It’s hard to let everything slip past your grasp when you swear you’re still holding it. I’m struggling to find enjoyment in the things that have brought me endless smiles. People say it was "sudden." They really like the comfort of that word. Sudden means no one is responsible for missing it.
But nothing about this came out of nowhere. You can’t call something invisible just because you refused to look closely. I’ve been dissecting it in private for years, every interaction, every word, the tone behind the word, the way a body moves when it thinks no one is studying it. My head doesn’t let interactions pass by. It replays everything, cuts it open, asks what someone meant when they thought I wasn’t paying attention in the first place.
I know most people don’t live like this. They don’t contradict their own thoughts until the thoughts start making up stuff. I do. Sometimes I blame myself over stuff I never thought was true just to explain to people why I feel guilty. Silence feels incomplete without a something connected to it.
I’m not confused about how harsh that sounds. Awareness doesn’t soften it. It just means I watch myself think it in real time. I’ve known from the beginning that something in me was unstable. I fought it so carefully that when it finally collapsed, it happened all together, years of weight landing in two seconds. Effort has a limit. I found mine.
What saddens me is how easily my love thins when I’m tired. I’ve watched myself fall out of devotion to people I promised were permanent. Not because they changed. Because exhaustion edits attachment until trying feels optional. And some days I want to choose the version of myself that stops trying. It’s not scary anymore, how peaceful that sounds.
I know there are people who hear my kind of honesty and mistake it for performance. They think naming a feeling is the same as begging for reassurance. But when you don’t like yourself, your mind turns into a courtroom that never adjourns. Every thought is evidence. Every memory is cross-examined. The verdict is written before the trial begins. The judge was corrupt from the beginning.
I can easily feel compassion outward without thinking. I understand mistakes. I forgive people before they can finish explaining themselves. That mercy disappears when it turns inward. I know how to care about others in fluent language. I speak to myself in accusation.
I learned early that needing less looked like virtue. Or being an “easy child” would make me more loved. I feel like it’s a learned response, being unseen, getting compared, getting criticized for just doing things my way. If I don’t cost anything, I can’t disappoint anyone. If I need less, I’ll be easier to love. Or if I reduce the cost of loving me, I become affordable.
And still, even after laying it out, I can’t explain the depth of distaste for myself. The standards I apply to myself would be unrecognizable if turned outward. I would never demand this level of perfection from another person. Yet I enforce it internally with the certainty of law. Some nights it feels like I’m fighting a version of myself in a sealed room, no communication from inside or out, just the echo of my own arguments looping back at me.
I don’t think I’m searching for pity. I’m trying to understand how a mind can be this inhospitable and still insist on calling itself home.
Loading comments...