ποΈβπ¨οΈ A Transformation and a Lesson to Restore Hope
Last Updated: 3Β months, 3Β weeks ago
Surprised By Change
So, in all my hyperanalysis and overanalysis, with significantly living in my head a significant amount more over the past four years, ever since lockdown (March 2020) which was after a bunch of Bad Things happened, I somehow forgot one very important thing.
People can change!
The source of my conflict and my sense of betrayal came from a fundamental misunderstanding and a lack of knowledge of current events.
And in the silence, my trauma-fueled avoidance and my resulting lack of perception of any news to the contrary I extrapolated.
I assumed.
Systemic Rot and Fallout
I had left an incredibly toxic community, where certain predatory people had never faced accountablity, where I myself had faced some pretty terrifying situations, and where people funamentally opposed to better community safety, some with literal nazi beliefs, had come out of the woodwork in droves on social media, seemingy with no recourse.
Things had come to a head in 2019, and even more so in early 2020, and I had left. I had been thankful for lockdown, which had made disengaging from communities that had been part of one's routine even easier without the social pressure to give a reason for one's absence or to give one's own take on the current social media explosions going down.
(Necessary?) Extrication
Since that time I had distanced myself, progressively from social media.
As of around the commencement of 2021 I now no longer operate personal profiles on Twitter, no longer on Facebook (with a brief momentary lapse during a person's medical emergency crisis), and no longer on other networks either. More recently, in the past three weeks, my mental health even even started improving further as I managed to withdraw from Youtube, the platform where I had sunk my attention and my new addiction as an improvement on my Facebook addiction of pre-January 2021.
Transformation
But a conversation with the person I had been fighting with, a face-to-face and heart-to-heart cleared up a lot.
Things had changed.
I was skeptical, but she reminded me "It's been half a decade since this started." She told me "We have been communicating with leaders of this community. Things have been rebuilt from the ground up. It's almost entirely new people in this community now and a totally new way of doing things."
This blew my mind. Really and truly blew it.
In all my taking a stand it had not occurred to me that anyone could, would change this!
The Wounds
I think my parents had really cemented this idea in my subconscious that all these "chances" and "opportunities" that could be extended to people ultimately wouldn't be taken.
I had learned boundaries over the years, finally learned to fight that compulsion in my brain to rescue and help people, learned that I couldn't and shouldn't, as a victim of abuse, stick around and try to "save" people who were hurting me and others. That it was a trap, for people like me. That I could not change them.
Somehow it had not ever computed in my brain that sometimes, people and communities COULD change. That they COULD take ownership. That they could WANT to change. That they could see what went wrong, despite the comfortable defaults of status quo and the ease with which one's own privilege could be ignored, many, many people are good-hearted people who want to change.
Realisation
My next response was sheepish.
"Well... I guess I've kinda burned bridges with them then, haven't I? In being so angry. I mean, I didn't go on a smear campaign or anything... but..."
"Don't think like that," she said. "Not all people are like that. This is black and white thinking again. In healthy relationships, people stand for principles, they don't demand loyalty to people."
The picture she painted, with relationships starting to grow stronger and their own ties being restored to the community again, the community she had strongly and publicly called out online...
This picture painted by this woman I trust, this chosen family member I deeply love, this humanitarian activist I value as a community leader, this bastion of hope and pillar of support in all of the communities she becomes involved in... really spoke to me. As usual, she was the one who got through to me when literally nobody else could. I hate to admit it, but the blind spots in my unprocessed trauma can make me stubborn as fuck.
The picture she painted spoke of new life, of new, green, promising shoots growing up through ground I had thought was barren, with all its life burned to nothing, and scarred.
Maybe I have been out of the loop longer than I thought I realised.
I had been purposely avoiding this community and all social media concerning it (in fact, all social media) as a place of trauma, had grown used to being betrayed by other communities and yes, people in this one too in the past, whenever I'd reached out for help in times of crisis.
I'd started to see and feel that betrayal everywhere. People who couldn't help. People who wouldn't help. People who wouldn't risk conflict but talked a big game publicly. People who would blame or bury a victim rather than have to deal with a situation. Workplaces, and most prominently, my own "family", though I no longer use that term to refer to them, but for chosen family instead.
"Don't project your parents onto other people", she reminded me.
Admittance, and a Path Forward
Trauma. It was so obvious in hindsight. Trauma had frozen me. Locked me in a time period of years ago, of early lockdown when those events had stopped, and I'd extricated myself from the community. I had already learned, prior to this conversation, in researching CPTSD and Polyvagal Theory, how trauma and emotional flashbacks freeze you in a certain time period, bring you back to those traumatic moments of the past rather than living in the here and now.
Maybe...
Maybe things were less dark than I thought.
And maybe, not everyone leaves.
Maybe sometimes, more often than I realise, I'm the one who leaves. Who writes people off, and writes myself off in the process, without giving actually good people and meaningful relationships a chance. Who lumps all people in together, and all triggering behaviours as intentional, due to certain particularly bad experiences becoming settled in my mind as the norm, and my fear of getting hurt.
And maybe I don't have to leave everyone else who hurts, or might hurt me, either.
Or at least, maybe there is a way back.
Or rather, maybe not back. Maybe never back, in fact.
But maybe, like on my crossroads walk yesterday, there is still a path forward.
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