I noticed I do this. I'll become somewhat repugnant with flattery to keep girls away and I'll be somewhat obnoxious with topics to keep guys away.
I like being alone and all but not all the time, and so I noticed that I have this tendency to push people away once I identify what seems to repel them.
Such as flirting with a girl or going nerdy to keep her from finding me interesting, or such as talking about my issues with football to make guys not find me interesting.
Tracing this behavior takes me back to elementary school, where I would be silent and ignore everyone because... Well the bullying was minor at the time I'm thinking about, with it being worse prior... I remember this one time a girl with her two friends walked up to me and said she liked me.
I honestly thought she was just trying to hurt me so I was very dismissive. Then ironically that same girl asked me to dance at the only middle school dance I attended years later, only to tell her I don't dance and what's funny is the next day she denied it was me she asked to dance with when I asked her if she realized the guy she was talking about right in front of me was me. It was actually very hurtful (and not the first time a girl has lied and denied something with me from actually happening).
I recall another time a different girl walked up to me and asked me what I was drawing, except I recognized her as one of those mean girls, so I just ignored her.
Looking back, there was a lot of... Very confusing experiences that I overall took in a negative way because I was conditioned very early on, very quickly, that people will hurt yiu and use you and ruin your life.
I had a friend in middle school, a slightly older girl coaxed his interest in her then told the school cop he was sexually harassing her. He was a labeled sex offender before he was even 14.
I had an indian friend who was only my friend when not with his other friends. Come to think of it, basically most of my friends were those types.
Now, looking at present day, I see I am very good at keeping my distance from others, at cutting people off, at avoiding drama, at just trying to be alone. I'm too good at it, I notice even on here I have a very hard time letting people get close to me...
I have an even harder time believing in kindness in others as well.
I'm trying to... Make sense of some stuff I guess you could say, from my childhood and how it effects me in the present day, and its overall a very hard thing to do because when I look back, all I remember anymore was the only damn good moments were of me locked in my room glued to a damn video game. I don't remember the love of my parents. I don't remember the joys of friendships. I don't even recall my mother ever once saying she loved me or my dad saying so. On the flip side I remember being yelled at a lot, even hit with a belt and punched, grabbed by my hair and dragged, then told I'm the one with anger problems and just looking back is very disturbing.
It is no wonder I'm so screwed up, love for me has always been extremely conditional.
Sigh. I'm tired of talking about this for right now, its one of those it wasn't so bad in contrast to, kind of things, but for me, it was bad enough to make me extremely secluded and shy and timid. Don't speak you'll get yelled at, don't care you'll piss off people, don't expect praise because nothing I do will ever be good enough.
Ah, why bother trying in futility? My mom drops a cup and somehow it's my fault and I get punished. She can throw out my stuff, sell my stuff, but I'm the bad guy.
The story is old, I'm painted as the bad guy. I may as well be the bad guy because I've become so apathetic too.
I am tired of being so full of hate that it cripples me with fear and anxiety. I am sick of being terrified of having a horrible boss. I am just done with trying anymore because no matter what I do short of going to prison, becoming homeless, or burdening another greatly, I'm going to end up living most of my life with my mother, because she'll take all my money, if I start saving up suddenly there's more to pay, she talks me into getting a medical marijuana card for my depression and the pain in my back I've been dealing with for a while now. Turns out she basically wants me to be her drug dealer.
Every time I go out for an interview she looks at me and says I look like s*** one way or another, my hair, my teeth, my good looking interview clothes. I know I look, smell, and dress like s*** now, even though I don't.
And looking forward is just daunting, the rest of my life working to feed my mother's drug addiction and f***** up lifestyle, all because she forced me into debt by forcing me into school, forcing me to do things before I was ready or even wanted to.
I push people away because they're all controlling I'm scared of. I have spent my life being used and now, I'm a user.
It's the greater part of horror to find yourself the very monstrosities you hate. Now I'm the abuser, now I'm controlling, now I'm all bad.
