deserving
by maipani (mai and panda)
Thursday April 11, 2024 00:41
@chantal_horeis on twitter
trigger warning: SA/rape mention, death (family and pet), medical neglect
there is something to be said about the last year being one of the worst in my life. but i can't decide if it's 2023 that's the worst, or 2021, when i broke up with my boyfriend of 3 years, was in an abusive living situation for a month, my parents split up, 3 people close to me died, and a guy i trusted raped me a day after a funeral. its redeeming factor is that i met my current partner that year and they bring a lot of joy and meaning to my life. last year on paper shouldn't be worse, but i quit a job i loved, lost a lot of friends, and moved out of the one place i really considered home and felt safe in because my health worsened and i became more disabled. idk i guess it was scary because in years before, even losing people, even dealing with the aftereffects of abuse or SA, i still felt like i could pull myself out of it. i no longer felt like that in the last year.
the year of your zodiac is said to be particularly challenging. im the year of the rabbit (or cat if we're going by the vietnamese zodiac), which was last year, and i turned 24. so it was my time, i guess. i wasn't really aware of much at 12, but it was the first year i was really going through mental health issues. i think i got pretty severely depressed then but i didn't have the knowledge to know that was happening. but. yeah it got harder each year since then.
i was at the doctor last week. i was dreading it so much, i was so stressed about it, that i was hallucinating. i feel like medical trauma is pretty typical in the american healthcare system, especially as a black person, a person of color, someone read as a woman, and as someone visibly queer. plus, (im still making sense of this so idk but) i think my parents medically neglected me. there's a lot of things i am bringing up to doctors and nurses now and they're like !!! that's not normal, sweetie. how long has this been going on. and i say years and they're just silent for a bit, maybe processing that i became an adult around the start of the pandemic, and i probably haven't been places since it started. i don't know.
i think i'm contending with a lot of shame.
i made a post a couple weeks ago following the trend with the "think of you" song where people make slideshows about their pets that have passed away. i posted about my dog, and the way my dad treated him, and how as a sick teenager i had to take on a lot of his care. i realized after that my timeline was messed up, that i thought i was already 20 when i was giving him basically 24/7 care. but no, he died when i was 19. now that i'm 25, i have trouble talking to anyone under the age of 21, but frankly under the age of 23, because there's a big difference in life stages and maturity. i felt like such an adult then but... i was so young. i had just started 3d art around then, and by now i have been doing 3d for 6 years. i know enough to teach people about it now. like.... what a difference in time.
i dunno. i'm mourning everything i lost, i guess. i never had the opportunity to have a "normal" life that looked like those of my peers. i was not allowed to play with people on school nights because homework came first, and starting in middle school, i could barely see them even on weekends because it took me so long to do my homework (hindsight is i had untreated adhd) and i had soccer games. and then on top of that, my parents were very protective... which is a nice way to say my mom was extremely paranoid due to her ptsd (and maybe anxiety or ocd or something) and my dad turned out to be a controlling misogynist. we lived away from family because my mom's family was dysfunctional and were kind of just an ecosystem of enablers around an abusive patriarch, while my dad's family was dysfunctional just in the generational trauma way that people descended from enslaved black americans and native americans tend to go through (ifykyk). so i have always been fairly isolated.
that's a scary thing to finally put into words. i have always been pretty isolated.
i guess it enabled me to become pretty radicalized because i was reading and researching a lot in my free time, but it's frustrating now that i value community so much and struggle to maintain community or any kind of relationship on my own. i know my next steps are that i want to cultivate the two friendships that did the most towards maintaining my sanity that i neglected in the past year or two. and i want to have a bbq this summer because i wasn't able to have a birthday party around my actual birthday because i was incapicitated by pain for a few months. that's definitely something.
i am very scared about jobs though. i don't really need to have one because i'm lucky enough to have a mom that makes a lot of money who lives with a man who has paid off the mortgage to his house so she can take care of my rent and my bills and my food. and she's at the point now in our relatioship where she can acknowledge the ways she failed me in my childhood and she's determined to spend the rest of her life making up for it. but. i dunno. maybe there was too much damage from people besides her. because i don't feel like i deserve it.