the worst days are the ones where my own head gets too loud to ignore. when you're this aware of where you are, where you came from, and the systems you built to survive it, reflection stops helping. it just paces the cell.
lately i've been trying to parse a specific kind of friction. psychology and philosophy used to be a hobby, and the reading gave me a vocabulary for my own thoughts, an exactness i didn't have before. it also made me a hyper-critical observer of my own behaviour. i can tell you exactly how irrational a tendency is. that changes nothing. knowing the mechanics of a spiral doesn't keep you out of it; it means you get to watch yourself fall in 4k.
i value autonomy above almost everything. possessive, controlling behaviour disgusts me, so my brain punishes me for wanting even transient, exclusive attention. divided attention feels unsafe. attention i had to ask for feels unearned. if it feels demanded, it violates the thing i care about most, the freedom of the people i love. and if i don't get it, the silence detaches me from everything.
so it turns into guilt. i think the discomfort stems from an internalised judgment that my wanting to be chosen, to be held in focus, is intrusive. stifling. remorse follows every time. when you carry trust issues and a history of neglect, your default assumption is that your needs are a burden, that having feelings at all is a failure of discipline, that it's on you for being like this.
but behaviour isn't immutable. when someone shows you, again and again, that your presence isn't toxic to them, that wanting to share their time is just what care looks like and not obssession, the guilt starts to crack. i've seen otherwise now. i'm cautiously confident the anxiety will shrink, and that it won't drag the same remorse behind it. i'm still figuring myself out.
this is the exhausting part of changing. survival keeps most people too busy to look inward at all, which is the same paradox i wrote about before: survival versus self-assessment. there's rarely energy for both. either you spend it on the repair and risk disconnecting from everyone around you, or you let life run and become a half-assed productivity machine, blissfully unaware of what's underneath.
none of this would've been possible without vivian ❤︎. thank you for being the sweetest, most precious person in existence, and for shattering the biases i held against my own needs. you give me the safety to understand myself, to heal, to get better, and you've proven to me that growing doesn't have to be lonely or punishing. thank you for getting me through this. i love you so so so so much. thank you. like, i can't even put into words how thankful i am that you exist. you are perfect. in fact, so much more than perfect,,