a confession

This one is a long one, I’ve never wrote here but I’m not even sure where to post this. It has more to do with toxic pitfalls and harmful coping mechanisms and stress and such. And maybe where they might come from.

[TW: Eating disorders, Suicide, Depression, Self harm, Toxic Relationships, Substance abuse.]

I don’t know what to title this. But I wanted to vent about some things I did and how they make me feel.

In August of 2020 I was on a windowsill. And I don’t mean that in the cute artistic way, just a windowsill. For reasons that are hard to remember or at least hard to admit I wanted to die.

It was cold, I got scared, I thought about how my Family might cry, how they might be devastated by my passing.

They didn’t deserve that, so I couldn’t do it to them.

In 2019 I got Baptised, It just felt right I guess. Up until the moment it happened. In reality it had always been some kind of excuse. Earlier in 2019 I started making myself vomit.

When I would eat I would feel nauseous. So I just, got rid of it.

i hated the feeling afterwards. That you’d just depreciated someones food like that, that they worked hard to give you.

how empty you feel afterwards. I hoarded sweets and whatnot in my room. Just to line my stomach I guess, like a coping mechanism.

I hated myself. I hated how I looked and I hated how I was hiding things from people. I wanted nobody to know, I couldn’t make them upset. Maybe that was what got me to the windowsill in the first place.

All that guilt I just couldn’t take it anymore, but I didn’t have the guts to take that way out.

2021, I’m lonely, I feel awful.

A girl starts messaging me. Basically out of nowhere.

For the sakes of this let’s just call her Audrey.

At first it was so cool that someone actually wanted to text me, It had never been that way before.

But then she started telling me about how she struggled with eating, and how she would steal cigarettes from her Dad to feel better.

Then she told me about the rusty knife under her bed, only she told me because she had cut herself with it.

I said she should call an ambulance or something, or ask a trusted adult or..

just anyone else really.

But she insisted. I told her to clean it, with cold water and bandage it up so It could heal. Luckily they were small cuts.

She had an issue with how she looked, I always liked her though, I didn’t see much of her but when I did I was happy.

I mean who wouldn’t be?

A friend of hers came to me, asked me if Could convince her to stop vaping. I asked Audrey about it,

I said that I wasn’t here to judge, *** knows I’ve had worse methods of coping with anxiety and whatnot.

She told me it was nothing serious.

She slowly started cutting and smoking and vaping more and more.

I remember being concerned but I was supportive.

Until one night when she called me.

She told me she had ingested some amount of paracetamol.

She cut herself and it hurt, so she wanted the pain to stop.

Paracetamol isn’t instant though, she wasn’t getting the hit so she took a few more, and then a few more.

I think part of her wanted to die.

When she told me I was panicky and begged her to call for help or call the Ambulance. She refused.

she told me she was scared, I didn’t know what to do.

she asked If I could tell her a story, like I had before about a girl I had been with.

Only I didn’t have any more stories. So I made one.

About some girl who never existed on some date that never happened.

It was a little white lie y’know? How much damage could it really do?

By the end of it all there were maybe 7 or 8 Girls.

Which is to say fake ones.

I was 13. It must’ve been insane that I had that much experience. But she never seemed to question that.

She would message me every night almost.

Sometimes there was a crisis, she’d done some or hurt herself or someone else or she felt like she was going to.

But she’d almost always ask for a story.

So I just kept telling them.

Those were the worst 9 months of my life.

I was always stressed, wondering if she was okay, If she was getting better. I went on a couple family trips in that time,

3 I think to be exact. But every time I couldn’t keep my mind on anything else.

She told me she loved me. And I couldn’t do it anymore, I couldn’t lie to her.

I made excuses as to why we couldn’t talk, I got drunk or my family wanted me off my phone or I fell asleep early.

I couldn’t bare to talk to her. I remembered all the horrible messed up things I had said, she didn’t deserve any of this.

I told her that I had been lying about everything.

at first she didn’t believe me, and then she defended me.

that hurt the most i think. I wanted her to scream, to hate me and to never look back.

It wasn’t like that at all, she was heartbroken. She was vulnerable and I took advantage of that. I was a bad person.

I saw myself in her, I couldn’t let her reach that windowsill.

this time I mean metaphorically.

Her windowsill was a bridge. She would sit on the edge and contemplate just how easy it might be. I talked her down from it again and again. And at some point she stopped going back there.

She was better.

I hated myself, rightfully really. In 2022 I tried to recover, to sort of better myself so that could never happen to anyone again. I talked to another girl, Lets call her Mia.

I talked to her a lot. And I thought about her a lot.

She talked about how trapped she felt.

about how she wanted to be a bird. So She could just be free in that way.

that’s probably why she wanted to be a pilot for some time.

I felt like I could be real with her. I didn’t lie to her, which was the bare minimum from me obviously.

I cared about her a lot.

I talked to a boy.

He talked to me semi frequently, he made weird comments about me sometimes but when it was just him calling me or just him texting he seemed so sweet. One Break-time we held hands. I don’t remember why, I just remember liking it.

I asked him if he liked me(in that way) and he said yes, that he’d had a crush on me for a while.

I talked to him about how excited I was and how I wanted to go on cute dates or go get coffee or go to the cinema or just spend time alone with him.

He told me he wanted to keep us a secret.

that his family were homophobic.

I recounted everything.

He came to see me the next day and I told him I didn’t want to see him.

