Pattern recognition is a bitch because I could feel something was wrong, but I could not name it. I think I have found my answer, that I scared them. But I wasn’t trying to scare anyone, I was trying to connect. Pattern recognition in reverse is a bitch, because I thought I had a team, but it has been reset and not repair.
It cannot be true that Tiina meant to hurt me, but I think she did hurt me by not telling me everything. “Time will tell all” should have been a warning that I was on the way out. But I had stopped living in rejection sensitivity dysphoria until Tiina’s son-in-law told me to get help. I lashed out at him because he was just so cruel, and I don’t regret letting him have it. When I make a mistake, the first thing that people do is blame it on my diagnosis because it gives them a convenient way to mask concern as moral superiority.
His narrative was that I was obsessed. My actual narrative is that I write about my life no matter what it is, and he entered a world I was building. It was not about him. It was about reflecting on the plans that Tiina and I had. No one in that family was obsessed over. I am a systems thinker. I was constantly thinking about how to make things better from a structural level, and most people don’t understand that way of thinking.
I need to mull over what I think happened with Tiina in an M&M of the relationship, because I don’t think I’ll get closure from her. Because I was treated so badly when I erred, there’s no bad blood between us. But there is hurt inside me that I wish I could fix, and it is not my place to contact her and demand why looking at my Facebook feed is the limit right now.
I wanted to be chosen, and I was. But in impressing Tiina with prose, I alienated her kids. I am 100% positive that everyone in my life wishes I wouldn’t call people out, but it’s always a problem that I published it….. never taking accountability for the harm I endured because they don’t have to. The best thing to do is hope I forget and say “hey” when you think it’s safe…… in a manner that never addresses past ills so that they reappear in different forms.
Then it becomes, “you’re throwing things back in my face” when it feels to me like lack of accountability for a bad pattern. When I saw this one, I didn’t stay around the farm hoping that things would get better. I exploded at being threatened.
That is because what I said and deleted was not the story of an obsessive friend, but someone who thought that as a member of a family I would just being doing work in my proximity. That is all, and it was amped up into “you’re an obsessive friend who needs help.” The irony is that I have a small enough following that it was like McDonald’s arguing with a local mom and pop. But I also realized what she was saying and took everything she objected to down.
What looks different to me about this relationship is not that I was shamed or embarrassed by my mistake. That is never what I am saying. I am saying that the injured party doesn’t deserve absolute authority on where to go from here on out. There is a huge difference between accepting an apology and being able to see that you have been forgiven.
I thought I had my life together, and I clearly didn’t because I didn’t ask anyone if I could blog. That’s not a thing. I’m an adult, I can write what I want. I do have to accept consequences, though. I am having trouble reconciling the timeline of where my friendship with Tiina went wrong and whether there were other factors at play.
I know that at first I reacted with pain, but there was a reason for it. The scope was so broad that it covered things that just seemed petty. The only thing that would have solved this is Tiina either a conversation with her daughter explaining why we needed each other, or a conversation with me about why we don’t.
Silence is a choice, and I have to believe that’s for the best as well. I need to re-regulate myself and not count on other people for things. My entries come out jagged and raw (too raw).
Too. Raw.
I don’t hide it because this blog is a portrait of mental illness, an opening into my inner monologue. Right now I am trying not to lose the frame and treat a friend as an enemy, because Tiina didn’t do anything. One way or the other, she is not responsible for what happened. I am. I didn’t give her a chance to hinge, I saw danger language and didn’t even want to give the impression I cared anymore.
That’s the only response to being called a stalker in not so many words.
The elephant in the room would have been hard for me to ignore while I was playing Skyrim with 16yo. I have all kinds of concrete examples of what I meant in my back pocket. Because I wasn’t writing from fantasy. I was writing in the safety and security of what I thought I had.
If you thought I was being childish, then you’re probably right. When I am emotionally dysregulated, all of my thinking is disrupted and channeled into the issue. I want to understand all of it in a way that few people do. No one wants clarity. They want you to shut up so that they don’t have to examine themselves.
That is always what is missing in these conversations, because repair would look like being allowed to debrief something. That the language doesn’t become so heated that it is designed to make me afraid.
The way I responded to Tiina’s daughter was not my best work, because I was asking for grace- “these are not all your memories. Let me check with your mom and see if she agrees.” And then, I thought better of it and deleted everything, anyway. The people I’d wanted to read it already read it.
And I wasn’t talking to anyone but Tiina and Brian and what I thought we were going to build over time. That’s the part that’s missing. I can still be friends with Brian and Tiina, but I cannot until they reach out to me and they actually want to discuss what was really going on that I didn’t see and they were too polite to say.
I feel utterly alone and don’t know what to do, but what I do know is that silence is an answer. If I am wrong, I’ll get a letter. But so far, I’m not.
Stories That Are All True 