How do you manage stress?
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Stress went down when I:
- Started making friends with no history with me.
- Started paying attention to my sensory issues.
- Started spending large swaths of time alone
Because I thought so little of myself, I surrounded myself with people who thought there was something wrong with me and treated me like that. Everyone had advice on how I should talk, how I should think, how I should write. Except the advice was not kind, it was designed to hurt, always. That’s because disability is not their reality with me. They think I am lazy, and their language is ableist AF. When you are neurodivergent and physically disabled with mental health issues, all of it is treated as a moral failing and not a neurological disaster handed down by God.
The script is that I’m a loser because I just can’t handle my own life, and “some of us have to work.” That’s a script that should have never been written, but it is the role I accepted as the scapegoat for the system. I have been that since I was born, and I let the work build up. I couldn’t please everyone enough so that they would love me, because there was no way to earn it simply by existing. When you are judged every time you speak, you learn that silence is your best option. I dropped out of the group chat. It’s been several days and no one has noticed. And if it was noticed, no one said anything. Good. That’s how I like it. Manage your own emotions, for once.
Because that’s what the scapegoat does. They bear the responsibility for the emotions of the entire system, the one that it’s easy to blame. I am naturally cast in this role because I am a truth-teller. If you are capable of spotting flaws in a system, you’re the problem.
It is never assumed that I see a problem and want to fix it. It’s that I’m ungrateful and should shut the fuck up. My opinion does not matter, so I will not participate. I am not a loser. I am also not capable of the type of work the people around me do.
With cultural relativism, there is no floor. There’s nothing that says I deserve worth just because I exist. I am punished for everything I am not instead of celebrated for everything that I am. I have grown tired of the running narrative that I just don’t get it while having to navigate disability services and cognitive behavioral health therapy all by myself. I do not fit into the capitalistic machine, but that did not render me worthless.
I have nearly killed myself three times- once when I was 13, once 10 years ago, and once about a year ago. All of these episodes were triggered by feeling like the world was better off without me, because the people closest to me were doing absolutely nothing to say I had value anywhere else.
I’m not your mother. I’m not your medication. Find someone else.
Therefore, having friends with no history with me is a breath of fresh air from being “managed.” But it is not about running away from who I am. I have mental health issues- so do my friends. I have autism. So do my friends. I have complicated relationships with people who don’t understand me. So do my friends.
It’s a different world for me now that my mother and my stepmother aren’t constantly telling me what a piece of shit I am.
It has cut out a lot of stress.
