Last night (by which I mean this morning), for whatever reason, I decided to read some yaoi. It's no secret to anyone who knows me that I love yaoi, but I'm especially partial to fanfiction and doujinshi. I'm not really the target audience for a lot of mainstream BL. However, I gave this one a shot because the story was military-based and it was by a FFVIII doujinshi artist whose art style is really pretty.

This is what I got in exchange for my trust and cooperation...

You've gotta be freaking kidding me!

It seems that, even in my yaoi, I'm not safe. Lol.

Anyway.

I can't help but feel like fiction is the only place I will ever truly be happy. Waking up and remembering that I exist in the real world is such a depressing experience. I wish that I could live in the fictional mirages I create forever.

The good news is I'm a lot better at coping with my sadness than I used to be, and I have a lot more support than I did when I started to really break down. I appreciate that. I appreciate that so much.

I'm also tired of grieving. I have a lot of trauma that attacks me and forces me to grieve these immensely horrific and unbelievable experiences, but recently I feel like I'm also being forced to grieve a lot of very happy (and even benign) memories. They’re inaccessible to me, unreachable, because they’re in the domain of the past. The stoics say that the past is dead; that sometimes helps when i’m in a certain state of mind, but more often than not, I have a really hard time with it.

The past is never easy for me. I feel like the past, in any format, is the thing that makes me the most suicidal. I wish I could be a creature with no memories. All I would have would be the present, which is how everyone always says you’re supposed to live anyway if you want to be healthy and happy. But my past is the engine that powers me and moves me forward. Sometimes I want to dip into the fuel tank and never come out.

I think now that I'm overall more grounded and stable, I'm experiencing a greater sense of appreciation for how good my life is. Thinking about where I came from versus where I am now really emphasizes how important the good things in my life are. Comparison is also the theft of joy, and it’s really hard to straddle the middle point between appreciating 1) the difference between my unhappy past and now, and 2) the happy and pleasurable experiences I miss. I will never have those experiences again (even if I were to re-experience the exact same situation in the exact same way) because all of the moments that comprised those experiences were one of a kind. My regret is not having the perspective to appreciate how precious they were. I was a lot younger and a lot more dissociative, and now that neither of those things are true in the same way, I'm very bitter towards myself for not understanding how important it was to feel those moments to their fullest. Was I so desperate, coming from such instability, to believe that some things were certainly stable and would always be there in the exact form I loved them in? Maybe so. Either way, it was naïve.

I want to go back in time and punch myself in the face. I think violence was and is my most fluent tongue. Part of me believes that cruelty is the only thing that would reach the person I used to be and make them understand the mistakes they were making with each passing second. I know deep down that that’s not true, but that’s the impulse I get. At the end of it all, these thought experiments are useless because that person is dead now, just like all of those experiences are dead. I’m happy that person is gone, but I’m not happy about the other things I’ve lost. I guess that’s my cross to bear.

Self-awareness is so sad and uncomfortable.