journal entry — Monday, July 28th 2025
Over an hour has passed since I put myself to bed. It was 8:49, I think, but I was proud to have gotten through my routine in the bathroom before the exhaustion overtook me. The problem was, though, that the exhaustion had already overtaken me this afternoon, stole me away into a thick sleep that neither SVU nor any of my family members could rouse me from until about 7 o’clock.
I doubt myself almost all the time, and I don’t mean I doubt my abilities or my worth or my right to have the future I want, although that could be its own discussion. What I mean is that I doubt what I feel, I doubt what I think, I doubt my own perspective. I have such a hard time believing myself when I think I’m happy, or grateful, or excited, or sitting in my bedroom, back against the door, my vision going in and out as my mind frantically asks me to recall what happened that night.
The truth is, as much as I could describe a million fragments of that memory in more detail than I could describe my mother’s face, I don’t actually know what happened that night and I doubt I ever will. Especially when I write that and reflexively think, “No, that’s not true. I’m exaggerating to make myself sympathetic. I’m pretending bad judgment is cinematic.”
I intellectualize to the point of my thoughts about how I really experienced things being indistinguishable from fiction, completely conflated with a romanticized view of my life where I am the perfect victim.
My critical side, my safeguard against unexpected judgment from others, hears my genuine question: was I _____? and spits back out
“you’re watching too much SVU”
“you’re trying to avoid responsibility for letting that happen again”
“you want people to feel bad for you”
“you’re inflating this to give yourself a reason to stop going back”
“you assumed this would happen to you at some point, as a woman”
“you want to make him the villain so it’s easier to move on”
“you’re splitting, this is bpd, and he never responded to your text so you have to make him all bad”
“you wish he’d intentionally abused his power over you because it would fulfill your desire to be toxically desired and used…objectified…”
I experience everything so deeply and so impersonally all at once.
My OCD doesn’t want me to think or say that I’m getting better, because it wants me to believe that trying to be happy means you are cursed to never be happy, and I am doomed to a life of either misery or apathy.
But that isn’t true. I AM getting better, because I am thinking about different things all day and I am choosing not to go on my phone in bed and I am drinking coffee at restaurants and having a personality around my family. Nothing will ever be the same as it was, but it’s unoriginal and just too convenient to believe that only the bad things will come back around & reinvent themselves.
My memories aren’t weapons, and neither are my thoughts. This is real. It is real. I am real.
The Dilemma Of It All 