It gets old, these excuses to make me bad. If people would just not be so fucking cruel I'd... But it's too late for me.
Do any of you ever notice yourself or others pushing people away?
Why do you think that is and what do you think can be done to help heal such behavior?
And I do apologize, I'm laying some heavy stuff out for processing. Have to drag it out to organize it.
In some ways I feel helpless or infantized like 'you'll never make it on your own, why even try? Hahaha!'
But inside I...Don't know if its because of all of this, but I feel like I can make it if I just had this chance I don't seem to perceive to live my life the way I wanted, I feel like I could go make myself a truly fulfilling life. Instead I feel like I'm a permanent caregiver to someone whom cuts me down more than builds me up.
Is it so wrong to want to hear your mother say 'hey, how are you?' Instead of 'What did you do today...?' (In a very condescending tone) As the first words spoken to me that day?
Or is it so wrong to feel damaged and hurt and broken up inside from not having any human contact of a sustained positive nature? Or to feel like a helpless child because most of my life was spent in escape and fantasy, games, cartoons, and distracting myself from reality with school work...?
I'm tired of bitching! Of feeling like a b****! I want to do something and not be insulted for it, to do something and not feel pathetic, to do things and not hear the haunting voice of discouragement and insult in my mind of my mother's voice destroying anything good about me.
I really want it to stop because I can't function in society if the only thing my head tells me is this is all pointless, worthless waste of time, just fueling an addicts lifestyle and giving her someome to cut down so she'll feel better about herself.
What's more is my lack of motivation, conditioning to just give up and shut down. To just become helpless.
It pisses me off, I need to change it.
I am more than some failure loser manchild, a lot more, if I could only know how to show it, and not feel so discouraged at a lifetime of experiences haunting me saying why bother? What's the point?
I shouldn't have to hear my mother's voice telling me to go kill myself, or that I'm a piece of s***.
So I'm not going to anymore, and it starts with putting these pieces in proper context so I can actually find my self worth, empowerment, motivation, drive, and direction to be a better person that I feel I can be.
My mom always asks "did you get my meds?" or "did you get the mail?" and never asks how my day was.
She'll insult me on Facebook to all her friends there. She doesn't even care that I let her live here with no rent and no paying of utilities.
And she wants me to lend her $10,000 saying she'll pay me back while she's on SSI making $700/month plus the $800/month I give her for working to take care of her.
I do get about $2000 in disability per month, but that'll change when Social Security Disability goes through and I make less.
She's proven in the past that her word is unreliable. She refused to reimburse me for shipping her dog to her and paying for the ticket.
She took $1000 from me and claims that it's ok because it's in a CD that I can't touch for a year.
And plus I gave her $1000 + paid for her dentures a few years ago.
She says that it's my job to make her happy.
But I try to take the high road. I know that by sending her love when she's having her profanity shouting conniption fit, she'll become aware of that after we both pass on. Just have to wait for karma instead of trying to do something myself.
After we both pass on we'll see how we each got on each other's nerves. She blames me for her unhappiness.
She often says she wishes she were dead in order to try to make me react. She likes to call me incompetent behind my back.
Your mother sounds like the third Pokemon evolution of my own.
I am trying to make sense of the individualistic experiences that have led me to become myself I am now.
It all started way way back in basically preschool/kindergarden, I was instantly different from others. Growing up as a child, children were monsters to me, they'd steal my stuff, insult me, call me gay, I didn't even know what that was the first time I heard it.
On top of going home to parents screaming at each other...
Then going into 1st grade was okay but I found the environment disruptive. 30 kids in one classroom. I didn't learn s***.
2nd grade, bullying began, was so bad I didn't want to go to school and the best part is I don't even remember anymore what all was happening.
3rd grade, my stuff kept getting stolen, I began stealing genstones from other kids because of this.
This stealing culminated at age 16 with getting caught at Hot Topic with $180 of merchandise. I haven't stolen a thing since except maybe a pen and accidentally a box cutter from my old gas station job.
