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[Therapy] November is a cursed month
Nov. 28th, 2018 10:32 pmTrigger Warning: Rape and emotional abuse. Excerpts from an 18 year old's diary (it's cool, I got their consent to post 'em)
I said to a friend "November is a crazy month for me" and haha, we're all crazy with work and politics and Arisia nonsense1 and trying to get our lives in order, but no. That's not it at all.
November is quite literally crazy-making for me. It is by _far_ my worst mental health month in the year, every year, and it has been getting harder the last few (or maybe I've just been paying better attention.)
Part of that is straight up seasonal. The light goes away, the weather gets cold, and it's before the soft joy of December lights shining out from every house2. It's often the first time in the year it snows. This year there's been multiple days of bitter-cold rain, which is awful to bike in.
Most of it is anniversary effect --there's a lot of really fucking bad things3 that have happened to me in Novembers. Obviously two years ago was shit for everyone, but there's other little sense-triggers that hit me "oh, it's the month where _that_ happened, of course." and so many of them are just _shit_. I still mourn the lost hard drive from my first semester of college.
And part of why I mourn that missing hard drive, even eleven years on, is because I desperately wish I still had access to the Behind the Walls file from August-November 2007. BtW is my version of a diary, an unfiltered, utterly private text file where I can say what I need and know that no one else is going to read it. It's been largely supplanted in my modern life by my use of 750words, but gods, from February 2005 to March 2010, it was a _critical tool_ for keeping my brain on straight4.
And from August to November, 2007, it was a detailed account of the sorts of things I was experiencing in my first semester away from home. Including the dissolution of the relationship I was in for most of 2007, which was a sexually and emotionally abusive relationship with a man eighteen years my senior. I call(ed) him kSatyr5, and it took me nearly four years6 to be able to say in public "I am a survivor of emotional and sexual abuse".
BUT, and here's a crucial thing. Right after my hard drive died, practically the very first thing I did on the replacement was start up BtW 2.17 and start writing again, because I'm not a complete idiot.
Which means when kSatyr raped me in a new and irrevocable way on the morning of December second, and we _finally_ fucking broke up, I was able to record some thoughts about it. And a few tumultuous weeks later, riding the confusion of two breakups8 in three weeks, I was able to make the post I'm going to excerpt from below.
( This post is the first time I ever said 'aloud' that I had been raped. Obviously, hella trigger warnings. Also, this is an excerpt of the diary of a pretentious eighteen year old. You're reading the public-facing diary of a pretentious twenty-nine year old, but still...be warned. )
This entry got way longer than I was necessarily expecting, which is _completely normal_ for me when writing about anything, and double-normal when writing about my rapist. If you wanna have more dark-humour coping-mechanism funtimes you can peep TherapyFilter for everything I've ever posted publicly on the subject11.
I feel better right now than I did an hour ago, which is important --writing is good for me.
But seriously, by far the most important takeaway from going back eleven years into my diary and reading the ramblings of an 18 year old madwoman, is that...it was rape. It was definitely rape, I said so with absolute conviction then because I knew it from the moment it happened. I didn't use the r-word again after that for almost eighteen months, until I saw the pretty coloured shirts on a clothesline and it broke back into my heart.
It drives me _fucking bonkers_ that this is still something that affects me. It's been over a decade! I have healthy [sexual] relationships with wonderful people! Why can't I get over it?! But then I remember that it was a big deal, and it was a _huge_ affect on my introduction to my own sexuality.
And the dying shards of a control-freak who couldn't stand the existence of my own independence are always going to echo at me hard at certain times of year. February 22nd is bad. December 2nd is bad. I do what I can to survive.
~Sor
MOOP!
1: Absolutely do not comment about Arisia in this post. Thank you.
2: I like Christmas Lights more than nearly any other holiday _thing_. It is so good and necessary for us to drive back the dark.
3: I don't have time to find it now, but I remember posting one year about how the last week of November/first week of December is a huge up-and-down of good and bad memories, which makes it even harder. I can't just shut the whole time out of my mind if I am also celebrating 11 years of dancing and the memory of the first time the city ever sang into my heart "you are home".
