#im fuming the animals are ONLY 10 diamonds now

[syekick-powers]

rambling about emotions and self-control

i think one of the things that pisses me off the most when family members criticize me is when they say that i’m “bad at controlling my emotions”. first of all, I have ADHD and bipolar simultaneously, my emotions are a hundred times fucking stronger than yours. secondly, i am actually excellent at controlling my emotions. i am the kind of person where if i am having a panic attack, you might not have any fucking clue that i’m even having anxiety unless i state directly that im having a panic attack. ive had PAs so bad where i legit thought i was about to die and not a single shred of that world-ending panic touched my external affect for a second. part of my fucking trauma revolves around having to hide my distress to avoid freaking out other people, which means that i learned to develop a diamond fucking grip on my external signs of distress. it’s deeply maladaptive in some situations, but in other situations it’s equally as useful. and yet because i am very animated and exaggerated in my persona, people assume that i just let my emotions fountain everywhere uncontrollably and that i’m just a waterfall of feelings.

incorrect. every bit of exaggeration in my affect is deliberate. i am not acting like a clown because i can’t control myself, i am purposefully choosing to exaggerate to convey my feelings more effectively. if i don’t want you to know what i’m feeling, you will never ever ever find out. there are some people i interact with on a regular basis whomst i fucking loathe deeply, and yet any time i interact with them i am completely personable and friendly. when im streaming video games on a high difficulty and get frustrated from having to do the same part over and over and over again, i never get tilted on stream. i dont yell or rage, and in fact the more frustrated i become the more blank and expressionless my affect turns. when i was playing dead space 2 on zealot difficulty on stream recently, all of my viewers were complimenting the fact that i spent at least two collective hours on trying to beat the final boss and yet still did not get visibly upset or pissed off once.

yes, my emotions are strong. i have two separate disorders that both have “emotional dysregulation” as some of their biggest negative side effects. my bad moods feel like a fucking firestorm most of the time and strong emotions are very difficult to handle and control. sometimes, my emotions get the better of me and i snap or get irritable. but the only time i’m irritable is when i feel physically and emotionally like utter dogshit and the bad mood impacts my ability to hold back my emotions. the truth is that in my day to day life there are dozens of fucking things that irritate the living hell out of me and i choose to discard my frustration rather than stay mad about something trivial--either that, or i feel the frustration intensely, but bite it back and don’t say anything because i’m not in the mood to pick a fight. if i’m being pissy with you, it’s because i’m completely fuck-out of all mental and physical energy that i would otherwise use to hold back my irritation. there is nothing left to burn. there aren’t even fumes in the tank. this bitch empty, so prepare for the yeet.

the problem that i run into with my family members is that this internal struggle to contain my emotions is completely invisible to any external viewers. they’re not me, of course they can’t see what’s going on in my head. what makes that an issue is that they don’t see the twenty fucking times i got irritated and managed to control my temper through the frustration, they only see the five or so times i lose control. my efforts are invisible to everyone around me, so when i finally do get fed up and make a snippy comment or complain, it seems like i just let my emotions get the better of me all the time.

to be fuckening honest, if the people who criticized me lived one fucking day in my shoes, the extremity of my emotions would exhaust them within hours. the thing is, i’m 25 fucking years old, which means i’ve lived with this shit for over two fucking decades. i have learned to control myself to an extent, and, being honest with yall? it fucking exhausts the living shit out of me all the goddamn time. it’s like my brain expends all my mental fuel reserves on overclocking my emotions as hard as possible while leaving no fuel left over for activities in the day that i actually need to do. it’s part of the reason i’m so fuckdamn tired all the fuckdamn time. but i’m not bad at controlling my emotions when i actually have the energy to do so. in fact, i’m so good at suppressing them that half the time, people don’t know i’m upset at all. to a certain extent, i’ve gotten used to how extreme my emotions are, and have started learning to predict what sets me off so i can make an effort to avoid the negative stimulus and save myself the frustration. i’m just really fucking tired of people accusing me of not controlling my emotions well enough when god fucking damnit you have no idea how hard i’m actually fucking trying!!! it feels like i’ve gotten so good at hiding my distress in my day-to-day life that now people have no fucking idea how shitty i actually feel until they poke me one too many times and i fucking bite their finger off, and then assume that i just randomly blew up on them with no reason or justification. that i’m just behaving like this to spite them personally.

