[rl/rp update - mh/mute @ will] hey everyone - I'm sorry for not being around, for not being active in rp or any other way.
as some of you might have already seen or known at the beginning of the month, i was struggling with my mental health. we watched the barbie movie and it... dragged up some very specific trauma re: my mother i cut off ties with in 2020
we were chatting about all sorts of things about alan and scratch and scratch's identity crisis at ryslig about who he is without being a copy of alan wake and laughing a bit about how a song from the barbie movie was on scratch's playlist considering he's an evil weirdo
she wanted children she could play with and dress up like dolls a boy and a girl each, ideally. when my grandparents took my older brother and sister to care for most of the time because they thought my mother was unfit to care for her children. so, she sabotaged condoms and all other sorts of devices one uses to prevent pregnancy b/c my father didn't want
i first came out as trans to my mother when i was 8. the way she went around discouraging and manipulating me to convince me not to think about it anymore was extreme. she made all of the choices about how I looked and dressed until i started to become more defiant and fighting back for my own agency.
and before all of this, i was struggling a lot with my sense of self-worth. the idea that my value as a person only stems from the entertainment and pleasure i can give others. so.
you can imagine how being faced with both thoughts... made things worse for me
I'm... scared of asking people for help, for people to talk to and listen when I'm hurting, because i hurt a lot, so much, in a way that sometimes feels near constant and I know that it's hard to be around someone who seems negative all the time. so when i start feeling this way, I retreat away from people. i know i shouldn't, but I do.
i don't want to do it, but aside from boomeranging something for AC, I might need to discuss handwaving and dropping old threads and starting with a clean slate for going into November
I'm sorry the movie brought up hard associations for you but thank you for sharing and I hope we can help you get back into a place that's healthy and good
I'm so sorry you went through all that. You shouldn't have had to, and it's genuinely hard to reach out for help you've been trained not to expect. Glad the game is giving you a better message.
okay thank u I'm gonna take a second to gather my thoughts but tl Dr i read what you said about your mother and not only am I horrified, I kinda hope she self combusts
I'm not 100% certain I can in any way compare (and I'm not!) but like I understand you so so deeply because recently my situation with my mother has been just as aggressively "expectant", like, the only relationship I have with her is essentially her asking me for things & money, all leading to violent behavior when I say no
reading the pain you expressed here made me feel far less alone than I did before, and I admire you having been able to cut off your mother the way you did, that takes serious balls
thank you. yeah, my mother has never been violent in a physical manner but the level to which she has been emotionally abusive and manipulative to myself and other members of my family has been extreme. eventually I just couldn't forgive her behavior anymore, and apparently from what I've heard from my siblings she has had a wild downward spiral
(she's become super religion-obsessed and is convinced the rapture is real and sent everyone in the family, including me and my partner, bibles for xmas last year. even after i cut ties with her, or maybe especially because i did, idk)
but in any case, thank you for the sentiment, and i'm also sorry that you've gone through it with your own relationship with yours. I'm glad that you feel less alone though
"Uses control over other people to self-regulate => they escape => dramatic downward spiral and escalation of scary behavior" is such a hard thing to have to survive from anyone, not to mention a primary caretaker.
They try to drag everyone else into the dark place they're hiding in and hoard them there as a shield against the feeling of having to process other people as other main characters and not their dedicated NPCs.
nods, for sure. i was reflecting on it all the other day with vin and was like "damn, i really think i was the voice of reason in my mother's life since i ended up the only person not afraid to give her a reality check, b/c she really started to go off the deep when i moved away and then even more when i cut her off"
one of my therapists was like "sounds like you were the actual parent in your situation" and i was like "whoa what" and after that i started to realize just how much she had messed me up lol
oh yeah, that's always been a major issue she's had. she'd try to make friends, something would happen, and then she'd place all the blame on the other person, and start putting all of the emotional burden on me again
it's hard to break out of that example of retreating away from peer relationships, especially with the added feeling of having had your needs trivialized by the person who should have been the safest, but you're worlds ahead of her just in the fact that you know it's okay to reach out, even when it doesn't feel like it
as some of you might have already seen or known at the beginning of the month, i was struggling with my mental health. we watched the barbie movie and it... dragged up some very specific trauma re: my mother i cut off ties with in 2020
i definitely cried a few times through it but overall had a good time. then, "what was i made for" played again in the credits
you can imagine how being faced with both thoughts... made things worse for me
fear got in my way
yeah