That dark princess with saddening jest She lowered her eyes of woe, And I felt her sigh, I wouldn't like to try The changes she's going through But I hope love comes right through them all with you.

I know I've spoken a lot about the artifices of social media and relationships, and how what we see might not always be true (and rarely is), but it was brought to my attention that you cannot even use BART to get to these stairs, and that these stairs are anything BUT BARTable. BART is using this advert to endorse itself, and it's not even a real BARTable locale.

I mean, this is still going to make me cry every time I see it, but finding that out made me LAUGH.

I've never felt as though I were missing anything. I felt like my life was rich and fulfilled and filled with wonderful and beautiful things. For the most part, I still actually feel that way.

But I always find myself second-guessing myself because I have always been made to feel, or been attempted to pressure to feel, that what I want isn't enough or that I am not good enough the way that I am. These pressures have come from "family" and "friends," who obviously cannot, do not, and will not understand that me wanting different things than them is not a threat to their very way of being. 

The old, "we JUST want you to be happy!"--because my version of being happy is not good enough.

I have spent most of my life alone, and have very rarely felt the kind of loneliness I have felt this year. I cherish my alone time; I have to have dedicated hours a day set aside for being alone and quiet. I need at least an hour to decompress before bed and I need silence. I very rarely go out with my friends, I very rarely go anywhere or do anything. I don't experience loneliness very often.

But I have experienced it over this last year because of a few intimate betrayals from family and friends, so that I genuinely feel both alone and unsupported. I know people with Borderline Personality get a lot of shit for "running away" from "perceived" abandonment, but I do not think people understand what a Herculean task it is for us to let people in--and when people violate that trust, when people do not appreciate how special it is for them to have been let it, we are often left wondering, did I... did I make a mistake? 

I have often stayed in situations much longer than I should have, ones that my gut told me were unsafe, if not downright dangerous, and each time I was meant to second-guess my instincts, belittled for "always running away." If I had been allowed to trust my gut, I would have never been in these situations. (It's also interesting how the same people often mock me for hanging around for as much as I did because I swear to God, people are awful and I cannot win.)

So now my gut tells me two different things: one is that there is nothing wrong with what I want and the way I live and the things I want for myself, and that people who do not understand this can piss off. Two is that maybe I do want these things, because I feel like something is missing--although I cannot tell if I actually feel this way, or if I have been made to feel this way by people who cannot accept that I do not want what they've built their entire lives around. Do I want these things? Or am I being pressured to want these things by people that cannot accept that there are more than one ways to live?

(Side bar: people project onto me a lot, and it's become very apparent to me in the last year, especially when it comes to aging. Like worry about your own bad genes, itch, I still look 12.)

I have never had a normal, healthy, basic human experience that so many other people have had, and I do wonder if I am missing something. I know there is part of my gut that tells me I do not want these things, I do not need these things, because if I wanted them, there are options to get them. Options I am not taking because I don't want them. But there is also part of me that wonders, now that I am 36 and my market window is running out, now that this door is potentially closing, if I have missed something. If I am missing something.

I keep thinking that, like, you know, maybe there is something wrong with me. I mean, if there wasn't something wrong with me, then why would my family, friends, and the few people whom I have dated treated me like I was not enough and disposable? I have always not been enough, and I don't understand why.

I suffered a malpractice removal of my lower wisdom teeth in 2010 that has caused permanent nerve damage in my face. I cannot feel whole sections of the right side of my face. After a particularly shitty 2009 (another one of those instances where I cared about someone who treated me as though I were disposable) that was honestly quite traumatizing,  I decided that after my nerve damage, which I learned would be permanent, I was going to wait (and I can't believe I am saying this out loud) to be kissed by someone special. God, I could throw up typing that. It sounds so stupid. 

Well, that day never came. In 2018 (about a year after my nervous breakdown), a friend of mine got me drunk and started to kiss me. I knew that's what they had been trying to do, I knew that's what their intentions were, and I just let it happen. I had waited almost a decade for absolutely nothing. I just let this happen, because, in reality, kisses have no meaning. They have no magic, they don't break any spells. There is so special symbolism. They're just one person putting their face on yours. 

My great folly was that I had wanted people I cared about to care as much about me as I did them, and I was just "so stupid" for that. My great folly was that I wanted to be treated like I was worth something, that I had intrinsic worth as a human being. That through all of this, the great take-away messages were not that these people were bad, or had treated me unkindly, or were selfish, entitled, or cruel, but that I was stupid.

My trauma and the nerve damage in my face are permanent, but I don't think about them most of the time. It's just there, and I think about it sometimes. They are parts of who I am now, and I have accepted that. 

I have a lot of anxiety, a lot of torschlusspanik,  because I have been made to feel as though nothing I do is good enough, and now there is this pressure that I am running out of time.

I just don't want to feel like all of this suffering has been for nothing.