In 4th grade racism came into the picture, I was the receiver of racist remarks from a black girl, whom told everyone I was racist. I soon discovered the N word. I have called three people that word, two Hispanic kids on the school bus whom harassed the s*** out of me. And a 16 year old black teenager in 7th grade, he punched my friend so hard it broke a canal in his nose and to this day, he cannot smell nor taste.
That person deserved that word at the time and looking back, I should've been much more harsh, and the way I know he deserved that word: Him and his gang buddies never once messed with me, a 12 year old calling this punk violent uneducated 16 year old in 7th grade an N word.
I don't even connect that word to black people. If you're an N word in my mind, you're worse than what that word means to black people. That's how I took that information.
So now I already see, being exposed to theft taught me how to steal. Being exposed to racism taught me how to be racist.
5th grade was just one long year of hell, even girls were treating me like s***.
6th grade I had a growth spurt. Suddenly I'm nearing 6ft among people who are barely breaking 5ft. I was left completely alone and by this point I'm wearing a red hacket daily through summer and winter at all times, my red jacket, serving as my protective shell. I discover my first love.
7th grade, goes well mostly, quiet...NOT. My parents got divorced, but only after my mom drove my father to drinking to handle her insanity, then suddenly she starts a fight with him and upsets him so badly that she demanded he call the police on her for trying to assault him (she DID assault him, three scratch marks bleeding along his arm), he calls the police, they show up and arrest him because my mother lied completely about what happened and threatened me to tell her story over the truth.
(Feels good getting that off my chest...)
That same night she got a restraining order on him. All he did was get drunk and yell at my mom who was screaming at him, he went to jail, he lost his home, his marriage ended. All because my mom pushed him over the edge and used it and me against him.
So then all through 7th grade I'm just in a daze at this. I stopped doing homework, stopped caring about school. I'd go home and be alone for hours before this woman comes home and starts taking her bad day out on me. Suddenly I'm all of tgese horrible things, I went from a manipulated sweetheart in a mother and father family to a piece of s*** with just a mother.
She hit holes in my wall, my door, calls the police on me and says I did it. I spend months going to an anger management class where I met actual horrible kids. I remember in the juvenile delinquent home they were keeping me at, that I refused to leave with my mother when it came time to leave. The woman overseeing me was so shocked by this that she let me stay an extra day, and apparently I was such a sweet kind gentle teenager for my age that she even let me break a few rules like entering restricted areas of the building for a few minutes. She saw I was depressed and terrified of leaving. Was I the abuser or the abused?
8th grade, that love I mentioned, she stopped talking to me without a single reason why. I spent months hurt by her cold shoulder and to this day swear should anyone do that to me again, they don't ever get a second chance. After all of that my mom found a boyfriend and my half brother moved down from NJ. My mom was immensely easier to deal with while she was with Bill. My brother on the other hand found living with my father hellish, I've lived with my father. It's nice mostly. My brother is just a really huge ass hole. So go figure when my dad kicked him out my mom took him in then subsequently kicked him out a few months later for being an ass hole that didn't put up with her attitude. Then soon after my mom gets a pacemaker put in, and her bf leaves her over it.
Start high school, on Concerta and Abilify by a shitty psychiatrists who up and left the state when all of her clients recognized her as a pill pusher. Half way through freshman year my mom is single again.
My grades were A's until the final months of freshman year, when my mom began attacking me daily again having no one else to abuse.
I finished high school with a gpa of less than 2, somehow.
Sophomore year is hell. My stomach acts up in great pain for no apparent reason most days. My teachers are crap, my friends aren't friends, I have this girl I love walking in front of me all the time whom refuses to even speak to me for what I later found out was not talking to her about my home situation...
And I'm pretty much just a loner by now.
