wasn't even directly after we had some conflict, but we even had started to interact like normal again and then out of the blue, gone. I guess to some extent there was the writing on the walls, where she showed a lot of red flags, of course not things that she needs to do but just different issues that end up causing so much damage in relationships with others. It's really weird to write that out, because I'm so worried about the way it's perceived. But at the same time victims that are innocent can also end up with red flags of their own, like this is separate but I remember when I first had my experiences with a jealous or clingy girlfriend, it quickly became apparent how that's actually way worse than what I expected. And this kind of stuff happens in so many different aspects, and it's super easy to romanticize or act like these things are harmless compared to the red flags of aggression or lying. But at the same time, what I'm guessing is conflict avoidance has fully just trashed what was a good friendship. I'm at a weird spot where I know what she is doing is irrational and is not something that I should beat myself up about. I think there's probably some things I did or said that are either miscommunications, or are things she didn't like. But especially because this kind of happened out of the blue, and her response being a complete lack of communication and ignoring my attempts to ask if everything is okay, I'm really thankful I'm experienced enough to know that trying to diagnose and fix this issue completely blind is unrealistic and unhealthy for me. I really hope this doesn't come off as me saying I did nothing wrong and I am infallible, I feel okay because I tried to communicate, and it is unreasonable for me to ruminate on this and overthink to try to diagnose what happened from her point of view.

It still sucks a lot. T with someone I considered a really close friend, and it's one of those things where you just click. We've known each other for about 3 months or so, and it sucks because I know a lot about them. And I actively do care for them and I want the best for them as a person, And sometimes I caught myself because I felt like I was falling too much into that caretaker role. And it sucks because that means that someone mattered to you, in a way that's good, but that space in your brain can be put to rest. It would have been nice to be friends, but at the same time I guess I'm thinking that with the version of them in my mind. The one where we get along and there's no problems. But once there are some problems, the fact that we couldn't communicate about it in a way without it exploding like this, even without me making a choice that's a deal breaker. I've had enough relationships with people in my life where things blow up at the first conflict, and I've had so many relationships where that hasn't been the case. I think this is a scary thing, since this is my first time living and so I don't know if it's my fault or some big issue that I'm doing that I don't know about that causes this. But thankfully through years of talking about this topic in therapy, I think I have a fairly grounded view on it. I think because of the person that I am, I get along and attract people with their own share of issues. And I think it's a fairly good indicator when people struggle to maintain friendships, but I'm not that person. And so I feel fairly okay. I'm of course super sad, and I probably will be for a bit, mourning what could have been of this friend, but I will be okay. And it's not going to hurt me as much as it has in the past. And so I'm really thankful for the work that I've done because this doesn't dig into that scar anymore.