4:41 am saturday

It just occurred to me that there’s more than one type of hellhole. In both situations, you’re being strained in some way, bombarded by the continuous fear of loss, abandonment, or whatever it is you failed at coming back to bite you in the ass. In one place I had fun, friends, liberty, but at the same time fear, anxiety, lies, dishonesty, distrust, instability. A fucked-up reputation.
In another place, I have diversion, distraction, hiddenness, no social life, constant nagging, nocturnal activity, depression. Still a fucked-up reputation, but slightly fewer repercussions. I can’t actually list anything good except that nothing from the former hellhole can really bother me—that is, externally. I may be out of the situation, but like a shell-shocked soldier I dissociated from it in order to survive it--but now the feeling-memory combination comes back in unbearable waves whenever a trigger comes along on the television, or some other source. Thank God I have no nightmares at the moment. I’ve tried to look into post-traumatic stress disorder for some answer to validate my feelings, but all I could find were accounts of battle-weary servicemen or survivors of hostage situations and natural disasters. It made me feel like an asshole. I don’t deserve to experience post-traumatic anything because I didn’t have any qualifying “trauma” to give me a stress disorder. And yet I do. Because of the lack of resources, I am forced to convince myself that the memory triggers and fear-driven dissociation is a good old-fashioned “once bitten, twice shy” reaction. No, I’m not serious. But it’s really hard not to feel petty when you seem to be the only one experiencing what you’re experiencing as a result of what you’ve gone through. Making a mountain out of a molehill. Stop making such a big deal about it, Melissa. You’re overreacting and you just want attention. You always take a small problem and make it seem bigger than it is to get the sympathy of others. Fishing for attention. Fishing for sympathy. Fishing for compliments. Manipulating the emotions of others.
No, that’s not the verbatim stream of thoughts I have, in fact most of my thoughts are non-verbal, following suit with my right-brained tendencies. They’re abstract, or they’re just wordless feelings. Words don’t even begin to describe the magnitude of some of them, though try I must. That’s why people like me need to write or talk or use some outlet to maintain sanity. To remove the synergetic effect that several small problems have together on my psyche. To use the trephine tool that is self-expression to relieve the overwhelming pressure in my mind, though most of the time it is an afterthought, taking a backseat to the cradle of self-indulgence or self-injury (which mean the same thing for some) as a result of self-loathing, a comfortable stranger with candy.