Junior year, crazy girl called Anna takes my two closest friends and turns them against me by telling them me and another guy raped her. Because I'm just so horny I have to rape people apparently or something, but overall they called her bs eventually, but by then the damage was done, and before I even had sex, sex was being used to hurt me intentionally by a girl I really liked at first.
That year otherwise was a blur of misery.
Senior year I would've dropped out if not for one particular class, tv production. I got to be on my school's broadcast, I made a somewhat funny video starring as Farmville Addict #2, the guy whom wailed in sadness when the power went out and the game turned off on me. Turns out I'm a natural at being an Editor of film as I edited a lot of broadcasts in that class.
All of that right after Mr. Brown's history class, to this day I cannot fathom how that guy could look at a student who gleefully said he enjoyed reading the chapter on the civil war, and then tells me I read the book wrong.
-triggered-
Like how do I read a textbook wrong? What the f*** is wrong with people??!
I am beginning to believe that public school is an excuse to expose children to destructive catalyst. Send your son to public school and watch him become secluded and miserable. Send your daughter to public school, watch her get pregnant. Send your children to public school so they may be exposed to crime, drugs, assault, harassment, manipulation, racism, sexism, and possibly legal ruin of their life.
I'm soooo happy I went to public school, so happy when the vice president made a sexual pass at me saying I have great ankles (would you like to see the rest of my legs Mr. Nero??) So happy when someone stole a kids phone and I was being accused of it. So happy when every one and every thing makes me want to retreat to video games and comics and cartoons and just gtfo of reality.
So, very, happy, to have gone through America's education system, thank you so much for exposing me to some of the most atrocious things people can do to one another. I'm so happy on the last day of senior year my great mood was ruined by a bunch of fliers being thrown across the school from the second floor with a picture of a girl and underneath it read 'so-n-so is a huge slut!' What a great ending to high school, being told to everyone idiot like me walking by that you're a slut, that's such a great ending to a horrible experience.
Ugh, I'm sick to my stomach trting to go through it all again and again grabbing new tidbits each time in my memory. My heart is racing, my diaphragm shaking, my stomach hurting, just recalling it all.
It's a lot to work through for me, most of life is traumatic to me. Why did I come here again? I love? I didn't know I could love such things. I am greatly disturbed.
I don't want to be dealt that catalyst anymore. I'm tired of suffering. I just want to make people happy and be happy but everyone wants to be in misery.
I'm pushing people away because I don't even know if I have what it takes to make friends anymore, to provide love to others anymore. I'm so disturbed by the majority of this ENTIRETY OF EXPERIENCE. From being in a biological machine, my body, that is nothing more than an empty vehicle devoid of thought or awareness without a soul. To being a personality shell that will deactivate in death, making all that I know myself to be now basically Gone, nonexistent except in potential, and then the social and cultural catalyst...
It's overwhelming, were I not centered on aligning this all into a healthy mindset...I'd probably just give up right now all over again going over it all in my head right now...
I ask for help them shove away helpers... I have to do this on my own I guess...It's...probably the best way to do so without hurting anyone else. And I'm so very tired of hurting people... I never wanted to hurt a person deep down, I hate violence, I'm so sick of it in any form. It is NOT entertaining.
An honorable match between martial arts is entertaining. Watching a man assault another is NOT.
I'm so tired... I'll pick up on this later when I've calmed down a bit...
Sometimes my stomach hurts so bad it keeps me up pacing back and forth all night.
I am fortunate to never having been bullied. In part of high school I was popular because I filmed the football games for the school.
I've only been punched in the face by a young kid at home at my front door, and slapped by a girl twice.
I've made some bad mistakes in life. I think I've hurt others more than they've hurt me. Even though I've never hit anyone.
When I publish my novel, I'm worried a bit about some people finding my past and digging it up. That's why I let my book go for 13 years without promoting it. I was scared of becoming well known, in case the book takes off. But an opportunity came up with the funds, and I'm going forward so that I won't regret it. And I'm already starting on my 2nd book, which is a lot of philosophy, and is a sequel to the first book.