i promise you im not fucking behaving randomly. in fact, my frustration triggers are actually pretty fucking consistent. the same bullshit behaviors will always piss me off; what changes on a day-to-day basis is how well i control the extremity of my reaction. if i’m having a good day, i have enough fuel stores to go “meh, whatever” and brush it off without being too bothered for very long. if i feel like shit, my ability to control my response is hampered and it becomes much harder to bite back a snippy comment. i’m not lashing out to be malicious or spiteful. i’m lashing out because you’ve been doing this shit every day for the past two fucking weeks and today i’m just too tired to deal with this fucking bullshit anymore. my reaction is not a sudden unprovoked blowing up of a bomb. it’s “you poked the caged animal one too many times and now it’s going to fucking bite you to make you stop because it has no other way to express its frustration”.

i try to be clear and concise with my boundaries, and frankly i don’t think they’re all that unreasonable. i like to be able to decide when and how i do a task on my own time rather than being pushed and pulled and jabbed and pressured every step of the way. i like to be able to have my own space where people have to get my permission before entering suddenly so that i feel like i have a safe place to hide when i’m overstimulated. i like to decide when and where i want to engage in socialization, and for how long. i like being able to decide when i’m ready to do a task, rather than having a task suddenly shoved on me with no warning or being pressured to do it before i’m ready. i do not like being gifted objects i did not request (and often actively requested not to get) and then being expected to be grateful for something i didnt even want in the first place. i don’t like gifts coming with invisible price tags and obligations that can change whenever the gifter decides they want more out of me. and i absolutely cannot. fucking. stand. passive aggression. all of these things do not really seem all that unreasonable to me, yet time and time again people treat me like i’m just asking for so much more than they can possibly give. and you know what? 75% of the fucking time when someone crosses one of these boundaries all i do is Make A Note Of It and go along with the boundary violator’s wishes anyway, because i actively decided that making a big deal out of them crossing my boundaries is not worth the effort of asking them to change their behavior, because throughout my entire fucking life i’ve been constantly treated as the irrational, unrealistic, crazy bitch for trying to set those boundaries. i’ve been taught time and time and fucking time again that defining my boundaries is too much to fucking ask. so when someone does violate my boundaries, there’s a little “Sye will remember that“ popup and absolutely zero expression or reaction. which means that yes. when i finally get tired and can’t bite back my frustration any longer, it’s because you’ve done the exact same thing to me two hundred fucking times previous and i don’t have the fucking patience to suck it up and deal with it anymore. im done with your shit.

so yeah. i’m a little bit fucking sick of people telling me that i have poor self-control. the fact that you think i have no self-control is an indicator of how good it actually is, because i’m so fucking good at hiding my distress that you don’t even have any idea how absolutely like a fetid mound of horse shit i feel like until my fuse finally burns all the way up. i can contain a 10-out-of-10 ‘i’m imminently about to die’ panic attack so well that not a scrap of that panic shows up in my external affect for even a second. i can suppress my pain on stream when it’s at a 7 out of 10 intensity or higher and be fucking on stream playing video games and commentating and show almost no sign of discomfort except for an intense concentrating face. don’t you fucking ever tell me that i’m bad at controlling myself. i’m a goddamn adult. i’ve learned how to control 90% of my fucking emotions so well that i could be holding a conversation with you imagining myself breaking your fucking nose and show absolutely zero sign of external hostility. i am good at controlling my fucking emotions. the problem is that my emotions are so world-endingly, apocalyptically intense that sometimes i just get too fucking tired to hold back, and then that’s when i bite. i’ m not just lashing out randomly with no provocation. i’ve been tread on a million fucking times and took it with a smile and you had no fucking idea. just because i bit you doesn’t mean i did it because i have no self-control. self-control? self-control???? don’t you fucking talk to me about self-control you headass bitch. i have a fucking supernova coming out of my brain and you’re telling me im weak for not being able to bite it back when your emotions have about as much intensity as a bowl of lukewarm porridge. don’t ever fucking criticize me for not being able to control myself when you’re playing life on easy mode and i’ve been stuck on expert all my fucking life. self-control. don’t you fucking talk to me about self-control ever again. you have no idea what the fuck you’re even talking about. fuck off.

#sye's babbles #sorry this is a fucking essay but i needed to get some shit off my chest