I Understand, Why I Can’t Stand Understanding

Journal entry, recent past  
 
Victimized, I no longer identify as a victim. Terrorized, I no longer live in fear. My self-confidence was held down, beaten down, but I’ve risen above what I was told. The worst thing about living a life filled with toxic shame is that you believe the lies that are fed to you. I was never my illness or the person I was told I was and the atrocities that were done to me were never my fault, however, I was chastised for complaining. I was labeled a whiner. As I was coming out of the fog that was my existence, I was told that my explanations only made things worse when I was just trying to be understood and I fighting just to survive. And when I said that I didn’t know how to communicate properly, I was wasn’t taken seriously. My neurologist assured me that the ability to write but not articulate was definitely “a thing,” and she did her best to get me to see that I didn’t have dementia or Alzheimer’s. She always believed it was the psychiatric medication that caused me to have the memory issues I did. Now we both know that my amnesia is from the trauma and a symptom of C-PTSD.  
 
By the time I turned fifty, my life had become unmanageable and overwhelming for other people. I was drowning, I needed help, but all I could say was, “I understand,” so that the people in my life could be absolved from the burden of my life. It was only fair. A lifetime of losing me to illness and psychosis took its toll. When I began to feel better and my decision making wasn’t in line with the expectations of others, I thought I had to give them what they needed. I grew to despise those two words. Those two words lost their meaning the more I felt like I had to say them and just like my apologies, they lost their effectiveness.  
 
The only thing I asked was to be loved the same way I loved. Like most everything else, it didn’t work out the way I expected.