Speak The Truth Even If Your Voice Shakes

The thing that still angers me the most, that still hurts the most, is how he took my anxieties, my fears and my trust especially, and he turned them into weapons. "You are too dependent." He said it so many times and with so much confidence, it had to be true. Didn't it?

He said he cared. He showed he cared, until that moment he realised he didn't have to anymore. I trusted him. I gave him one of the most precious things I have to give. Trust that my well-being meant as much to him as it did me. Trust there was no venom behind his words and actions. Trust at all, because I can count the people who have truly earned it, unquestioning, on one hand; and only one even lives in the same city as me. And I don't mean "Here's $50 pay me back when you can" trust. Or "Please take care of my cat for a week" trust. Or even "I'm drunk, please ensure I get home unharmed and unscathed" trust. This is "My life is literally in your hands" trust. Because it was. To allow someone to support you fully in your mental illness is to hand them your ability to survive.

And he turned it into something vile, a poison to eat away at me from the inside out. A dagger sunk deep into my heart and twisted with a grin. I handed him the keys to my own destruction, and the change was instantaneous, like a venus fly trap snapped shut to capture its prey. Had he literally stabbed me in the back, it would have hurt far less.

The thing is, I never asked anything of him. At least, nothing he hadn't already proved over and over he was willing to give. But it was too late. Once the cage slammed down, there was no acceptable level of expectation. It was a trick, and it always was intended to be. Asking for anything, even the tiniest level of consideration, was always going to be too much. What I wanted, what I needed; it all ceased to exist.

He rode in, your stereotypical knight in shining armour, and gave me far more than I would dare to ask of anyone. But also not too much. If you're too willing, too helpful, the scales tip the other way and motivations come into question. No, he knew the perfect balance. Always more than I expected but never so much I grew suspicious, either. He tested my boundaries, subtle little aggressions which were easily brushed aside by an anxious mind trained to stop believing the worst about everyone and everything. Eating all but one of a snack I shared with him, just to see if I would complain. "Forgetting" to mention to me that the thing we planned together with friends was actually happening, to see if I'd protest at being left out of my own social gathering. So many little pushes here and there, trying to find out when he'd finally go too far. Swallowing down his good intentions, the boundary lines kept contracting further, inward and inward again, until there was nowhere left to go.

And so, I was caught in his web of honeyed lies. And once caught, that I gave him the thing he worked so hard to earn, my trust, became the basis of everything I was doing wrong. I relied on him, and suddenly attempts at contact would go unanswered. Suddenly, the white knight was overwhelmed and nowhere to be found. I pointed out he was hurting me, and I was expecting too much, I was dependant, and too broken for anyone to cope with. I gave him solid boundaries and guidelines to avoid triggering my anxiety, and these were promptly ignored. He wanted me anxious. Anxiety breeds fear, which in turn breeds compliance. Fear of scaring away my one source of support (after he had pushed me away from all others), and the fear that he was right, that I was too broken. The push was an easy one once he had my trust, because they are the constant plague of the mentally ill, that we would lose everyone and everything from something beyond our control.

I handed him the very thing that would be my undoing. Well, nearly. It took him messing with the already-delicate inner workings of my mind, pushing me to the brink of giving it all up, for me to say enough was enough. Finally, the one boundary I was unwilling to give up. That one little voice in my mind that keeps me going when every fibre of my being tells me not to, that thread of strength I rarely realise I have inside that forces me to survive. He was destroying me from the inside out, and I knew it had to stop.

And I was angry. It was a pure rage. To let him get so far, to give up so much to cling to something so deadly, to lose all sense of my worth as a person deserving of the most basic respect. I was so very angry, and I still am. Even that rage has been turned against me, proof that I am the one wrong, the one causing harm. To feel so deeply lessens your worth, and in a world run by power-hungry abusive controllers, we see this to be true. To not feel is a privilege, the domain of those with the ability to crush others under their heel without consequence. Anger is where the rest of us live, and it gives us strength and clarity to finally resist. That's why anger is wrong. That's why its condemned. Anger is power. Anger is revolution.

