Not Interested In A Love I Have To Earn Or Perform For. I Want To Be Loved As A Choice, On Purpose, Not

This is a result of the inhumane decisions that members of this administration want you to be silent about in public for fear of a loss of “civility”.

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revisiting the "comics as a self-love exercise" thing i did a few years ago. (u can read the first one here, cw for discussions of death + suicide.)

thank u for hanging in there. u did really good.

Sometimes your abusers will be extra nice to you after an event of horrendous abuse and it will feel transactional, like if you accept this niceness now, then you’ve accepted to forgive them for the abuse, then it’s all behind in the past and you’re perfectly happy to be on good terms with them again, and it will feel wrong and prickly like poison being injected into your body because no, you’re not okay, and no, you’re not forgiving them, you are not on good terms anymore, you do not want to act nice back, you do not want to accept niceness, you want to shut them out and be free from them forever. 

But you don’t dare to act out only because it might bring the horrendous abuse back. You have no choice but to let them believe all is well and forgiven and you’re a nice little family again and nobody is holding grudges. It feels like signing a contract against your will, confirming that the anger and the pain and the hatred will forever be festering inside of you, until they eat you alive, but you will never bring it up or act on it. It’s like being blackmailed to keep all of the consequences of abuse to yourself, and never let abusers experience any, because they’re currently being nice, and you can’t risk them being anything else.

And you know what, that contract is invalid. You were at a direct threat while you were displaying this behaviour. It doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to explode later. It doesn’t mean you have to keep consistent with what they expect of you. It doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to hold them accountable anymore. You were not leading them on to believe you’re fine with abuse, you were blackmailed and forced into taking over the consequences they deserved to bear. They still deserve it. Temporary niceness makes up for zero of the abuse. Nothing they do or preform or fake can make up for the abuse. Nothing can absolve them. None of your behaviour means they’re forgiven. You’re allowed to hold them accountable, to be mad, to show rage and coldness and consequences for however long you deem it prudent. Even if that is forever.

So, the formula of plot is... succeeding after trying at a thing??

Are you fucking kidding me??!!??

Via @Ed_Solomon at Twitter. Here's a clearer copy, in case (as a result of the looming Twitpocalypse) the original goes missing.

reblog if you worried about your abusive parent more than they ever worried about you

Emotional and psychological abuse often go hand in hand to the point where you don’t even notice the person abusing you wasn’t merely ‘hurting your feelings’, but also changed the way you perceive yourself and your surroundings. Psychological abuse doesn’t only break your heart, it puts you in a reality where you’re worth nothing and can’t achieve anything on your own. Constant gaslighting, changing the past, convincing you of your own incapability and the cruelty of the world, is not only hurtful, it’s brainwashing. It can make you feel endangered, cornered and wondering if you’re insane.

This isn’t something small you could brush over, and it isn’t done to you when you’re in your full strength, this is done to you when you’re at your most vulnerable, most trusting and defenseless. There is nobody fully resistant to it, and nobody who could get out of that unscathed. Psychological abuse will make you blame yourself, hate yourself, ask your own self what is wrong with you, and the emotions will follow, making you ashamed, guilty, desperate, hopeless. You will find yourself living in environment where you’re powerless, unimportant, not taken seriously, not even heard if you try to voice your pain and anger. It will make you try thousand different ways to make it better, to become someone worthy of attention and care, and when it doesn’t work, you’ll fall depressed, and feel even stronger that everything is your fault somehow.

Psychological abuse might be the most dangerous one, because it will take your life, and your personality away from you. You will not see an exit from a life that breaks you into little pieces every day, you will not even feel as if you deserve any better. You wont even dare to think you could be worth more of that. You will lose sight of everything except whatever it is abuser wants you to think and believe, you will be reduced to merely surviving and not knowing what happiness even is. That is devastating for any person to go thru. It’s cruel, dehumanizing and torture to inflict on a human being. If this is what you’re recovering from, you can feel the extent of which your own life was taken away and broken into pieces for someone else to use. It’s revolting. It’s comparable to being held hostage against your will. It’s not a 'lesser’ type of abuse. It’s the worst.

in batman 2022 bruce wayne's parents were killed in 2001 he would have been like 10? i think. the black parade was released in 2006 when he would have been ambiguously high school aged and obviously very emo and unpopular. what i'm saying here is that i think battinson heard the lyrics "when i was a young boy my father took me into the city to see a marching band he said son when you grow up will you be the savior of the broken, the beaten, and the damned" and decided to become batman then and there.

Neglected children will sometimes reassure adults that they’re fine, even when they’re in a horrible state. Neglected kids will feel guilty if anyone is worried about them because they don’t want to be a bother, feel badly for taking anyone’s attention, and don’t want to cause any concern. If as a kid you reassured and convinced people that you’re okay, when you were anything but, know that it’s normal for abused kids to do that. Concern and worry are often things we get guilt tripped for, we’re told we’re “bad” for making anyone worry, “selfish” for causing any kind of distress.

This doesn’t mean anyone is allowed to use this to change the narrative into ‘but you said you were okay’ when you finally admit you were not. Pain and struggle is visible on a child, regardless of how good an actor the child is, for anyone who bothers to pay attention. You pretending you were fine does not absolve anyone of hurting or neglecting you. A child always left to their own devices, reassuring others and insisting they don’t need any attention ever, is obviously not fine. Healthy children thrive on attention and always try to get more.