"Catharsis" Observed

There is some profound value in writing these in blog posts and clicking "Publish." It's like I'm filing them away in a way that can be retrieved if I need them and can be aesthetically appreciated should I wish. A filing cabinet "maze/tomb" of my own design. They do not make everything all better, but they do allow me to wander away, to let go, if even for a moment.

Truths, literal and metaphor

I am a victim of gaslighting. My immediate social realities sow their Impeccable Truths into my mental soil. My abusers reap the fruits of Helps Them Sleep At Night at my expense.

"I am a tool groomed into a weapon, sharpened and hardened by fire, thrust into the sky to pierce personal heavens I happen to identify with. Reality must be meaningless for me, for that keeps me sharp enough to continue being available as a weapon." This is the prayer I have been conditioned to sing to get me to sleep.

My dreams contain horrors these social realities have the stability to be able to reject. My mind is the prison in which all Rejected Truths are discarded and left to rot. Just as the American Midwest can demand an equal seat at the table after having been ignored for so long, so must the same principle apply to those prisoners. I am that equal seat.

I did not want this to be. I was simply too young for my objections to be respected.
Whenever this weapon that is me would rear its head in such a way as could be construed as "towards my abusers" (even if, to me, it felt like natural conversation I had been brought up with), I would be neutralized. This act of neutralization was usually something that other people would, and did, call "child abuse." But I made the mistake of calling it that too. And so things only got worse.
I cannot speak objectively of the events anymore. I relive them and feel so ashamed that I cannot truly accept I relive them. This reliving is then dispersed throughout my emotions, creating these fragments of identity I call "masks." Each mask is reliving a different aspect of my memories and unwilling to accept it.

I can't keep doing that. It is dangerous. I do not want to kill myself.

If I am to be a weapon, let me be forever unwielded. Please.

So the dowager refutes social "realities"

My mind runs on various alternating sets of... awareness? I call each set a "mask," at least when in private and safety. Each mask has different emotional associations for memories and ongoing stimuli. They correspond, very roughly, to emotions, though due to their experiential nature they are very difficult to articulate quite right. That doesn't mean they're subjective, though. Subjectivity is me, in one mask, assuming the qualities of that mask apply to the outside world in some way. This is some kind of description of the experience of one specific kind of mental health. My goal is to eventually delineate this field and have it down to a science. I believe the ones in power already do so, and they call it "marketing," "semiotics," and "sales tactics" depending on the angle. Due to how effective of a weapon they have it down to, they would not want just anyone studying it. My goal in life is to fuck that idea and facilitate the spread of free information.

But anyway. My mind, my feelings.

For some reason, I have trouble accepting that I am upset. I am so good at saying I am upset that it has been rendered ineffective: If I say I am upset, my mind does this whole projected arc thing where it's like "Wow, I admitted I'm upset! Now I can begin recovering!" and then I switch to a happy mask-- a placeholder mask, a mask that was summoned by my own expectation that that is how the arc of such an emotional exchange should go. It's almost as if my mind is so scared of admitting being upset (due to next-to-nonexistent self-worth) that if I can even utter the words my mind will bargain for any way to stop accepting it. (I believe this is the ideology of a cancer cell: Self-preservation regardless of necessity to the whole. But even in recognizing the similarities between my mind's tactics and such ideologies, I am only providing more self-hatred that I can hide behind.)

I think I am scared of acknowledging being upset because I fear saying it will make it true, regardless of the fact that it has already been true. But this is old news, worth restating: I do not fear pain. I fear reacting to pain. I fear my own emotions, I deeply fear them. I am scared of acknowledging being upset because I fear saying it will make me dwell on it.

Is it suspicious that my mind deemed it acceptable to produce a blog? Is this blog just my brain's attempt to hide its emotions again? I don't think so, not necessarily. Blogs are an established middle-ground for me. I can open up in them, since the blog itself takes some of the strain of "hiding" the feelings behind layers of "fiction" and "art."

I guess my long-term personal goal is to convince my personal reality that I deserve to exist.

The past was worse than I say. But I fear saying that, because I fear possible invalidation. I am too easily convinced that the past was better than I say. Because my mind, my emotional reality, is malleable under the shifting weight of surrounding social realities. I have been brought up, intentionally led, to be aware of and constantly question social realities. What was unintentional in those leading me was that it might have fucking worked. I can't stop. I no longer have a social reality. I no longer coexist with social realities.

The past was worse than I say. How bad I have said the past was said more about where I thought I was than about the actual details of the past. At their respective times, I had read my surrounding social realities (those realities propagated by those around me) as being more receptive to the parts of my past that I wasn't really ready to face yet. So I would force the words out in order to convince people not to mistake my emotional reality for a social reality-- ironically creating a cloned social reality out of an interpretation of an emotional reality.

The past was worse than I say. Defining "worse" is difficult. I can only, in all good conscience, express my emotional reality and define terms based on my emotional reality. I do not wish to deem the specific things I went through as being "worse" than other specific things. If you have been through similar things, I respect your experiences and your judgements of "worse" regarding them. But I ask, indirect as I tend to be, you don't get caught up in the "worse" of my experiences.

The past was worse than I say, in this post then, translates to "I was not and could not have been totally honest about the past before." The reason I did not say it in that way and choose not to simply go back and edit it for "clarity" is because that clarity only applies to a social reality. In my emotional reality, "The past was worse than I say" is more direct and to-the-point. Its syntax puts stress on the past rather than on my having said things about it, because in my emotional reality the past dwarfs all else.

The past was worse than I say. Is this a poem in prose?

The past-- what I have been through-- was worse than I say-- had said in prior occasions.

Social realities are what a social reality would call a "myth."

Emotional language is what I would call a "myth."