The day I hated myself the very most in my whole life was when I woke up and realized I’d somehow become the very thing I hated and ran from: him; my father.
The very thing I abhorred and fought against within my own weary being.
I guess his stupid demons won over my helpless thirteen-year-old self. But I never deserved that.
Everyone else I encounter deserves better than him, too. Yet somehow, I’m his walking mirror.
I want to wipe myself away—tear out of my skin and never even remember him again.
I’ve tried escaping because I knew that if I stayed around these people long enough I’d lose against them; become like them; lose the shields I’d put up of better character that I fought for.
But survival is survival and coping mechanisms are coping mechanisms.
And now I am hated for the very things I was changed into. The ways I was stretched and torn into.
Hated for the very thing I hated, and never intended to become. I’m just as repulsive as him. I am the demons I ran from, and I am judged for it, because they caught up to me. And now I am hated, but not for me, because I am not me; I lost “me” in his demons. They swallowed me whole.
I thought I was becoming strong or invincible carrying around the emotional weapons that he did, but I was becoming them.
I am the demons that haunted me, and now I am seen as them.
I am what I worked so hard to be the opposite of and better than.
And I deserved to be better—to keep my innocence— but better was not how I could survive. To survive, I had to hold my enemies’ weapons against them and, in doing so, I became what I feared. I became like my enemy.
Everyone else grew up and changed since then—with me left behind where they trampled me. And I am blamed for all this pain which was inflicted upon me by them.
I am judged and hated and treated repulsively as though it all came from me. It is as though they hate their selves that they see now reflected in me.
But this was their faults. I tried to get away. I tried to fight it. I tried to be good and soft and loving and I tried to cope.
But good, soft, loving things do not survive in a harsh world where soft means “naive” and “hasn’t seen enough” and “doesn’t know pain”… and also, “immature”. They become a punching bag for mockery and insults in the name of “maturing [me] because [I] am a baby and way too innocent”; as if everyone ought to be cold and hard and cruel, and as if that is the only way to be “respected” in any way by all these adults with the character of 5th-grade boys.
They killed me and still ask, “where did the good people go?”
Consumed by your demons.
And now I have to do all these reparations in myself— reparations I ought not to have had to make within myself, if I’d been left to my self— for things I never asked for and simply were thrown. Because they didn’t care about the little girl or her life or how she would grow up.
They couldn’t put their demons aside as they raised her or were in her presence.
They maximized the volume of their own traumas and threw them upon her as her own demons and flaws to carry.
And then they wondered why she was built to sit in the company of demons and carry them on her shoulders.
They asked where their “little girl”—their “angel”—went.
Lost in your “mature” world of immaturity and mockery, for she learned the game.
This is all your fault and now she must carry your pain.
They ask her why she crumbles when she attempts to walk. It is because of the bricks and stones and chains and iron weights thrown onto her from them—strapped to her when she had no way to throw them off.
So she carried them for a time, but crumbled beneath them and now is laughed at for lying on the floor.
Will she ever be enough? Good enough? Bad enough? Strong enough? “Alive” enough? A perfect balance of every quality they never had?
Probably not, but that is what she reached for all those years and that is what she still dreams and hopes for. But all this is the adult lie so that bullies who look like grown men can tell kids or really anyone that they’re pathetic for their good hearts.
But for now, her parents’ (and every adult’s whom she has encountered) chains wrap around her neck and over her back, and she has to be the one willing to do the job none of them were.
Now she struggles and suffers with their repulsive traits—because they had to hate her, didn’t they.
For something— just as they do now.
She’s always been “wrong” and trampled, and anything she says in incorrect—not because of mistaken reasoning, but simply because it was her hated self that said it; only because it came out of her mouth.
She’d not even discover the trickery of their game and the cruel joke they’d played until her adulthood.
Her very essence, very being, very existence was wrong and bad.
She felt so hated and so hateful toward her own self—stuck inside that box and labeled “wrong”; everyone laughing and poking at her as if she were a game of “whack-a-mole”— that acid from the deep parts of her heart where all this pain stuck and dwelled ate away at her heart and ate away at her silver living and that tower of “good” that she worked so painstakingly for.
The chains held tighter and squeezed her raw heart, the acid eating her away. The acid they’d placed there with their rotten words and actions.
With hate for herself and hate of the world, she emerged an adult. And thus she appeared, grown and lost. Not alive, but survived; a mirror of the demons that haunted her.
For she learned that only demons were dirty enough to use the tactics necessary to scare off other demons, more chains, and abuse.
The mirror stuck, wrapped to her skin— the skin of her trembling and terrified and innerly young self.
And she reflected what the world threw at her. Their shit back in their face.
But still they had the audacity to wonder, “What happened to her? Where did our innocent little angel go?”
Where you wanted her to go, meant for her to go, and where you put her in:
Hell.
Because clearly she’d not seen enough and hell was the place for “mature” people.
She gave you what you gave her and now it’s wrong? What is it about you that it’s okay to be so bad, and what is it about her that you expect her to give you better than you give her?
She didn’t want to have to work through your mistakes and have a need to rid herself of what you wouldn’t, or carry all the ugly pain. This healing journey is because you couldn’t pull your shit together in the presence of a child.
She is still fighting her way out of your mess and their mess and everyone’s mess that she’s been entangled in. So don’t you dare tell her that her soft heart means that she’s “not been through enough”. Her soft heart frankly means that she’s seen it and hated the blasted evil that you are. (And don’t you dare judge her or tell her she’s not good enough, or ask her why she’s not got a good heart or give her shit for the pain she wears on her face. If she is hard-hearted, it came from outside her, not from within).
If you tell her she’s not seen enough or are mocking her for her innocence and kindness and actual maturity (which must somehow bruise your ego or pick a sore spot you ought to work on, for you to hate such a thing like goodness in a person so much) then you’re the one putting her in hell and wishing for her to be there. And you need to grow the fuck up. Don’t keep tossing your heavy ass chains on her raw shoulders; she’s seen enough of that shit from other men of your immature level. You make a fool of yourself.
If you ever wonder where the good people went: The good people are under your feet swallowing the scum you’ve been shoving down their throats. Stop trodding them and you might see them for once.
Popp!nTalk 