By all means this can be ignored, maybe I just need a place to vent. But I am at a loss of what to do. I’ve never talked about it out loud before, only one internet friend (but even then, not with any details). I haven’t really thought about any of these things until maybe some time in high school and I just kinda brushed it off, but it’s built up since then. I want to leave a trigger warning but truly I don’t know how to describe it. It doesn’t feel “bad enough” (to me, but again, I feel like I genuinely don’t know if my discomfort is valid anyhow). I don’t know. Just…stuff that made me uncomfortable. Creepy childhood things, I guess.
It’s been wracking my brain lately. I’ve always had this memory of when I was a kid where I remember falling asleep and then waking up completely naked, and having no idea what happened. But I don’t remember a thing before that and almost nothing after. I remember wondering if maybe I fell asleep in my towel after a shower, but I had looked and never found one. I didn’t think about this for a long time cuz it just didn’t mean anything to me, and there’s a good chance that it really might not be anything at all. But now that times gone on I’ve realized there are memories of mine that really did happen, and I do remember them clearly. I remember being watched in the shower and being old enough to be uncomfortable with it and trying to cover myself up, only to be told to stop.
And I don’t know. Maybe that’s just a thing parents do when their kid is misbehaving. I truly don’t know. There’s a lot of stuff in my childhood where I was yelled at or hit or told I wasn’t wanted. I realize now that most families are probably closer and trust each other and aren’t scared to be alone in a car with one of their parents. I also realize that I try to lessen my experiences and say they aren’t that bad even though they DO cause me distress even into adulthood.
I just don’t know if I’m being dramatic. Some part of my brain just tells me I WANT to be traumatized when that’s an absurd thought. I just keep digging into my memories and remembering more things, or I read stuff that describes behaviors in children that are signs or whatever bad things that have happened to them, I realize just how many of those behaviors I have.
Theres just a lot of little things, I guess. Little things that never bothered me before, but now I’m an adult and I try to understand why I feel the way I do, or why I react to things the way that I do, and it all comes back to those little things that have piled up. I’m scared when men are angry around me. I get these weird, unsettled feelings in certain places and I can never understand why or how to describe them. It’s like sudden waves of guilt or anxiety, or I’ve tried to explain it to my friend as “nostalgia but in a bad way”.
I think maybe I want to tell myself all of these little things are nothing, but at the same time I don’t want to be told that it’s nothing. I know I wasn’t molested or raped (at least not that I can remember) but yet I act like someone who was. It makes me feel guilty. And yet, I DO feel these things, and I should just focus on that, but I can’t help but feel like somehow I need to permission to.
Truly, I don’t know what I’m looking for here with posting this. I just feel so miserable all the time. These memories pile up and if they pile up enough it starts to make me feel sick.