My Cat Likes To Run Into Rooms He Isn't Allowed In The Second The Door Cracks Open. But Most Of The Time

Confessions from an emotional abuse victim:

#5 Kind Gestures

After spending so much time with either the absence of kindness from others, or with kindness always being conditional, you tend to forget the feeling of having someone truly care about you and be kind to you.

Depending on the situation, my brain will go into one of two modes when being showed kindness. I will either immediately become paranoid and worry about what I will need to do to repay it, or just completely short circuit and become confused.

The urge to repay tends to come when it's someone I don't know very well being kind, or when I'm given compliments. I start to wonder how I'm supposed to make the miniscule amount of energy that they need to use to be nice worth it for them.

When I react with confusion, it's usually either with someone who I know well or it's a really big gesture that means a lot. After being treated horribly for so long and having my sense of self-worth chipped away at, I sometimes have trouble comprehending why someone believes I am worth caring about and going out of their way to be nice to me.

Most of the time for them it's just something casual and simple, that they just feel is good to do, but for me it's a whole new healing experience every time. Getting past my initial confusion is hard, but it's worth it because once I can accept it, it opens an amazing point of view and helps me truly understand the fact that I am worth caring about (which is something people tell me and I try to tell myself, but is still hard to fully grasp)

The kindness of all these new friends I've met since I started high school is one of the biggest things I have to thank for aiding my recovery. Whether they've helped me through hard moments, or have just been a good friend to talk to and hang out with, these people and their kind gestures mean so much to me.

I'm trying to figure out more about Tumblr right now by posting a bunch of random things, so here's a story from my childhood;

I live really close to a creek, and I spent a lot of time around there as a kid. There was this one specific little pool that had a waterfall feeding into it that my friends and I really loved. It was only a few blocks away, so we'd always go there a bunch on hot summer days.

There were two spots you could use if you wanted to do a jump into the water instead of wading into it. One was a little rocky ledge about 3 feet above some deeper water. It was really perfect to do little plunges off of. 10/10 very fun. The other spot however, was this short and slanted overhang that stood about 6 feet above some shallow rocky water. If you wanted to jump off it you had to make an effort to jump out into the deeper area so you wouldn't break your legs landing on sharp rocks.

One day when I was about 9 or 10, I was at this pool with two of my friends, their dogs, and one of their parents. We were playing around and taking turns jumping off the overhang. I was a fairly unathletic kid, and it always took me a moment to prepare myself to be able to jump out far enough as to not land on the rocks. One of my friends was keeping lookout since the dogs were running around and playing with each other. She gave me the all clear and I ran toward the ledge, but I hesitated just long enough that the dogs had moved from their position farther away and had begun chasing each other. Next thing I know, they come in and sweep my legs out from under me. I hit the ground and start sliding across the rocky surface of the overhang.

Despite this ledge being only about six feet above the water, the rocks underneath were sharp and I was also quite weak and fragile at that age, so that knowledge combined with the adrenaline made me totally convinced I was about to fall to my death. (I probably would've just broken a bone or got a nasty cut or something, but ten year old brain full of adrenaline wasn't thinking the most logically) I was holding onto this tiny plant for dear life while slowly sliding farther down every time I tried to reorient myself to get back up. As a result of all the wet children dripping water all over when jumping off, it was very slippery.

My friend notices how I'm panicking and unable to get up and asks me if I need help. I was a very socially anxious child, and hated the idea of burdening anyone. So as I am sliding down this ledge, convinced I'm about to die, I hear my friend ask if I need help. My dumbass said no. I was lucky that she ignored me and pulled me up by my shoulders regardless. I find it kind of hilarious that despite being absolutely terrified, I still thought it would be better to fall and get injured than just ask for help.

I got out of it with just some scratches on my lower back, and I never told my parents because I knew they would freak out and never let me go there again. Still haven't told them to this day lol.

