The thing about setting the bar for yourself so high is that others start to hold you to it too.
I'm really not perfect, but I feel like my crimes are so minor compared to the things you've done and said to me, the silent treatments I never started, the crying, and hitting yourself, and hitting things. The taking your anger out on my cat, the making me feel like shit all the time for liking him. I know these are behaviors you've worked really hard to rectify. (most of them, anyways.) but the thing is, once you've proved thay you're capable of reacting like that, the people around you spend all of their time in fear of it.
I have swallowed so many things that I needed to talk about, so many questions that burned for answers in my stomach and so many feelings that I felt would just not be worth the fight to express. I just couldn't learn to trust you after those fights, couldn't help but agree with you when you said that you didn't deserve my forgiveness, couldn't not be revolted when your voice would start to go up in pitch when I'd deny you sex because I just didn't trust you with that information anymore. Couldn't bear to tell you how much it made you sound like him or how much of a difference it would have made if; the very first time, or every time, you just said "okay," or "You seem tense, or uncomfortable. what will fix that?". I wish you knew how uncomfortable it makes me still that you felt so potently about not being able to fix how I feel about my body. It's so hypocritical, anyways, nothing I said ever made a difference in how you felt about yours. It's just that I've been sexualized since I was thirteen, been called a minx, a tease or a babe by greasy men twice my age and perfectly respectable ones who still should have known better than to say things like that, and the trauma of being treated like a blow up sex doll since I was so young is not negated by how sexy you think I am, no matter how much you love me, your solution is not for the problem that I have. It is not a lack of confidence but a discomfort with being viewed sexually, when I would rather have the sex appeal of a fucking sock just so that everyone will stop looking at me like that and wanting things from me. Things that I just don't have the desire to give right now.
There are so many tiny greivances that I've filed away, too afraid or too exhausted to pursue reparations for. So many family holidays spent fielding questions about why you weren't there, so many panic attacks suffered in silence becuase for whatever reason I knew you'd find them offensive, so many wounds inflicted on myself because I just couldn't summon up the courage to deal with how stupid you said I was for doing it to begin with. There are so many things that I couldn't bear and did anyways just because I thought that someday you would transform into the man that I knew for a whole year and then just disappeared one day in a puff of smoke. I get that you need me now, but there's just nothing left. There is but an inch of me left after storing this much resentment and swallowing my mistrust and keeping my mouth screwed up against the litany of disappointment that begs to leak out- and I am spread so very thin.
I have worked so hard for so long and tried so diligently to just be strong and supportive and not just do everything and walk the fine like between being helpful and being infantalizing. To give you the tools you needed while still doing the things that make me me. Things like working my ass off on projects and being involved in the theatre and being helpful to my friends and being a fucking mess all the time. All I hear from every side is that I'm wasting time, dragging this out, that I deserve better. I keep thinking to myself, muttering under my breath that I don't want to do this anymore.
To be continued.
I have swallowed so many things that I needed to talk about, so many questions that burned for answers in my stomach and so many feelings that I felt would just not be worth the fight to express. I just couldn't learn to trust you after those fights, couldn't help but agree with you when you said that you didn't deserve my forgiveness, couldn't not be revolted when your voice would start to go up in pitch when I'd deny you sex because I just didn't trust you with that information anymore. Couldn't bear to tell you how much it made you sound like him or how much of a difference it would have made if; the very first time, or every time, you just said "okay," or "You seem tense, or uncomfortable. what will fix that?". I wish you knew how uncomfortable it makes me still that you felt so potently about not being able to fix how I feel about my body. It's so hypocritical, anyways, nothing I said ever made a difference in how you felt about yours. It's just that I've been sexualized since I was thirteen, been called a minx, a tease or a babe by greasy men twice my age and perfectly respectable ones who still should have known better than to say things like that, and the trauma of being treated like a blow up sex doll since I was so young is not negated by how sexy you think I am, no matter how much you love me, your solution is not for the problem that I have. It is not a lack of confidence but a discomfort with being viewed sexually, when I would rather have the sex appeal of a fucking sock just so that everyone will stop looking at me like that and wanting things from me. Things that I just don't have the desire to give right now.
There are so many tiny greivances that I've filed away, too afraid or too exhausted to pursue reparations for. So many family holidays spent fielding questions about why you weren't there, so many panic attacks suffered in silence becuase for whatever reason I knew you'd find them offensive, so many wounds inflicted on myself because I just couldn't summon up the courage to deal with how stupid you said I was for doing it to begin with. There are so many things that I couldn't bear and did anyways just because I thought that someday you would transform into the man that I knew for a whole year and then just disappeared one day in a puff of smoke. I get that you need me now, but there's just nothing left. There is but an inch of me left after storing this much resentment and swallowing my mistrust and keeping my mouth screwed up against the litany of disappointment that begs to leak out- and I am spread so very thin.
I have worked so hard for so long and tried so diligently to just be strong and supportive and not just do everything and walk the fine like between being helpful and being infantalizing. To give you the tools you needed while still doing the things that make me me. Things like working my ass off on projects and being involved in the theatre and being helpful to my friends and being a fucking mess all the time. All I hear from every side is that I'm wasting time, dragging this out, that I deserve better. I keep thinking to myself, muttering under my breath that I don't want to do this anymore.
To be continued.