This is an unorganized trauma dump. Read or skip, your choice, but don’t blame me if you read it and don’t like the dumping.
The physical form containing my mother stopped functioning on December 8, 2024.
I struggle with making and maintaining friends. It’s easy for me to insist that’s because of my Autism, but that’s a cheap excuse.
When my mother died, I went through a short period of internal mourning. Part of that was relief; she was no longer an active threat to me. But she hadn’t been an active threat to me for several years prior.
Spiders lay their eggs where they will, sometimes deep inside.
This summer I came to realize that I am terrified of dying like my mother did: Alone in a nursing home, abandoned by her family. It had been almost a year since I’d last seen her; my younger sibling had visited more recently.
One day, I will get what I deserve.
And that’s what I caught myself telling myself this week: I fear that reality because I think I deserve that reality. I deserve to be friendless. I deserve to be alone and suffer in solitude.
The warning at the beginning, about trauma dumping, is because the last time I had a set of what I considered friends, more than one or two stragglers, I was told by one person that people in the group were tired of my trauma dumping and by another person that I was unstable and told by a third person that I was basically a fraud.
I got the message, and the message is clear.
I hermited myself then, and I have been having trouble coming back out of my shell.
Some recurrent themes in my life, though:
- I don’t deserve anything good. If I get something good, I stole it. If I get something bad, that’s what I deserve. Karma is all-knowing and all-seeing, but only when it comes to doling out crap.
- People really don’t like the real me. I’m a burden, a nuisance, an overwhelm. So any evidence that confirms that is internalized, and any evidence that undermines that is tossed aside.
The second theme is manifested through a recurrent response to “Just be your authentic self, and you’ll attract friends.” So I go and I sit on my own and I leave on my home and I go home and I cry and I want to die.
These are things my parents convinced me of. That it was my fault that I didn’t have many friends. That my father had to use his influence as a church pastor to force kids to interact with me. That I was destined to be great, and so if I turned out to be great, it would just be me meeting expectations.
Once, my father told me I was too good a writer to ever be successful.
Spiders laying eggs.
I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!
Except maybe they don’t.
Except, hear me out: Maybe they do.
Maybe it’s me that doesn’t like me.
I carry undeserved guilt for how my mother died. What was I supposed to do?
When I was a child, I loved my mother. Because she had created a reality in which she was the only one who could possibly ever love me. She created a monster and put it on my father’s body, which wasn’t even necessary because he had his own imperfections.
She’s dead now. Guilt won’t change that. Karma isn’t going to punish me, but I’m doing a great job of punishing myself. I have become the villain in my own Dickens novel. At least I’m Haversham and not Scrooge.
I have more to say, but it needs to be in a separate post. This one is too messy.
(This post contains quotes from Men Without Hats, The Smiths, and Stuart Smalley.)