begging the bruise to stay
Oct. 15th, 2021 03:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hiddenramenJust venting some thoughts about trauma and online culture here!
When I was a kid, my mother was terribly abusive.
More emotionally than physically, but she certainly didn't shy away from the physical stuff: when she got mad, she made it count. And to be honest, I was glad whenever she did. Anytime she bruised me, anytime she left a mark, I reveled in it. All the things she did that didn't leave a mark, and then finally, finally, here was proof. My mother hurts me, I'm hurt. Do you see it? Do you finally see it?
I used to press my fingers into the bruises and make them deeper, make them darker. I begged them to stay. I begged them not to leave me alone with nothing to point to. And that defined my personality for a long, long time, in the end—I was a person who dug their thumb into the bruise just to see if it still hurt. And it did; of course it did. I'd snort pills I didn't know the name of and chase them with alcohol that made my throat bleed and it was a thumb, it was nothing but thumbs all the time. It was nothing but a very old question: "Can you see it?"
Sometimes when I'm online, I see these kids (and sometimes people older than me, which is a whole other kind of hurt, I guess) and they're so fucking angry. They've got all these bruises too, and they're not even bruises anymore, because at this point these people are just raking their nails over their own skin over and over and then screaming. And they can't even tell, is the thing, because all they know is that they have a bruise and they're begging it to stay. They don't know what's going to be left of them when it's gone and it's all smooth skin, but it still hurts. Nobody knows how to treat bleeding on the inside, except you know that you probably need to cut yourself open, so you take that step, over and over, and then what? Then what?
I dunno. There's this one person's blog that I check out every now and then, and I always come back to this one post she made where she talked about Jiang Yanli discourse. Someone had said that Jiang Yanli was a bad sister, or abusive, or something, hell, I don't know. A bad take of some sort—God knows the internet has plenty. But anyway, this clearly triggered her, because she went into a spiral that ended with, Would you kill me? Do you want me dead?
I remember being staggered by that. Like, honey, log off. Run. Let the bruise go. She kept scrolling down the tag, apparently, even after that Yanli post sent her into the stratosphere: sometimes I still see her make posts in the same vein. Would you kill me? she asks, and nobody's touching her. She's got her finger dug into her own arm yelling, "Why are you hurting me?" and it's because she's internalized her trauma so hard that she can no longer tell the difference between her own hand and the hand that hurts her. She is the trauma, at this point. She's all bruises.
The thing is that eventually, there comes a time when you have to take responsibility for your own skin. Somebody hurt you and so you hurt yourself, because you're trying so, so hard to make the hurt make sense, to show it to someone and have them tell you what it means. You just want them to see it. But there comes a point where you have to excavate your fingers from the wound and let it close up. Sit alone in a room with your own hurt and find where the ache is. Forgive it. Stop turning a bruise into a scar; learn whose hands are whose. Learn to pay attention to the way your fingers twitch when you're alone in your suffering.
When I was a kid, my mother was terribly abusive.
More emotionally than physically, but she certainly didn't shy away from the physical stuff: when she got mad, she made it count. And to be honest, I was glad whenever she did. Anytime she bruised me, anytime she left a mark, I reveled in it. All the things she did that didn't leave a mark, and then finally, finally, here was proof. My mother hurts me, I'm hurt. Do you see it? Do you finally see it?
I used to press my fingers into the bruises and make them deeper, make them darker. I begged them to stay. I begged them not to leave me alone with nothing to point to. And that defined my personality for a long, long time, in the end—I was a person who dug their thumb into the bruise just to see if it still hurt. And it did; of course it did. I'd snort pills I didn't know the name of and chase them with alcohol that made my throat bleed and it was a thumb, it was nothing but thumbs all the time. It was nothing but a very old question: "Can you see it?"
Sometimes when I'm online, I see these kids (and sometimes people older than me, which is a whole other kind of hurt, I guess) and they're so fucking angry. They've got all these bruises too, and they're not even bruises anymore, because at this point these people are just raking their nails over their own skin over and over and then screaming. And they can't even tell, is the thing, because all they know is that they have a bruise and they're begging it to stay. They don't know what's going to be left of them when it's gone and it's all smooth skin, but it still hurts. Nobody knows how to treat bleeding on the inside, except you know that you probably need to cut yourself open, so you take that step, over and over, and then what? Then what?
I dunno. There's this one person's blog that I check out every now and then, and I always come back to this one post she made where she talked about Jiang Yanli discourse. Someone had said that Jiang Yanli was a bad sister, or abusive, or something, hell, I don't know. A bad take of some sort—God knows the internet has plenty. But anyway, this clearly triggered her, because she went into a spiral that ended with, Would you kill me? Do you want me dead?
I remember being staggered by that. Like, honey, log off. Run. Let the bruise go. She kept scrolling down the tag, apparently, even after that Yanli post sent her into the stratosphere: sometimes I still see her make posts in the same vein. Would you kill me? she asks, and nobody's touching her. She's got her finger dug into her own arm yelling, "Why are you hurting me?" and it's because she's internalized her trauma so hard that she can no longer tell the difference between her own hand and the hand that hurts her. She is the trauma, at this point. She's all bruises.
The thing is that eventually, there comes a time when you have to take responsibility for your own skin. Somebody hurt you and so you hurt yourself, because you're trying so, so hard to make the hurt make sense, to show it to someone and have them tell you what it means. You just want them to see it. But there comes a point where you have to excavate your fingers from the wound and let it close up. Sit alone in a room with your own hurt and find where the ache is. Forgive it. Stop turning a bruise into a scar; learn whose hands are whose. Learn to pay attention to the way your fingers twitch when you're alone in your suffering.
no subject
Date: 2021-10-15 09:48 pm (UTC)Can I say I love this? Is "loving" the right term? Whatever the term, this resonates so much with me. 💜
no subject
Date: 2021-10-22 10:44 am (UTC)