My Story

[RanOnEmpty]

I guess I'll start my journal.

 Lately I've been ruminating on memories of my parents (lots to come), and earlier today I thought about this part of my introduction post: "I think they started threatening to kick me out of the house as soon as I learned to walk. They'd say they're going to send me to live with another family."

I thought about how I must have felt as a kid hearing that all the time. I've never forgotten what it was like, actually. As I said in my intro post, my parents demanded constant gratitude, and I'd have to beg for their forgiveness when I didn't live up to that. There was always a weirdly specific quality to their threats, "If you can't be good for a week, we'll throw you out!"; they demanded promises of good behavior from me and amped up the threat every time I failed to live up to it. So, like someone in a troubled marriage might say, "we're three fights away from a divorce," I was always one or two screaming matches away from getting thrown out on the streets. This dynamic persisted from toddlerhood until my early teens.

So anyway, as all of this was going through my head, a phrase came to mind: "They're going to throw me away eventually." And I think for a brief moment I went back to a bewildering sense of limbo that that realization put me in as a child. It's not an intense emotion, actually . . . the best way I can describe it is it feels like time stops, or perhaps like you're frozen watching time go by. It's like your world has fallen away and you're floating in space, locationless. You don't know where you are in your world. The physical sensation it evokes is very much like floating.

After our fights, I would spend a lot of time pacing on my parents' acre of land and just being in my own head, and I think I spent a lot of time in that timeless, dissociated state. I haven't had the opportunity to really sit with this feeling yet, but I hope to do so soon.

[AphoticAtramentous]

Hey RanOnEmpty, kudos to starting your journal. I hope it will be the start of some very important future revelations and discoveries.

I'm sorry to hear about those insidious deadlines and expectations that were imposed on you. I can't imagine how exhausting that must be, having a constant threat of instability, a threat of bad things to come.

When you do have the opportunity to sit with it, I do hope you can practice some self-care to go alongside that. No need to go too deep or too hard all at once. Healing takes time.

Regards,
Aphotic.

[StartingHealing]

Hi RanOnEmpty

Welcome.  Good place here.  Really really good folks! 

I savvy that feeling. I'd hazard a guess that many here also savvy.

I wish you all the best brave soul.