4: Hell, even this modern computer has a version (the first two lines read "Welcome, little child. Be not afraid." which I think is lovely.) I've got about six entries this time around, the most recent from mid-2017. It's a little strange what gets put _there_ specifically, but I'm glad I have it for when I need. (Lots of things that end with the line "I'm not actually going to post this" --dreamwidth entries that weren't.)
5: The k is silent. It's a pile of stupid in-jokes. The funniest (the darkest) one to me is that in retrospect, naming your partner after a particularly rapey kind of mythological figure means it shouldn't be a surprise...
6: It took me _much_ longer to name him --I think the first public post to do so was the ten year anniversary of us starting to date, so like, only a year and a half ago. I was protecting him or something? And eventually I just didn't care anymore? If he didn't want a narrative where I call him a rapist, he shouldn't have fucking raped me.
7: BtW 1.0 was on Dmitri, my teenage-years desktop. 2.0 was on Seren, my college laptop, 2.1 was on Vera, the replacement harddrive for aforementioned computer which lasted me until like 2013 before being replaced by my new and current box, Kela. Dang, the girl's been working for five years now, she's a good box.
8: Magus broke up with me before we started dating. No really! I got the "we're just friends" talk like...six weeks before I got the "so I keep finding moments where I want to kiss you" talk, and I think that's brilliant and hilarious. But it was...a weird emotional thing at the time. Don't be eighteen, kids. It's not good for anyone.
9: Technically speaking, kSatyr was my second sexual relationship. The first took place over the internet, and when things started to get too hot'n'heavy for me (somewhere around text-descriptions of touching each other's genitals) and I said "can we step back?" the answer was "of course, and I really hope you haven't been dwelling on this because holy shit yes." and they did and we did and it was great.
I am consider *that* person to be a friend. They were the second person in the world I ever told about what happened, after Magus.
10: "Your Kink Is Not My Kink" (Usually followed with "But Your Kink Is Okay")
11: Why is it called a filter when it's public posts? Because it started in August 2009 (about a year and a half after I broke up with kSatyr) with only four people allowed to see the posts. I've not bothered to un-filter the posts, but I've gotten a *lot* more liberal about putting people onto the filter --if you wanna see them and can't, go ahead and ask me.
If you're new here, you might not know that trigger warnings go both ways! The entry above has references to rape and emotional abuse, and the occasionally not-so-enlightened words of my 18 year old self.
I said to a friend "November is a crazy month for me" and haha, we're all crazy with work and politics and Arisia nonsense1 and trying to get our lives in order, but no. That's not it at all.
November is quite literally crazy-making for me. It is by _far_ my worst mental health month in the year, every year, and it has been getting harder the last few (or maybe I've just been paying better attention.)
Part of that is straight up seasonal. The light goes away, the weather gets cold, and it's before the soft joy of December lights shining out from every house2. It's often the first time in the year it snows. This year there's been multiple days of bitter-cold rain, which is awful to bike in.
Most of it is anniversary effect --there's a lot of really fucking bad things3 that have happened to me in Novembers. Obviously two years ago was shit for everyone, but there's other little sense-triggers that hit me "oh, it's the month where _that_ happened, of course." and so many of them are just _shit_. I still mourn the lost hard drive from my first semester of college.
And part of why I mourn that missing hard drive, even eleven years on, is because I desperately wish I still had access to the Behind the Walls file from August-November 2007. BtW is my version of a diary, an unfiltered, utterly private text file where I can say what I need and know that no one else is going to read it. It's been largely supplanted in my modern life by my use of 750words, but gods, from February 2005 to March 2010, it was a _critical tool_ for keeping my brain on straight4.
And from August to November, 2007, it was a detailed account of the sorts of things I was experiencing in my first semester away from home. Including the dissolution of the relationship I was in for most of 2007, which was a sexually and emotionally abusive relationship with a man eighteen years my senior. I call(ed) him kSatyr5, and it took me nearly four years6 to be able to say in public "I am a survivor of emotional and sexual abuse".
BUT, and here's a crucial thing. Right after my hard drive died, practically the very first thing I did on the replacement was start up BtW 2.17 and start writing again, because I'm not a complete idiot.
Which means when kSatyr raped me in a new and irrevocable way on the morning of December second, and we _finally_ fucking broke up, I was able to record some thoughts about it. And a few tumultuous weeks later, riding the confusion of two breakups8 in three weeks, I was able to make the post I'm going to excerpt from below.