But in all I can still love others. What I have in anthros is so meaningful to me. I can imagine cuddling with one and get tears in my eyes and get choked up with goosebumps. Just from the though of touch. I've never been that close to any person. It's an excellent feeling, almost as close as I can imagine to being in love. Yes, sometimes fictional characters can make me feel true love.
It's okay, sometimes drawn imagery is the only thing that evokes feelings of love inside of me.
Honestly were it not for my son being born, I don't think I'd have ever known what love actually was had I not felt it myself...
In many ways the love for my son was what propelled me into initiation, it was a prerequisite it seemed.
It makes me wonder if a wanderer will willingly plan towards karmic entanglement for a better outcome down the road?
Ahh I don't know. I just know I'm done with 3D games for a little bit after this life. I can only hurt myself so much o:
CA, is this the way that love feels to you?
This is how I feel inside sometimes. I sort of rotate through many anthros. I've got like over 1,000 images of them and I like them all.
Any one of them can make me feel like that if it's the right species and drawn well. Luckily I am a poet.
Coordinate_Apotheosis Wrote:I'm so tired... I'll pick up on this later when I've calmed down a bit...
Okay, I have now written two posts which I have deleted, because it kept feeling like I'm missing the mark with empty advice and even more empty encouragement. Then it hit me, turns out one of your life lessons is very similar to mine. Freedom. You can only remove toxicity from your surroundings if you are financially free, the play between independence and dependence has been a central theme in my life. That's what you gotta do now, get yourself OUT of that situation. I'm no stranger to family drama, believe me, and as long as you are dependant on others, you are exposed to their toxicity.
And try and don't make the mistake that the majority of people make, by just taking the first job that you can find. You are obviously very intelligent as your posts show, and still young, and you seem to have found something you love - film. Sit for a while and figure out what you love doing, even if you've never afforded yourself that luxury before. Children of narcissistic parents never do that, because the "I don't matter" is very deeply ingrained in their consciousness. When you have nailed it down, go in that direction. Chase it, and acquire your freedom first, even if you have to move to a different state to get away from all the drama and taste freedom and peace for the first time.
It's going to work out, you'll see, just keep the faith. Focus on the first domino that needs to fall before any of the others can fall - your freedom. Be bold, take the step, you have nothing to lose.
It is not too late for you. It’s never too late. These are the central themes of your life lessons. I can’t say exactly what those lessons are, but you’re able to discern that for yourself.
I don’t know exactly what to advise... but I am here for you. You have a friend in me.
I’ve had very difficult relationships with some people, such as my father. I truly thought that the relationship would never heal, but here I am now and significant progress has been made, imo. I’m not angry all the time. I’m no longer self conscious being around my dad. I don’t have thoughts of hate or ill will towards him. What helped me reach this point was the opening of the heart in acceptance and understanding. By looking at myself in my father, I’m able to see that he’s just like me. He has his pain and sorrow and joy and happiness. He’s just trying to do the best that he can. He’s made many mistakes, imo, but I can finally forgive him and move on. (Again I still have work to do. I don’t presume to think I’ve completed this life lesson.)
So, one is looking at his own pain. It’s looking at those experiences that caused one pain and going through the experiences in mind, in meditation. I’ve noticed that uncomfortable and painful memories have been coming up in meditation lately. When that happens I realize right away: “do not push this away. Look at it.”
It gets easier and you feel that it’s not so dangerous or painful, that you can do this! And you feel a lot better when you do! Find forgiveness within your heart for yourself and for those who have hurt you or would. After that foundation of love is laid, we can begin working on wisdom. How to not let people abuse you or manipulate you. How to lovingly say “no”, for example. Anyway, that’s just my approach.
I love you Apotheosis. You’re one of the thoughtful ones here! I think you are a strong person and you will definitely get through your life lessons. You wouldn’t have chosen to undertake them if you didn’t think that you could learn them. All is well my friend! We are here for you. I am here for you.