u/ebonylark

The resulting meows sound almost like a tennis match.

There are 5 or 6 total meows.

I know I first watched it on reddit, so it must be here somewhere, but I am clearly using the wrong search terms.

Thank you for your help.

I have been waiting a very long time for someone else to say these things. Which is, honestly, pretty foolish.

Apparently, I expected the person who hurt me to also be the person who handed me the bandages, explained the injury, apologized for the injury, and then somehow magically made the injury stop hurting.

A+ plan. No notes. /s

The problem, you see, is that person is also a person. A person with their own wounds, and fears, and limitations, and blind spots, and allllllll the other extremely inconvenient human things that make people complicated.

However, none of that means that what happened didn't happen.

So, here we go.

*Ahem*

___

Dear Me,

I believe you.

You were there.

You know what happened.

You know what you felt.

You know how many times you tried to make things better. You know how many times you brought the horse water, then lemonade, then milk, then soda, then tea, then coffee, then whatever beverage from a barista's fever dream was requested that day because maybe **this** would be the thing that finally worked.

You know that you did not leave because you stopped loving him.

You left because love was no longer enough, and because you were tired, and because you were scared.

Most importantly, you left because you looked at two small humans who were learning what relationships looked like and realized that "we love each other" absolutely MUST NOT be the only lesson they receive.

You are allowed to grieve the horse.

You are allowed to miss the horse.

You are allowed to remember the version of the horse who curled up beside you, who made you laugh, who comforted you, who made you feel loved. The version who was *your* person.

That horse *was real.*

**AND**

The horse who kicked when drowning was also real.

Both of those statements can be true simultaneously. The universe is obnoxious like that.

You **do not** have to choose between "he was suffering" and "I was hurt."

You do not have to pick one person to be the Real Victim™ and one person to be the Villain™.

Life is not a courtroom drama where only one person gets the sad music.

He was hurting.

You were hurting.

He needed help.

You needed safety.

All of these are true.

You are allowed to have compassion without climbing back into the lake.

I repeat:

Compassion **does not** require rescue.

Understanding **does not** require surrender.

Love **does not** require access.

You have spent a very long time believing that if you could just explain things correctly enough, kindly enough, carefully enough, with enough examples, and enough footnotes, and maybe a color-coded spreadsheet if necessary, that someone would finally understand, because if someone else understood, your pain would become **real.**

Sweetheart, please hear me on this.

**Your pain was always real.**

You do not need a permission slip from the person who hurt you to acknowledge that you were hurt.

You do not need him to say "yes, that happened" for it to have happened.

You do not need him to understand the depth of your exhaustion for you to have been exhausted.

You do not need him to agree that leaving was necessary for it to have been necessary.

You know. *You* know. **You know.**

**AND**

You are allowed to hope he heals.

You are allowed to hope he becomes someone who can look backward without drowning in shame.

You are allowed to hope your children get the healthiest version of their dad.

*None of that means that you have to be the bridge he walks across to get there.*

Bridges get walked on. Sometimes bridges need to stop being bridges. Sometimes bridges need to become houses with locked doors, and cozy blankets, and snacks, and no one yelling in the living room.

This is your house now. You get to live here. You get to be happy here. You get to stop checking the horizon for whether someone else is finally ready to come back and fix what broke.

Maybe someday he will understand. Maybe someday he will write all the words. Maybe someday he will look at the whole story and say, "Yes. I see it now."

That would be beautiful.

That would be healing.

That would also **not** be the thing that saves you.

Because you have already been saved.

You saved yourself.

You picked up the pieces. You picked up the kids, you made dinner, you paid the bills.

You *kept going.*

You did the boring, impossible, exhausting things that make up rebuilding a life.

No magical apology required.

No dragon tears required.

No horse retrieval mission required.

The horse can learn to swim. The horse can find a shore. The horse can build a whole new stable.

**AND**

You can love the horse from a safe distance while continuing down your own path.

You did not fail because you could not carry everyone.

You were never supposed to.

You are not responsible for saving every creature you love.

Sometimes the most loving thing you can do is stop drowning with them.

**TLDR:**

Dear Me,

You were loved.

You were hurt.

You were scared.

You were brave.

You were allowed to leave.

You are allowed to heal.

You are allowed to stop waiting.

The End

(Or, more accurately, the beginning.)

I was really thrown for a loop emotionally when I started coming back into regular contact with my ex for coparenting events, much more so than I expected based on anecdotes from other people.

I came up with a theory about why this might be a thing for me and how to maybe help fix it.

I have seen several posts here over the years dealing with similar issues, so I'd really like to know what y'all think.

