Abandoned by Your Tribe, Abandoned by All

I thought more about fleeing today. How I can’t have help. This post is on-topic: https://www.reddit.com/r/CPTSD/comments/d3ljaq/

There were lots of situations where it was important to hide the way I needed help, because when I got “help” it just lead to me being punished. Imagine you saw an 11-year-old alone in public, sitting someplace outside, huddled against a wall in the cold. Imagine they were still there when you left several hours later. What would you do? Nothing is the most common answer. Attempt to send them “home” is the next most likely. Subject them to state violence is surprisingly popular.

Almost no one picks the correct answer, which is offer them someplace warm to be. Food would be good too. But among the common responses “nothing” is actually best, because the other options involve upsetting this bad but stable situation. I’m away from “home” for a reason, and that reason doesn’t go away when you send me back, it gets worse. Overwhelmed people assuming involving the state will help, but the state’s goal, by law, is to return me to the place that’s worse than sitting outside all day. Neither individuals nor the state are prepared for the amount of pain required to make this situation actually better, and when people try I’m the one who has to pay the cost. I have to eat the pain, new and old, so as not to upset the people around me. At least to keep them clam enough to choose “nothing” over any of the other things they think will make them feel better.

Which is a big demand to put on an 11-year-old. I was well ready for to though, because looking calm and being in charge during hard times was necessary to my survival long before I ever got caught unsupervised in public. Imagine you’re a child who has been seriously injured. You’ve been injured before and learned to keep quiet about it because your estimation of when you require assistance is too low – when you ask for help people you trust deny that you need it and object to you asking. In particular they object to the fact that you’re upset – you need to learn how to keep quiet even when you’re hurt. And so you did, but today is different. Today the bleeding won’t stop even after 20 minutes, and so you need treatment.

Step 1 is to hide the blood. Everyone reacts poorly to seeing a child covered in blood, so it’s best not to let that happen. Step 2 is to invent a reason that you’ll need to leave the house – maybe you can offer to buy an old person some fast food for supper. Maybe you can volunteer to do some sort of erand while they wait in the car. If it’s Pete maybe you can convince him that the Kids need vaccines or something that he’ll only find annoying and not upsetting. That’s always handy because step 4 is to be dropped off close enough to a clinic that you can walk there. Ideally an old person will come in with you but that’s not always possible. If they don’t step 5 is to wait for them to be back at home, so (before cell phones) you can get the nurse to call them and authorize treatment, because as a minor you can’t get treatment without their authorization. If they do come in you have to hide your injury from everyone and try to hide your old person’s lack of knowledge about your injury from the staff. Then you can get treatment. As long as it can be done here and now and won’t take too long and doesn’t require any followup care.

When you’re done the last step is to keep this secret forever – be sure the staff doesn’t talk to your old person (if they’re around), that your injury is still hidden, that it doesn’t affect your activities in any detectable way. It’s easier now in some ways, because treatment usually helps with pain, but it can be hard to keep up the invisibility in daily life. And for all of these steps you must show no pain, no urgency, no fear, nothing to suggest you’ve been injured. Nothing to make other people upset. Because if they get upset you can’t get treatment – certainly not today and possibly not ever. In fact you risk getting “treatment” at “home”. Treatment from someone who is panicked and angry at you and unqualified and not paying attention and not concerned about hurting you.

Ask me about why it’s hard for me to believe that medical care is valuable. I know a 7-year-old who has worked out the cost and decided to do without. Who knows that it’s almost certainly better to endure until they can handle it themselves, or until they learn to not want things to be different.

All of which makes it hard to believe I can have help. That anyone will understand, or that they’ll be capable even if they do. There are lots of ways I have learned to expect various kinds of assistance. In my daily life I depend on other people for all sorts of things. But only if I can keep myself under control, so that I can manage other people’s reactions to me. Which means I can’t have help when things are the worst. And ultimately I can only deal with people at all if I maintain the option to immediately and irrevocably flee.

I also talked at @BPS about loss. About keeping things. https://youtu.be/UuwedYr00o4 ¹And since I know you don’t click links, here’s the text: You talk about it being a lot to give up your piece to the world. Or to slice it apart. I have none trouble giving things up. I have trouble keeping things. Things I make, things I’m given. People for that matter. Myself. I’m always prepared to give things up, and the idea of keeping … Continue reading

Keeping is a skill I never learned. I’ll should get DerbyK to write me a story about keeping things. I asked before about photos but there’s a lot of noise around the content of photos – there’s a better question that’s just about keeping in some way that isn’t hoarding.

Closed out the week with almost no day job, which was good. I’m back on queue next week due to vacation schedules, but that should leave me with off queue for 3 weeks in a row sometime, which would be great. Blew off the BZ prettification project all week despite promising to work on it, but I’m okay with that. The thing my boss wants won’t work anyway, which makes it hard to feel any urgency about it. I should schedule a meeting for next week though.
Confirmed that 3 of my 4 packages arrived. Got pretty good feedback for a couple of them; even just a little buys a lot of smiles and today had reactions to specific bits which is even better. J popped up in person today; I had hoped they might one of these days but hadn’t been willing to risk belief in a specific day.

So there’s some sad story backlog. Done before supper, even with robots. I like writing on the bus, when I’m allowed to sit. And I’m done early enough to still have weed tonight, to have some feels about the way this makes me so alone. To maybe prod at Shanda’s feelings about having help, if you can unwind before too late.

And if I’m lucky M will poke me let me know how many minutes from midnight your doomsday clock is, because yesterday was uncomfortably close.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

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