dementia

My partner and I have certain things in common that we don’t really talk about but we both know they’re there. He spoke a bit about issues with a relative and how you grow to feel less sympathetic towards them when they actively destroy themselves constantly in front of you, through addiction specifically.

I told him that I understand where hes coming from, and that it doesn’t make you a bad person to become like that. Ive grown up with people destroying themselves in the name of coping, my father’s addiction to hurting people and then need of forgiveness, and my mother’s addiction to escaping the reality that her marriage is a shitstorm. My childhood friend threw himself into drugs, and I never blamed him persay because lord knows how hard his life was, but I had to witness him slowly kill himself infront of me over and over and it felt like coming out of each phase where it got bad was like giving him a painkiller but still having him barely stay alive. I cant remember the amount of times it felt like my heart was going to fucking explode because im so worried on if hes going to be alive when I wake up the next morning. And eventually that pain tires you. Yes obviously its not as painful as the person that’s going through the addiction themselves but you hit a point where youre too exhausted to help and tell them the same shit you keep telling them every time they get high. You cant be a savior and you were never meant to be one in the first place. Because people can only save themselves.

After he told me he said he hopes I never fall into that myself, because he cant save me and he doesn’t want to feel the stuff he feels for his relative towards me. And I completely understood. I haven’t really been in the best place for a while now, because im going through this phase of literally remembering my life and realizing whats happened in it. I searched it up and the results were mentioning dissociative amnesia, but that’s not it. Ive always known what events happened and ive never forgotten them but I never thought about them either. if i thought about them, they became real. if anyone finds out, it really happened. Its only this year since my birthday that ive had every little trigger pulled and everything inside me is flooding out and its creating a huge mess that I have to control. I never could’ve planned for it either because I thought the point of growing up was to be able to feel less intensely about everything and be grounded but that’s not what happened and it hits you like a truck.

Ive started to tell him more on whats on my mind and how I feel and why I think the way I do, and we both feel happy about that. But it doesn’t change whats happening either of course. I think for the first time in my entire existence im having to learn to be human and what that entails. And its terrifying and ugly and honestly I kind of hate it sometimes and wish I could go back to locking everything up again. But I know that’s not the right choice either. Part of letting myself feel everything all over again is how it looks to anyone whos watching. He mentioned that sometimes hes scared ill fall into the whole self-destruction cycle, and I had to explain that its less that and more my brain trying to think of every goddamn coping mechanism it can to try and escape from everything again because that’s what im used to doing. and I wont actually do those things but they do come in my thoughts, and you cant change that, and that’s what makes everything harder. And its one of the reasons I was so guarded before even without meaning to be. I don’t want anyone to have the concern he did, I don’t want any possibility of that kind of thought to be in anyone’s mind when they look at me. And I cant broadcast the entire list of reasons why my headspace can be so messy because id rather die than be seen as some pitiful victim. Ive never wanted that to be the perception of myself. And the fear of risking having that makes me want to go back to not being human anymore sometimes, not have anyone even know any negative thought I might get in my brain sometimes when it all becomes too much. But I know that would just be the easy thing to do, and being healthy was never meant to be easy.