___

Basically, I think that (for at least some of us) time and distance do not heal all the wounds because we aren't *feeling* that time and / or distance (i.e. a lessening of how emotionally immediate previous relationships feel) in the "standard" way.

Instead, to create that sense of time and / or distance, we need either many non-abusive relationship interactions with other people, or maybe something similar to exposure therapy with the former abuser where repeated interactions occur without any emotional abuse happening.

___

How I got there:

1. Long-term emotional abuse creates very strong emotional expectations through repetition. i.e. These relationships have a high level of affecting-you-ness to start with.
2. Part of the standard advice is that one needs space and time to recover from a toxic relationship. It need to feel less immediate for you to truly deal with it.
3. Many of us experience time through events rather than through abstract measures like "six weeks" or "one year." i.e. unless there have been events or experiences linked to the person since we last saw them, we don't actually *feel* like time has passed.

I mostly run into this with friendships. e.g. I can chat with someone for the first time in over a year and it feels more like maybe a month has passed in terms of how close I feel to them. I pick up a friendship right where it left off instead of feeling like it died out during the gap.

4. Since we are not feeling the calendar time since the toxic relationship ended, the emotional intensity of the expectation-creating experiences do not lessen based on calendar time.

i.e. we react to someone as though we went low/no contact only a month ago, even though it has been well over a year since we last interacted with the person.

5. Therefore, we need to get that sense of time to get the required emotional distance by means other than calendar time.

6. Ergo, we need to have events / experiences tied to either the specific individual or possibly to a different relationship that falls in the same category.

Whether that means having non-abusive interactions with the specific person, dating someone new, finding a substitute parental figure, or maybe even self-parenting (fingers-crossed), we need to get actual things that happened between then and now into the spot in our minds that the toxic relationship occupied.

___

Now, I have no actual proof for this. As far as I know, there are no studies looking at whether ADHD causes emotional memories, whether positive or negative, to resist fading over time, nor if adding experiences instead works to get the emotional memories to fade.

I do know that diagnoses of CPTSD are more common in people with ADHD, but the lack of emotional memory degradation over time is certainly not the only possible explanation. We are at an increased risk of having the type of toxic long-term relationships, being bullied etc. to cause CPTSD in the first place. Plus, executive functioning and emotional regulation differences probably affect recovery all by themselves.

Anyway...

Thoughts?

Edit: I did try, but I am now giving up on making the formatting obey me on mobile.

Has anyone else grown out an undercut with very long hair? Did you cut the long hair to even it out at some point?

I *like* having long hair. I like the occasional compliments and genuinely find long hair less work than short hair.

I got an undercut when I got pregnant years ago to make showers faster, burshing easier, etc. My hair is incredibly thick - most people never knew / did not notice the undercut - but I did remove maybe 1/4 of it.

I have been growing it out since September and the undercut is just about shoulder length now.

My long hair is now about tailbone length. I typically chop it back up to my waist once it gets this long, but am debating actually going somewhere and getting a long inverted bob or something (i.e. longer in front).

Thoughts?

I just realized I treat my own psyche like freaking Lassie.

I need to something ridiculously basic and I just **Can** **Not**. Every time I try, I get twitchy and anxious as hell for absolutely no identifiable reason, and internally I'm just like:

"What is it, girl? What are you trying to tell me?"

"...Timmy fell down a well?"

<head shake>

"Did I forget to do something?"

<head shake>

"Is there some vague, unresolved trauma buried somewhere in my subconscious that you've chosen to communicate exclusively through a sense of impending doom?"

**BARK BARK**

"Cool. Thanks. That's incredibly actionable."

So yeah, my brain has apparently replaced coherent thoughts with an emotionally distressed beastie that can't use her words.

This is a total shower thought and includes a very minor spoiler.

Much like there are not >!fairies or trains!< in Rellas, there must not be>!marigolds.!<Otherwise, the word would be said in Rellasian and "Maggie" would make no sense as a nickname. It is also possible that the collection of syllables in her full name has a different meaning in Rellasian. There are only so many sounds a human mouth can make.

As a side note, I wonder what the Rellasian word for "clover" sounds like. That one has to be the actual meaning-attached version because of the whole>!​dehumanizing maids / gentle beauty!<thing.

Thoughts?

Everard's eyes change color when he is uses his magic.

Do y'all think Maggie might get a bit of a shock if she somehow looks in a mirror while un-dying or reading Sareso?

One of my favorite childhood books has this possibly-relevant quote:

>One doesn't generally look into mirrors when one is especially angry; one has better things to do, like pace the floor or throw things.

Robin McKinley, The Blue Sword (Damar, #1)

I am trying to assemble this vest, but the pieces won't stay properly aligned, and now I can't even hold the hook properly!