There’s probably a ton more things I could and should forgive myself for, but right now I am too tired to think of them.
So I am just going to blog like usual and if one occurs to me, I’ll just plop it into the text.
Right now, I feel like all the stuff I forgave myself for yesterday – especially the big stuff, like forgiving myself for being an “accident” and for getting raped – is still on its way out. These changes are huge and will take a while to process, but waddy fug, I got time.
Lots and lots of time.
Right now, it feels like I cut ties with an enormous weight of guilt and shame and now it’s just kind of hanging off me by a thread. Like it’s a big cold mass of something viscous slowly sliding off my chest but not actually detaching yet.
There’s no way it can ever return…. gravity doesn’t work that way,
But it may be a while before it finally falls off.
If I get impatient, I’ll just give my hips a wiggle to shake it off.
Got a call from my cataract surgeon’s office today. They potentially had a cancelation which would have opened up the possibility of my getting my surgery on the 22nd of this month instead of the 26th of April.
Luckily, she realized mid-call that I had not done my eye measurements yet, and so surgery was a no-go.
That was lucky because it saved me from having to say no because that’s way too sudden and way too soon and I don’t handle sudden change real well.
Would have been embarrassing to admit that to someone who doesn’t know my psychiatric history. I prefer to maintain the illusion of sanity where I can.
I forgive myself for being insane. It’s not my fault that I have a head full of bad wiring and it does not reflect on my worth as a human being or the quality of my character. My mental illness is the result of severe emotional trauma and as such does not have any more bearing on my inherent worthiness than a missing limb or leukemia.
While I am at it, I also forgive myself for healing so slowly because my illness makes it so hard to face reality. It took me many years merely to get the courage to ask my GP for individual therapy and it’s taken many years of individual therapy and blogging to get as far as I have gotten.
This is not my fault. It’s a bitch to have an illness that prevents its own treatment and that’s what depression is like.
Besides, fuck all that “could\should have” bullshit. The past is gone, it’s deader than dead. It doesn’t matter what I could or should have done or what the optimal path might, in retrospect, have been.
So I collectively forgive myself for absolutely every suboptimal decision I ever made.
Or more succinctly, I forgive myself for being suboptimal. For being so much less than the theoretical maximum I can so clearly perceive.
That’s one of my depression’s oldest tricks to keep me down and I reject it wholesale. I am always going to fall short of perfection and I will always be able to imagine having done better but “not optimal” and “not good enough” are not and can never be the same thing. That’s just a fancy way of stacking the deck against myself and the fact that it uses some of the machinery of my powerful analytic abilities does not make it one iota more valid or sane.
Enough of this pseudo-rational bullshit. My powers of reason can go sit in the corner and think about what they’ve done.
More after the break.
Just keep on forgiving
I forgive myself for forgetting to actually type “More after the break” then drop the line into the text until now. Oops!
And I forgive myself for being a victim. All through my life I have been the victim of people’s malfeasance, ignorance, injustice, and contempt.
And it didn’t matter that I was innocent, because my real crime was being low status and therefore ran afoul of people’s total inability to imagine a low status person to have any inherent worth or even qualify as human.
You can do what you want to low status people. Nobody cares. Ask them why they did nothing when people were getting brutalized right in front of their eyes and they will shrug because they can’t face the truth that to them, some people don’t matter. At all.
Back to self-forgiveness. Bitter rage can wait, I have plenty.
Point is, I forgive myself for being the victim all my life. I was left with very little basis for self-preservation and the advocacy of my own self-interest by the rape and the resultant withdrawal into the world of the mind.
Retreating from reality severely limits your effectiveness in it. To this day I barely know what it going on around me and I doubt that will ever change.
So I forgive myself for escaping into my mind and never coming out again, too. It was my best option when I was raped by a stranger at the age of 4, and it preserved what was left of my sanity.
Not too shabby given that I invented it when I was four years old.
I forgive myself for being weak and feeble as a result. My retreat into my mind severed my connection to my id almost completely. This cut me off from the wellspring of strength of spirit and soul and the drives that keep living beings going, and I am only just now beginning to repair that damage and power up my full personality.
And I forgive myself for having to go through all I have gone through alone. No support network, no confidants, not a single person who truly gave a damn about me. No one with even a casual interest in my wellbeing.
Just endless emotional isolation. Midnight tundra stretching to the horizon in all directions. Me naked and alone, and not a stick of shelter to be seen.
Guess I will just keep wandering.
It’s either that, or finally lay down and die.
And I don’t want to do that. Any more. Much.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.