🧵 View Thread
🧵 Thread (25 tweets)
having a moment where I realize I don't... make much of an effort to *experience* the kinship of my friends it's kind of weird, like, i've put in all this effort into *making* friends, but I hardly spend any time *enjoying* them both are quite elegantly explained by fear
I used to spend loads of my time lounging around with my friends as a teenager, we were a group of misfits and we could be kinda casually harsh and cruel with each other but there was a love there, maybe largely out of a sense of shared suffering
the adults in my life often attacked/insulted/shamed me for this, and the hardest part was that there was a part of me that agreed with them, like at some level we were certainly a bunch of low-lifes just fucking around aimlessly. AND we also had big ambitious dreams. it's messy
i love my wife to bits, she's my best friend, we got married at 22. there's some details about the backstory here i've shared in bits and pieces involving the broader social context that our relationship was forged in, that was quite traumatic for both of us, in different ways
[waves hands around] at 22 we were married, broke, bought a house, and I was very determined to "get my act together" and work my ass off to pay the bills. i tried to consciously become a workaholic. my journal entries from those years were full of "fuck you, work harder" vibes
i have loads of things to be grateful for. i still love my wife. the traumatic context we experienced is no more. my relationships w/ my old friends are good. I have lots of excellent amazing new friends. i'm living my dream as a writer, like 10-20 years earlier than i expected
still, there's a harshness and a coldness in certain parts of my psyche that remains, despite all the rehabilitation I've done. there's been progress I'm sure, I'm kinder, smarter, less catastrophic in my thinking, more skilled, etc. but the coldness is really startling me today
that coldness I think is something deep in the heart, in the body, maybe the lizardbrain or amygdala or whatever, a deadness, a freeze response, fear. fear that I cannot truly relax, bc, just like my friend maia eloquently and bravely said, https://t.co/fzWBJnoknH
I was reading recently about some guy who was tortured, I think during WW2. and he said something that shook me to my core. I paraphrase– he said... until he was tortured, he had never been truly awake, truly alive. like torture was the moment he first experienced consciousness
now obviously i've never been physically tortured by enemies but I feel like... to some degree, there's something about the shocking experiences that I've had (that I still have never fully articulated on main, because they involve/implicate other people)... that "set me apart"
and I don't mean in a good way. it's alienating. it's isolating. it's a curse. I feel like I was struck by lightning and I didn't die, and instead it elevated the voltage in my nervous system to something quite difficult to bear, and I have electric hands... ah fuck i'm elsa lol https://t.co/1R9zwYgpNf
I don't hide in a castle, I don't think that's sth that a large brown man with a weird name and little $ can do. I hide in plain sight by being open & charismatic, being obsessive abt doing favors for others, as many loyalty missions as I can, to build a crew that'll protect me
I don't think I have secret monstrous instincts. I'm genuinely the person I portray, I truly love books, I truly try to be kind, etc. My anxiety isn't that you'll find out something about me. I have nothing to hide. My anxiety is people will assume I'm a monster *regardless*
I mean I don't walk around with this anxiety day to day. It's more like something buried pretty deep. I can conduct myself with abundance mindset and honestly believe it. but if you dig deep deep down (and my book makes me do this every day lmao, exhausting) you see a kid...
that experienced coercion, manipulation, gaslighting, abuse, and didn't have anybody to rescue him from those circumstances. nobody cared. not enough to do anything about it. https://t.co/oPSyqYzIb7
they made it seem like even repeating a year would be a great shame, which, in retrospect, who gives a shit???? absolutely bonkers. it was psychological and emotional abuse, like ~8 adults acted in concert to make this happen and there wasn't a single dissenting voice among them
I don't wanna make this about race, but there *is* a racial component to it. A book was published in 🇸🇬 just last year where a brown kid is a school villain – honestly, I'm grateful for it, because it puts into print the mysterious bog that i've been swimming against all my life https://t.co/gu4CiTbtAY
I'm not looking for sympathy or anything like that. Really, it's just that nobody fucking ever listened to me when I was growing up. So here. I spent 20 years building an audience, one person at a time. Now there are people who listen. Thanks for listening. ❤️
I suppose to tie it back to the start, the thing here is... I'm so used to people not listening to me, not trusting me, etc, that now when I have people who do, I kind of don't really believe it still, lol. I believe it in my verbal-conscious mind, but the coldness is in my heart
there we go, found it https://t.co/6Mn1YUbcrl
“Ok Visa, we get it, you believe that you’re different, and you’ve spent a lot of time and energy over the years questioning it... taught yourself to be charismatic so that people will believe you... We believe you! Preaching to the choir here! But different how?” Err,,, hm. Uh https://t.co/AnTigHQepl