( This post is the first time I ever said 'aloud' that I had been raped. Obviously, hella trigger warnings. Also, this is an excerpt of the diary of a pretentious eighteen year old. You're reading the public-facing diary of a pretentious twenty-nine year old, but still...be warned. )
This entry got way longer than I was necessarily expecting, which is _completely normal_ for me when writing about anything, and double-normal when writing about my rapist. If you wanna have more dark-humour coping-mechanism funtimes you can peep TherapyFilter for everything I've ever posted publicly on the subject11.
I feel better right now than I did an hour ago, which is important --writing is good for me.
But seriously, by far the most important takeaway from going back eleven years into my diary and reading the ramblings of an 18 year old madwoman, is that...it was rape. It was definitely rape, I said so with absolute conviction then because I knew it from the moment it happened. I didn't use the r-word again after that for almost eighteen months, until I saw the pretty coloured shirts on a clothesline and it broke back into my heart.
It drives me _fucking bonkers_ that this is still something that affects me. It's been over a decade! I have healthy [sexual] relationships with wonderful people! Why can't I get over it?! But then I remember that it was a big deal, and it was a _huge_ affect on my introduction to my own sexuality.
And the dying shards of a control-freak who couldn't stand the existence of my own independence are always going to echo at me hard at certain times of year. February 22nd is bad. December 2nd is bad. I do what I can to survive.
~Sor
MOOP!
1: Absolutely do not comment about Arisia in this post. Thank you.
2: I like Christmas Lights more than nearly any other holiday _thing_. It is so good and necessary for us to drive back the dark.
3: I don't have time to find it now, but I remember posting one year about how the last week of November/first week of December is a huge up-and-down of good and bad memories, which makes it even harder. I can't just shut the whole time out of my mind if I am also celebrating 11 years of dancing and the memory of the first time the city ever sang into my heart "you are home".
4: Hell, even this modern computer has a version (the first two lines read "Welcome, little child. Be not afraid." which I think is lovely.) I've got about six entries this time around, the most recent from mid-2017. It's a little strange what gets put _there_ specifically, but I'm glad I have it for when I need. (Lots of things that end with the line "I'm not actually going to post this" --dreamwidth entries that weren't.)
5: The k is silent. It's a pile of stupid in-jokes. The funniest (the darkest) one to me is that in retrospect, naming your partner after a particularly rapey kind of mythological figure means it shouldn't be a surprise...
6: It took me _much_ longer to name him --I think the first public post to do so was the ten year anniversary of us starting to date, so like, only a year and a half ago. I was protecting him or something? And eventually I just didn't care anymore? If he didn't want a narrative where I call him a rapist, he shouldn't have fucking raped me.
7: BtW 1.0 was on Dmitri, my teenage-years desktop. 2.0 was on Seren, my college laptop, 2.1 was on Vera, the replacement harddrive for aforementioned computer which lasted me until like 2013 before being replaced by my new and current box, Kela. Dang, the girl's been working for five years now, she's a good box.
8: Magus broke up with me before we started dating. No really! I got the "we're just friends" talk like...six weeks before I got the "so I keep finding moments where I want to kiss you" talk, and I think that's brilliant and hilarious. But it was...a weird emotional thing at the time. Don't be eighteen, kids. It's not good for anyone.
9: Technically speaking, kSatyr was my second sexual relationship. The first took place over the internet, and when things started to get too hot'n'heavy for me (somewhere around text-descriptions of touching each other's genitals) and I said "can we step back?" the answer was "of course, and I really hope you haven't been dwelling on this because holy shit yes." and they did and we did and it was great.
I am consider *that* person to be a friend. They were the second person in the world I ever told about what happened, after Magus.
10: "Your Kink Is Not My Kink" (Usually followed with "But Your Kink Is Okay")
11: Why is it called a filter when it's public posts? Because it started in August 2009 (about a year and a half after I broke up with kSatyr) with only four people allowed to see the posts. I've not bothered to un-filter the posts, but I've gotten a *lot* more liberal about putting people onto the filter --if you wanna see them and can't, go ahead and ask me.
If you're new here, you might not know that trigger warnings go both ways! The entry above has references to rape and emotional abuse, and the occasionally not-so-enlightened words of my 18 year old self.