Okay, I'm only on reddit for /nosleep wherein I lurk. As such don't expect formatting. And I've had a few, so don't expect coherency. More like mental vomit. Ended up here because I'm going to have to go back on antianxiet meds, and googling the diagnosis I got like 15 years ago ended up with this sub being the first useful thing to pop up. Not happy to discover my psych wasn't full of shit, by the way.

I was responding to a thread along the lines (I don't care to look up how to link) of "have you ever had to explain your symptoms". And my knee-jerk reaction was along the lines of "Fuck No. I'd rather people think I was an asshole than admit to the stuff I've lived through, and besides the times I have people kept trying to convince me that things were stuff they weren't." And it occurred to me: "Why?" Well, because things that happen to me are my fault; and that sort of thing doesn't happen to me. Which led to the even worse question "Well, what would you call it if someone who was not you was telling you the same story?"

Oh.

"No it wasn't."

If a woman told you that, what would you call it?

"It's not the same thing."

What was it then?

"I don't want to talk about it. That was in pre-school. I'm probably just imagining..."

No. You're not.

I'm going to get this out of my system, delete this account, then get blackout drunk and hopefully kill enough brain cells that I forget all about this again.

When I was in pre-school, maybe 3 or 4 years old, I was abused (it's strange, I can't actually force myself to call it "m" or "r"...I guess that's more acknowledgment than I can wrap my head around) by one of the staff on the playground. He put a stick...in...me. It was a piece of live oak, I remember the rough bark on it, and the end was broken off and sharp. I remember throwing out my underwear so my parents wouldn't see the blood. I told them I had an accident. Potty training and all that.

Skip a few years...

Spent middle school and high school getting the shit beaten out of me every day. Having my things stolen, being spit on and reminded constantly that I was ugly and worthless and that nobody would ever like me. That whole thing is a sort of gray blur with little highlights here and there: someone straightened out a safety pin and stuck it through my backpack strap so that when I put the pack on it ended up stuck about an inch and a half into my shoulder. Having my hand held down on the ground and someone kicking my fingers (broke a couple of them). That kind of stuff. By year two I'd made my peace with death: I knew deep down that one day someone would go a bit too far and kill me, by accident or on purpose. By year three it didn't bother me any more. Went on for seven years, until one day after PE I was sitting under a bank of lockers and someone kicked me in the head. Caught my head on the corner of the lockers (pointy corner, not the edge). Pretty sure it resulted in a skull fracture: I've still got a divot in my head from it. I think that's when my mind broke. It's also when they stopped, not because the staff did something about it (they had known the whole time, but declined to step in...boys will be boys, or building character or something like that...), rather it stopped because I calmly informed the guy that my father had been training me on firearms since I was five, that I took a Dahl sheep at over a thousand yards that summer (.300 win mag on a custom Winchester Model 70 HB, and it was closer to 1,600--we measured it with the odometer in the truck), and that when he stepped off the bus the next day I was planning on putting a .22 LR through his spine one vertebrae above the shoulder blades so he would spend the rest of his life in a chair not even able to jerk off without help.

See, monsters aren't born, they're made. And I'm pretty sure he realized he'd just made one.

[Sidebar: I'm not actually a psychopath. I wish I were, I think it would make life easier.]

Despite that being the end of that, as far as physical abuse, my situation deteriorated pretty rapidly from that point. Without the looming reminder of inevitable death I had time for self-reflection. And that is when the depression, social anxiety, self hatred, and all the other crap that was eventually diagnosed as CPTSD with complications started to rear up. I spent the next ten years or so actively suicidal. (Again, it would have been easier in the long run if I'd have found the balls to just pull the fucking trigger.) I self-injured. Not like scratches, like vivisecting down to arteries and tendons. I was an alcoholic for quite a while. And eventually it got to the point that I had to do something about it one way or another.

Enter shrink/diagnosis/meds.

That worked out to the degree I got functional again. Quit drinking for bad reasons. Kind-of/sort-of accepted the one coping mechanism that for me is both healthy and effective. Went to grad school. Etc.

Skip a few years again.

Started dating. Mostly by accident (I don't have the confidence to approach people: I'm not attractive or interesting.). She...was not good for me. Basically she was dating me to piss off her folks, and I would go along with pretty much anything because she was paying attention to me. It would have stopped at a moderately unhealthy codependence if not for the fact that I wasn't all that comfortable being touched and she had a high sex drive. She also made it quite clear (verbally stating) that she didn't have the ability to be emotionally supportive of me. So my first sexual relationship was...coercive. And I felt and still feel gross about it. Like, dirty. But that was in the terms and conditions. And she drank a lot, so I drank a lot. That sounds horrible, doesn't it? It ended well too: I trusted her with explaining some of my quirks and foibles (coping mechanism), and she told her whole extended family about it. On vacation. Out of the country. Then ignored me for the rest of the trip. And dumped me the day after we got back. (Christmas, if you're counting...)

But in the grand scheme of things, I bring my problems on myself. I honestly don't remember what my point was, if I had one at all, and I have to take a piss (vodka tends to do that). Maybe I was looking for some kind of catharsis? Thing about screaming into the void? The void is empty.

So yes: the nihilists are right. In the grand scheme of things, who fucking cares?