Harm
My parents destroyed any chance I ever had of a decent life when I was very small. Luckily for me I was born with raw tenacity and defiance, which is the only reason I am still alive. Some days I wish I weren’t. It is slowly but obviously becoming clear to me that no one else is ever going to understand the misery I live with, and no one is going to care about it.
People expect me to walk around in the world like I am just like everyone else. I am smashed to pieces, I will never see the world like everyone else, never. But I am supposed to see things the way other people do, understand what it is like to walk the world without feeling hollow. See the things that happen to other people and think for a minute that their minor inconveniences and petty annoyances compare to the hurt and abuse I will always carry inside of me? When I was a Christian I had the patience and the tolerance to deal with everyone’s everything. Now I don’t. When I think back over the years of listening to everyone else’s pain and encouraging them only to have people turn their back on me when I hoped they would listen to mine, it makes me so angry.
I am either consumed by anger or despair. There is nothing in between those two things. I know what it is to feel unwanted and unimportant in the world, I have felt those two things my whole life. As hard as it has been I have tried my guts out to continue to function every day when the truth is every morning I wake up is a disappointment, another opportunity to live in a world that I do not understand, and that doesn’t understand me, and doesn’t care to.
When people talk to me of harm, I just do not see it the way they do. People have harmed me my whole life, physically, psychologically, spiritually, emotionally. They have walked all over me for decades of my life, not giving an ounce of thought or care about the damage they were doing, not listening to me begging them to stop. No one comes to my aid, no one tried to protect me, ever, whether I was 4 or 40. I tried to protect everyone else, all the time.
As a christian, I was able to keep things at arms length, tell myself it was “the world” that didn’t care until I realised it was christians too. It’s everyone. People care until it costs them something, until they are sick of hearing it, until they don’t know what to do anymore so they do nothing.
I have two choices, I can cut myself off from everyone and feel constant despair over the soul numbing loneliness and feelings that no one gives a flying fuck about me (which in my heart of hearts I suspect to be true anyway), or continue to engage people and be constantly angry at the expectation that I can ever see the world they way they do. Nothing I say makes them understand, nothing.
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