Why I Stop Myself

Limited

I plan out stories and situations in my head a lot. 

I rehearse over, and over, and over again what I'm going to say, what I'm going to do. It ranges from full-on school-shootings, to people crying, to me crying or freaking out about something, getting mugged, some popular kid asking me to do a TikTok dance with them with lots of movement and I don't have a binder on,  getting kissed without my consent, etc. 

But both in real life and in my head, I fall short when it comes to comforting. 

In my head, I can see someone crying, in desperate need of something to ground them, reassuring words... 

But if I say "We're going to get through this one step at a time," I see my mother and I think, no, bad.  

Saying "I'm sorry" reminds me of my dad,  or my grandma, close to tears over the death of my mom. And in the case of my grandma, I can feel the fury burning inside my chest. You aren't "sorry," you hated her! She married a woman! You're a homophobic, transphobic, idiotic person who doesn't speak for herself, and told me that all my friends are wrong- 

With my dad, I see him crying, voice cracking like it never does, as he chokes out the news that would really change our lives, my mom is dead, and the fact that he cried made me never want to make him emotionally vulnerable again. 

Although I can't draw up any more specific examples, I know every time I comfort someone, I fall short because it seems like every word I say runs me into a brick wall, phrases associated with negative feelings that I don't want anyone else to feel.  When adults cry, it sends me into a near panic, and when conflict arises, there's always that fear that domestic violence is going to occur because I saw my mom hit my stepmother once, and the possibility of it happening again has been burned into the back of my mind ever since. 

Other various phrases that have the same speech pattern as Jayla does reminds me of how she makes me feel... patronized at times, like I'm not being seriously, or I'm a baby to be coddled. Either that, or it sounds like it came straight out of the mouth of my therapist, even though Jayla isn't my therapist, and my actual therapist has speech patterns that are nothing like hers. 

All of these are supposed to be comforting. But they're not to me, and I don't know if they're comforting to anyone else. I don't want to leave a bad impression in their brain like they somehow left in mine, and all I have left at this point is physical affection, although lord knows we're in a pandemic, I have very few people I would ever hug or hold hands with, and most people don't want physical affection anyways because sometimes it's too overwhelming, and I understand that. 

All they want is words. 

And that's where I fail, constantly, no matter how much I try. 

But I'm getting a little better, phrases that once would have been off-limits are now... okay for me, and usually, because I'm comforting people my own age or older, I can fact-check it against myself to make sure it doesn't leave a negative impression. 

Another thing is, I don't cry in front of people, ever. The only people I've trusted with that side of myself are adults, and I don't want to cry in front of my dad, once again because of the fear of making him emotionally vulnerable and getting that "pity face" that I hate so much. 

Crying in front of my friends would be a bad experience for them, or at least if it happened to me, it would, and I'd have the event stuck in my brain, there to remind me again not to do things like all the other things from my past. I'm already a very unemotional person, except for being angry (which is about 20-30%  of the time if I'm guessing correctly) and freaking out about fictional characters, which believe me sounds a lot more dramatic put into a text than in person. Seeing one of your usually stoic, angry-constantly-about-politics-and-the-other-injustices-of-the-world friend starts crying is bound to leave an impression because you know something really bad has happened. 

Either that, or they've lost contact with reality for the 5th time that week, it's noisy as fuck, and the world is going to shit, and they simply can't take it anymore. 

Which mind you, has been happening a lot lately to me. So frick. 

Anyways, I doubt anyone is going to see this story, but if there is any people, thank you for reading.

-Jamie