You're the reason you're in pain
The first person point of view of self-disappointment
“I’m not mad, just disappointed.” The first time I heard these words, it was when I was many, many years younger. Knowing how 8-year-old little me was, I was most likely getting into something extremely sneaky. 8-year-old chlo didn’t care about what my parents had to say to me, the word disappointed was no heavier than a penny to me. But now, as a 15-year-old little lady, the word disappointed holds the most value to me. But unlike it being my parents that tell me this over a failed grade or a missing assignment, I am the one that tells myself that I am disappointed. I am disappointed in the way I handle situations or the way I don’t know how to comfort. The value I hold has no value. The body I embody is a body that doesn’t want to claim itself. It’s a body that is ashamed and scared, one that flinches and goes silent. The body that holds me. Is a body that holds an empty soul.
Everyone has values, self-expectations, and even morals. I never expected much from myself. Honestly, I never set the correct expectations. When it comes to how I think of myself as a person, I have a blank canvas. I feel like I am something that nobody knows how to describe. It’s hard to think so positively about myself because all the feedback that I have ever received has been a constant negative. I feel like I am the type of person that gets stabbed and ignores the wound. The wound that I have is a wound that is bleeding out disappointment. Each thing someone says to me is another stab, and each look in the mirror digs the knife a little deeper. It isn’t just the outer beauty that makes me disappointed. But what my body has reflected on the inner parts of me. Although I have learned to adapt to the fact that my biggest disappointment is the person I carry I also had to adapt to the fact that the expectations that people have had of me have never been met. The bar gets dropped lower and lower after each communication line I have crossed. It once went from caring about how I am doing and what I am doing to now getting the response “Do what you want.” The highest expectation I set for myself is to not be poison. I am tired of poisoning people. But just like most snakes. You never know if it is actual venom. I am the snake that is venomous, and me trying to be the outlet that a person could be looking for was venom. I was the poison that made my person feel like they were everything too, feeling like nothing.
The first stab
When it comes to how you treat a wound, you learn to handle it with care. You learn to take it easy and be gentle. The first stab I had received was the realization that I am always going to be the person that doesn’t know how to feel. The greatest stab wound I have is not only not knowing what it is that I am looking at when I find myself trapped in my reflection but also not knowing what I am feeling inside of that reflection. I gave myself the stab of change. and the stab of being given up on. I would constantly ask myself the question, “If I already gave up on myself, would it come easy for everyone else around me to give up too?” That is when I felt the need to start to change. The line of who I “was” started to get blurred, knowing that I wanted to change overnight was something nobody could do. I can’t change overnight, I can’t change the feeling that I believe most of my actions lead my person to hate the person I am, I can’t change the fact that I can’t un-hear or un-live events that have happened to me as short as three days ago. I can’t learn how to treat wounds that are already too deep. The only thing I can change is how I treat the scar. I can no longer remember the feeling of the knife that is made up of self-hatred slowly trace my skin, I can no longer remember tearing what is already torn, and I can no longer replay the voice of being told I am unwanted.
Every scar needs to heal. Every stitch needs to be carefully stitched up. Although the damage has been done, the damage can always be mended.
“I should’ve”
I always remind myself of what I should’ve done. or should’ve said. Just like I said in my last paragraph, I can’t change what has already happened. I live in constant regret. I beat myself up about not doing what maybe another person would’ve done. I see the way others handle situations. I tell myself how I should’ve realized one thing and how I should’ve been better. One of my personal constants is how I should’ve known. I always lose myself when it comes to emotions, and I tend to lose focus on what I could be feeling due to the cause of never taking a second to focus on what I was feeling because if it was up to me, I would choose to never feel anything I am feeling. But that is something that can never happen to me. I sit on a constant planet of regret. a planet that is so far that it is ice. The spin of the solar system is what causes me to move on in my life, but my planet, or this planet, is out of the sun's gravitational orbit. I tell myself how I should’ve done better so my feelings won’t get hurt. I have always been to blame. I constantly fit everything into a box that makes sense to me. These “should have’s” lead me to create these characters in my head. The disappointments in my head give another extension to these characters. These characters are made up of things I regret and unknown pain. These characters, or memories even, are something I have learned to hate about myself.
These characters may be made up of many, but they all have one thing in common, at the end of the day, they all make up one person. And that person is me. I know I am broken, and I know that my heart is made up of wounds that are not yet stitched. But at the end of the day, what is left of me is all I make up. Even if she is hard to love.