I wasn’t about to start again. Part of me was scared about how my parents might have reacted. The other part felt guilty.

I didn’t want him all wrapped up in my baggage.

In retrospect I probably dodged a bullet there, but he was never a bad guy to me.

He was gay, which means he saw me as a guy right?

He had had a crush on me for some time.

years I imagine based on his behaviour.

It was a terrifying thought.

The guilt that drove me to vomit might have originated from dysmorphia.

You look into the mirror, you understand that it’s you, but it’s more complicated that that. Like it shouldn’t be you, like theres a disconnect there.

I remember being awake in the night, begging god to make me a girl. Not in a superficial way, like I would wake up and I would have always been one. It was more complicated than that I suppose. I remember that I thought, maybe this is a test y’know? So I tried really hard to be perfect. Every night I thought ‘’maybe this will be the one” but no.

In 2019 I was struggling and I thought that I had to prove my devotion somehow, so I got closer in my faith.

A baptism is meant to cleanse you of your sins, like a rebirth sort of. I thought, That maybe just maybe it’d be then. That it would fix me. I went into the water, I went out of the water….

Nothing, no change, no sense of cleanliness or cleansing or anything like that. I had to do a testimony. I talked about how I was “excited for what god had ready for me”. The other two were older than me. They had intricate testimonies that were deep and clearly very meaningful.

I remember feeling selfish afterwards, like the point of it was not to be about me, but about god. Like I had just appropriated it for my own purposes. That it was disingenuous.

I read the Bible, I read the bits that had been used to speak against gay people. I had the ‘Soul Survivor’ Bible. I watched the guy who just recently was outed for groomimg, performing live on a stage. I remember going there and hating the services. I would always feel so guilty. And exhausted.

i collapsed during one, one of the leaders left with me and gave me a carton of water. The asked me if I felt like relief or like pain had left. I told them I felt tired. Almost like it was painful.

My religious guilt was never healthy for me.

I reconnected with an old friend. A nice guy, lets call him Dan.

I hadn’t known him as Dan, I knew them before they were out as trans. We reconnected and I remember being close with them. I came out to him, I told him that I thought I was trans, that was when he came out to me as trans.

Over the course of that year although I never saw him we became sort of like brothers in my mind.

Where my Real brother(the middle one) just told me that being gay was a perversion and what have you, and all manner of horrid things about trans people, Dan Was there for me.

He helped me work things out I think, feel like it was okay to be who I was. Being closeted is kinda like the Ego vs Shadow divide.

the Ego is you, it’s your identity and your whole self kinda.

the shadow is also you, but the parts of yourself that you resent, that you deny are parts of you.

It’s healthy to embrace those parts, not to hide them away.

Now I’m out to myself in a way. I get that my gender identity is complicated so I’m not sure I want to put a label on it, But Genderfluid or Nonbinary feels appropriate. Same with my sexuality, probably Pansexual or Bisexual. With both it’s like I’ve accepted mostly in my head that it’s okay to think these things. That I shouldn’t beat myself up or hate myself for them.

so I’ve sort of merged that part of my Shadow with my ego in a kind of way. But it’s still not something that I’d be willing to show on the outside, to the world that is(as in a Persona in Jungian psych).

Sorry for that diversion or if it feels too clinical or impersonal, I’m not sure really how to word it because I’ve never wrote it down with the thought that someone else might read it before.

I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so much with someone before.

I would always start conversations with Dan or with Mia.

Mia moved to Pakistan, where she now goes to a farming college. I remember talking to her about farming, and how she wanted to make it out there on her own.

She was always so determined like that, I admire that.

We talked once after she moved. I tried texting her a few times after that but it’s been months and she hasn’t seen them.

I figure if she wants to talk to me she’ll be able to reach out.

she told me she’s made friends, so it’s not like she needs me exactly or anything.

Dan hasn’t moved, but I haven’t texted him in ages. I figure if he wants to speak with me he’ll just text me.

I don’t know what to say to them, so this is probably better than just stressing about it always.

At the start of 2023 I ended up caught in lies again.

I was flirting with adults. They started flirting with me.

They assumed I was a woman, and in some strange sense it was validating.

I couldn’t stop, It was wrong obviously. But I felt like I needed to help them, and I could only do that by being that person.

I helped one of them come out to someone they had a crush on, and it seems like they’re out and happy as a lesbian now.

Sometimes I have like a craving to go back and just slide back into that role. But I fight it. They are good people, it wasn’t their fault.

one of them told me that they were concerned that I might be a child, as they had been groomed as a child.

I couldn’t tell them, it was my mistake and It was not fair to drag them into that.

I assured them otherwise. And them a little while after I left the site. I’d like to say I haven’t looked back but that’d be wrong, sometimes I lurk and see how they’re doing.

one time I noticed one of them talking about me, and about how being their for me made them feel good about their life.

It’s hard not to go back but I can’t be around them.

it’s not a safe environment. I stopped the *** around early 2023 maybe April time. It’s 2024 now, sometimes I think about it, and I feel gross.

I think thats pretty much everything.

Here I am now and it’s like.. I can’t get therapy.

Not for another year or so. So I’m just trying to survive until then, I feel like I’ve gotten better. But theres clearly a lot for me to still work out.

I don’t know if anyone else is ever going to read this. But I feel like putting this here might be good for me, just setting it all out. Thank you, if You did read this I’m not sure why you would but I guess I appreciate that you’d hear me out.