I am hurting. And I am angry. I am a threat, and as long as I continue to speak truth without fear, I always will be. That my focus has a specific He and Me is irrelevant. There are 'He's and 'Me's all over. Mine is a story told over and over, in so many places, in so many ways. We are angry and unafraid to speak. Tear us down. Call us crazy. Try to destroy us, if you can.

We know you are watching. We know you are afraid. We have the weapons, the truth, the daggers, the power, now, and we will never stop.

Anxiety: A Story

Today, I needed to go to the shops and purchase a bus ticket, because my current one was going to run out. I was 98.7% sure that the shop I was heading to sold bus tickets. In fact, the idea that they wouldn’t sell bus tickets is almost absurd, especially as I’d looked up on the transport website at some point and seen that they are listed as a ticket retailer.

Walking into the shop, I looked around for a sign to reassure me that they did, indeed, sell tickets, but there wasn’t one anywhere I could see. Panic began to set in. I went to grab a water bottle first, as that was my other goal of this shop visit, and tried to decide what I would do about the situation. Here is where most people would ask the probably very nice woman behind the counter if the shop sold tickets or not, and of course I thought of that. It’s not that I didn’t realise that not only was that the fastest and most direct solution to my problem, but also that it would likely result in me purchasing the ticket I needed, because the chance they sold them was extremely high. We are talking 1.3% here.

But to someone with anxiety, it doesn’t matter how large or small that gap is between not being sure and being 100% absolutely certain you know what is going on, because 1.3% or 64% chance you are wrong is still a chance. Any chance something will not go exactly as you planned or predicted is enough of a crack for your anxiety to get in there and begin the rapid descent into dizzying panic. You go from walking into a shop fairly confidently to "Quick, run through all possible scenarios as to how this shop visit will now turn out" in the matter of mere seconds.

I decided to wander the aisles towards the back of the small store while my brain began its routine calculation of outcomes.

Some days, I am able to push the ridiculous amount of panic out of my mind long enough to force myself to do the easiest and most obvious solution, despite the fact that it's also the one that involves the most amount of variables and therefore causes me the most amount of stress. On those days, I have enough sense to realise that this is the most likely way to reach my goal and the chance of something going wrong that I haven't accounted for is so small that it is nigh on impossible. On those days, I leave shops happy and proud of myself for doing a thing my brain was screaming at me not to do.

Other days, the panic is just more than I'm able to handle and the thought of making myself do something with even the tiniest chance of an unpredictable result makes my brain freeze up and my heart pound and I go into "deer in headlights" mode. (Recently, I've learned that my "deer in headlights" mode is a form of disassociation, where I detach myself from my sense of reality because I'm finding it too overwhelming. Well. No wonder accomplishing things sometimes is just plain difficult!) On these days, I will wander aimlessly, pretending to intently study the products on the shelves, while in fact I am using all of my brain power to problem solve for a resolution to my situation that I'm able to handle at that given moment. Those days are the ones I generally leave shops angry and disappointed at myself, sometimes with and sometimes without the thing I intended to get.

Well, today was a spectacular failure in terms of coping with my anxiety. After a small amount of wandering, I decided that I didn't want to put back the water bottle and leave the shop to regroup and possibly purchase the ticket elsewhere (also scary for embarrassment reasons). I also didn't have cash, so I couldn't simply purchase the water bottle on its own with EFTPOS (that's a debit/credit card machine to you non-Australians), as there was a $10 minimum. So, the only solution I could stand the thought of was to find more things to buy and hope I worked up the nerve to ask the shop assistant about tickets when I went up to the counter.

No, I didn't work up the nerve as I'd hoped. I did, however, leave the shop after purchasing the water bottle and two large blocks of chocolate to ensure I was safely getting over $10 worth of items.

And I hated myself immediately upon stepping outside. But I did learn that crippling anxiety can sometimes have the positive side effect of leaving a shop with a LOT of chocolate.

(I did manage to get a bus ticket much later in the day after taking care of other things I needed to do, and getting cash out of an ATM and then braving a newsagent ALSO without signs. But newsagents not selling bus tickets would be even more absurd than my local shop not selling them. An awkward but painless interaction with a lady who was very trusting of my concession status ensued, and I felt dumb afterwards, BUT I had a bus ticket. Success at last.)