Monthly Archives: May 2023

I Am Toxic

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I Am Toxic

I am bad. I am triggered. 

My skin crawls with the need to carve into it, to cut. I have such a need, an urge to take away the bad parts and throw them away. I need to cut and hurt. I need to make it all better, to fix it. 

I stare in the mirror and all I see is blame, failure, a monster. 

I cut the thing in the mirror until the tears flow and he’s gasping for breath, but it is not enough. He deserves to cry, to suffer, to feel the pain. 

I’m triggered.

I’m fighting my mind with my mind and losing the battle. I don’t know how to cope. I want to leave … I want to leave so badly that it scares me. 

I press into the cuts already marring my skin, and it’s never enough. The pain is never enough. 

I see why my mother hated me. I understand it now. 

My mother used to make some ‘medicine’ when I was a child. She’d force it down my throat. I don’t know what it was. A concoction of things that always made me sick. 

There was is evil in me. She needed to get it out, to rid my body of the badness inside. That’s why they did what they did. That’s why my father took my innocence, because there was never an innocence to take. 

I was bad. 

I AM bad. 

Her medicine used to make me sick. So sick that some days I could hardly move. I can still feel the tightness in my chest, the heaving when it all tried to come out. I can feel the sting of her hand on my face when I made a mess. When vomit splashed. I can feel the helplessness, the loneliness. The looking for a mother I didn’t’ have to try to make me feel better. 

I told my therapist these things and she almost …. Almost convinced me that I wasn’t bad. That it wasn’t there. But I can feel it again. It’s under my skin, and I can’t reach it. 

My mother used to refuse to feed me. She said I didn’t deserve it. You don’t get to eat when you’re bad. 

Someone told me I was toxic for their well-being. It undid me. It loosened the lies my therapist tried to convince me of. She tells me I am good, that I’ve a loving person, that I care … 

She doesn’t know me. Not inside. She doesn’t see what others see. 

My mother always said I was evil. She said that one day I’d find her dead and it’d be my fault.

It is my fault. 

I made her unhappy. I make everyone unhappy in the end. 

Toxic. 

I’ve written it in my skin a dozen times now and it burns, yet I can’t get it out. I can’t get rid of the piece of me that is wrong. I try like my mother did. Not the medicine, but I starve it. Maybe I can rid it that way. Two days and I have cut and I have starved and it isn’t working, and I feel lost. I don’t know how to make it stop, to make me stop. 

There is a battle in my head, and I don’t know how to fight it. I’ve tried so hard to be good, to not hurt people,  to not cause them any pain, but I fail. 

The person is right. 

I’m toxic like they said. Bad like my mother said. Worthless like my father said. 

My body will starve and bleed and cry until every last drop of it is gone. 

A Place for a Broken Heart

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My Healing Place

It has been some time since I have written on here. So long that as I write this in a word document and think maybe I’ll post this on my blog, I’m not even sure I’ll be able to remember the password. 

Does my blog still exist?

I’ll find out. 

The blog has always been my healing place. The place for me to talk, to share my feelings, to put down things I can’t say to anyone else, and I’d like to say that maybe I’ve done healing, that I’ve been feeling so much better, and I didn’t need to come here, but I think I forgot myself. 

This is my place to come and be my authentic self. A place where I can just talk about what is in my head and not worry about any of the repercussions that may come from that. But, that in itself is strange and odd, because I write under a pen name. I wear a literary mask, yet the times when I am not myself, when I wear the shroud of someone else, I am myself. I am me. 

The mask allows me to be who I am inside. It allows me to not fear rejection, to not fear pain, to not hate myself. It allows me to make connections that I would have otherwise shied away from. But does that mean because I don’t give my real outside self, that I am not giving who I am to another?

It is the only way anyone who ever like me, because no one likes the real me. Not even myself.

It is so hard. 

How does anyone put themselves out there? How do we risk pain?

It’s taken therapy and insights to understand why I feel better when I am not me, and maybe it’ll take a long time to undo what caused it, maybe I’ll never undo it. 

I don’t like myself. I hate myself. 

That is so hard to write and so hard to admit, and when you say it, people don’t want to really listen. They don’t want to hear and they don’t understand.  They want to tell you it isn’t true.

When I look in the mirror, I see something else. I am shocked. I’ve built up this other self so much that when I am reminded of the real me, it hurts. I want to erase him. I want to reach into the glass and pull away his face and deny he exists. 

I want to make him vanish and scream at him. 

My parents did that to me, I think. I mean, maybe. If they couldn’t love me, then how can anyone else, and how can I even love myself in all the parts I had to play in the childhood I had in the life where things have gone wrong?

I struggled when my father was still alive to play the part of the caring child, when I had to look after him, when I had to put away the parts of me that ached. 

I’m not sure which loss affected me the most. When I lost my innocence at five, or when my parents left me. They both haunt me in their own ways. 

Because maybe my father’s pleasure was the only thing, I was good for in his life. 

But I am not really talking to the page for that. They’re just the whisperings in my head of how this happened.

I lost a friend this month. Not to death or sickness, or anything that takes them out of the world, but to a mistake. To an argument. To things that can’t be undone or changed. Yet, I grieve. Loss is loss. I’m sure they grieve too. I’m sorry.

Pain is ugly and hard and I’m struggling with it. I’m wishing it away and in many ways wishing for life to end so I no longer feel. I know I could make that happen, and I have thought about it. 

I have cut my skin and thought about cutting lower, deeper, of reaching in to try to make it all feel better. 

I’ve thought about jumping, about running into the sea and just to keep going until there is no where else to go.

I hate the feeling when it’s all through my body and I can’t move. I feel paralysed by it. I feel like I will never feel happy again. My heart hurts and breaks and I don’t know how to make it go away. 

I have had loss before. Bigger losses, smaller losses, but loss all the same, and they hurt, yet I remind myself I have survived every single bad day in my life. I have made it here. I have wiped away every single tear I’ve shed. 

And sure, I have fallen along the way and been unwell with it and suffered so many mental battles that I still bear the scars for, but I am here, and I am breathing, and I am alive. 

It is sad to think that a year from now, me and the friend will be nothing more than strangers. People who used to know each other, who may occasionally think of the other. We’ll be memories, chapters in each other’s lives.

I will miss her. 

I miss her now and maybe the intensity of that will fade. 

She’s been a big part of my life, and maybe some of the reason I’ve not needed to come here. 

But I’ve also had people. Through my words I have found an army who have helped me in more ways than they’ll ever know. 

I’ve been lucky, but I still feel …

I feel pain, and sadness, and hurt, and anger, and grief, and regret and sorrow. I feel broken. Like the jagged pieces are there, cutting into me and making it that I don’t know what to do with myself. 

If I hold my breath, maybe I can stop breathing, and if I stop breathing, maybe I can stop feeling …

For just a little while at least.