Sometimes I just remember the one moment when I felt really cared for after a year of abuse from my 'best friend' and months of strained relationship with my parents after I had pushed them out during that year, then left them with the broken aftermath of their very traumatized, very expensive, daughter.

I was in the ER. Not a rare occurrence at the time. It was before one of my inpatient stays that year, but I'm not sure if it was the second or the third, they all blur together. I usually would have to spend a night there and wait for a bed to open up before being admitted, and that was how it went this time. In the middle of the night, I woke up with a nosebleed from the dry hospital air. I didn't really know what to do. Any normal person would get up and go to the nurse's station and get some tissues or something, but being a mentally ill child who was just yelled at by her mother the day before for saying she needed help because the hospital bills were already stacking up and going to the ER cost a lot of money, not to mention the inpatient stay, I didn't want to inconvenience the nurses (it's literally their job) so I just laid back with the back of my hand over my nose while I waited for it to stop. Swallowed a lot of my own blood, but I was already in such a horrible mental state, broken to my core to the point I wanted to leave mortality, that I could care less as long as nobody else was affected.

The bleeding stopped and I did the best I could to get the dried stuff off my hands by licking my finger and rubbing it off, but it was dark, so I couldn't really see if it worked. I went back to sleep and then woke up in the morning and did my usual ER routine of sitting in the dark because I didn't want to have to go out to ask the nurses to turn on the light (lightswitches weren't in the rooms for safety reasons or something idk). When one of the nurses came in to bring me breakfast, she turned on the light, but I didn't notice there was still dried blood on my hands and just ate my breakfast in silence because I never asked for them to turn on the TV. I always waited for them to suggest it since I didn't want to inconvenience them (again, it's literally their job to do that but I still felt bad asking). When she came back to take my tray, she noticed the blood and asked about it. It was only then I realized that blood on the hand of a mentally ill child in the ER because she could hurt herself is easily interpreted as literally anything other than a nosebleed. I panicked and started explaining myself, and to my relief she believed me and I wasn't put on a 1 to 1 (I had to experience that at some point later and it sucks). She left to go get me a wipe to clean it off.

She came back and I was sitting on the floor next to the weird little plastic round side table thing. I was expecting her to just throw it at me or something and leave me to clean myself up, but to my surprise she sat down in front of me and (after asking permission to touch me) started wiping my hands for me. She was just so careful and sweet about it. She called me 'honey' and it left me with a warmth in my chest that I hadn't felt in over a year.

It's kind of odd but I just look back at that memory with a weird sort of fondness. To her it was probably just a normal day on the job, but for me that moment meant so much. She was also probably just using it as an opportunity to look me over and make sure I was telling the truth about the nosebleed, but still. I was just this scared kid who felt like she was so worthless that she couldn't even ask a nurse to turn the TV on for fear that she would be loathed, and this woman went out of her way to lightly scrub the blood out of my nails.

Nowadays I'm doing better. My mental state has improved and I've been working on moving past that all, but I think that some time this past week was the 2 year anniversary of that day, and it just goes to show how far I've come. From being surprised and comforted by a psych nurse's gentle touch on my hands (the first human touch I had felt in months), to casual hugs with my friends and a year and 7 months out of the hospital as of yesterday.

Silly phone, you're not detecting an analog audio accessory, you're detecting soup, from the bowl of soup I dropped you in.

idiot loser guys

Sometimes I can't tell if I'm being stubborn or nihilistic.

Do I want to stay at school even though I'm sick because I need to prove myself, or because I believe it is just impossible to be able to go home because my parents would dislike it?

merry christmas

...well that's a new memory that I just unrepressed.

That's definitely something that a 12 year old me was told and repeated to herself whenever something happened...

I tend to think that it wasn't so bad and that I've remembered all the big bad stuff but I guess I haven't. Leads to the memory of my twelve year old self admiring her friend because he's using tough love and he's so honest to her about how bad of a person she is and helps her fix it.

(She didn't really do anything wrong, but he yelled at her about it and hit her)