listening to game grumps remixes and realizing it been 10 years since i was a sad 16 year old incredibly fucked up deeply closeted suicidal kid stuck at my parents house and being taken back to that particular headspace is insane. i feel like i havent changed much its more like ive just slowly stripped away all the religious trauma and poorly managed anxiety but its insane that 16 year old me was like. haha. everything is absolutely awful and i want to die but if i get my 20-40 minutes of internet funnyman time daily i will be ok. it was definitely just refreshing and nice to hear from adults out there living and not constantly talking about Our Lord Jesus Christ and why Everything you do is Wrong because that was basically the whole bubble i was stuck in. (holy shit i barely think about it now but before i truly had enough self confidence to deconvert it literally felt like i was living an awful double life between irl and online, which i think is probably a common sentiment but god i forgot what its like to be in that constant self-monitoring place.) i think a lot of it was just wishing i had anything deeper than surface level friendships at the time and ALSO a deeply entwined gender envy for both arin and dan getting to be career silly guys. truly the funnyman was in me all along i simply had to nurture his feral puppyboy spirit and also build the habit of beating the shit out of neurotic thoughts. which all does still go out the window if i have to do socialization in person but hey ill take being able to be an actual person in any capacity or medium ngl being locked up in your own head and having literally nobody take any interest in your real opinions or personality if it falls outside a very specific kind of wanted behavior is a slow and painful internal death. the way we raise kids in this country is deeply fucked ngl anyways thanks game grumps remixes for perfectly dropping me back into 2012 at like midnight on the computer in the living room constantly watching over my shoulder so nobody would see me watch a guy say fuck and then cut off my internet access and my ability to make art and all my social ties
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huh. so like. transitioning from childhood into adolescence was really really hard for me. hard enough that even stating it like that is novel, rather than just "i was really weird and probably evil when i was 12" lol. but it just occurred to me how... autistic that was. the struggle with change. nevermind that from ages 10-13, my parents' relationship was worse than it ever had been as they approached divorce, and the tension in the house was enough to have set shit on fire but...
before my very eyes, things i enjoyed as a child were suddenly not fun anymore. i'd turn on a show i liked, one of the very few, and an episode i would have enjoyed the day before was mind-meltingly stupid. all of my toys—which because my mom substituted healthy love with giving me things, i had a lot of—dropped one at a time from my very short list of things that were fun. (un-dx'd autism also made playing with toys... boring as shit. could only put barbie in so many outfits. and i was too averse to social things to put her in Situations) what i did to my barbies when i finally couldn't stand them anymore was... it wasnt good.
and looking back at it through this lens though... i finally have an answer to the shocked and disgusted "what the hell was wrong with me??" it was because i was angry. i was scared. my parents were fighting all the time and i knew long before then that i couldn't rely on them for jack shit, so i had absolutely no recourse for dealing with the changes my brain was going through. changes i was going through while trying not to be abused, going through puberty (even as an adult shifts in my hormones make me extremely volatile), being bullied/ostracized by my friends and classmates, struggling for the first time with my grades (even though i was "Gifted"!), and of course, trying to fix my parents' marriage and their mental illnesses. all while having a brain that is particularly averse to change.
no wonder i was angry. no wonder i was scared. i was so alone. it was one of the rare occasions i actually acted out, and with the way i built my psyche to survive, no wonder that memory instills me with immediate shame. it was so unlike me to act out for a reason...
and i think back to another memory... one i hold very close to my heart. not because it was one where i was cared for, it's not even good. i think back to the brief stint when i was ten or so that mother put me in therapy for my "anger issues" (and i went unnoticed as autistic yet again. i know intellectually as an adult my mom just wanted to help... but that stint in therapy only reinforced the blame and the brokenness in me). one day, the therapist had me fill up this sandbox with figurines. she had so many to choose from, and it was so much fun. i'd never played with anything like it before. i remember i built a city, with ins and outs and lots of activity. but in the corner, closest to me, behind a wall where the rest of the city wasn't looking, i placed a little baby and an angry tiger. nobody could see how much danger i was in. nobody wanted to see. it was a quiet death.
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