π Sharing my Blog and Asking Myself Why This is Hard
Last Updated: 3Β months, 3Β weeks ago
So, I finally took the step of deciding to share my blog link with some people besides a handful of close friends.
I've been very nervous about telling people about my blog (despite it literally being on the internet, so, effectively public).
Why?
Trauma-related Reasons I Fear Sharing My Work
Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria
It could be my Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria, which pervades into so many of my interactions and is common with ADHD people, and I imagine with people who have CPTSD, as I do.Perfectionism
And of course, it could be the perfectionism I wrote about and seem to be writing about fairly continually.Performance Anxiety
I can attribute this to my entire struggle of being ASD and ADHD and trying to perform neurotypically at school both in class and social interactions. I expand on this here and how I basically learned to mask and mirror to avoid attention.
We Can Fix This...
These answers combine automatically in my mind. My brain latches onto them as the rational solution.
Of course these factors combine into the perfect toxic cocktail, what could be more logical?
Being observed to do anything, having people see how rudimentary my methods and thinking are, seeing the man behind the curtain is no wizard and has not even a pretence of magic...
It would make sense that these are the causes of my worries about showcasing any of my work!
Plus, fear of being visible especially makes sense, given I have withdrawn from social media. The internet can be an incredibly harsh and overwhelming place where people go to project their trauma and frustrations with the world onto other people, something I've certainly experienced in the past as a victim of cyberbullying.
This is it, case closed, and that's all there is. We even know how to fix this, we can just force ourselves to show ourselves via exposure therapy, the way we've always done our whole lives!
... Right?
There's one problem though. Why is it I always am nervous in new situations until I've grown accustomed to a new environment? People in each new environment seem to think that I've grown in confidence, but that's not true. I've grown familiar with the specific environment, but when I move, nothing has changed. It's reset, all over again. This tells me that something underlying all of these explanations is not being addressed that causes all of these factors to reset each time.
And this is the hint that I have more processing to do.
In that, something new stirs in my recent memory.
And I don't know if it quite qualifies as "the missing piece", but it's something, a clue left unresolved and a thread untugged.
And so my perfect post and my perfectly structured argument begins to somewhat deconstruct.
Another Reason
I saw a post yesterday which was unusual, unfamiliar in all my readings about the standard ways to address trauma.
This post, like dry-needling in physiotherapy, caused something to twinge and disrupted a painful tension somewhere that I'd started to think was just an immovable part of me, a muscle I'd learned to move around as part of the normal operations of daily motion.
It made me start to acknowledge there's also a deeper, more painful reason underneath all this, and that some things are not quite so simple, and as my brain tries to swerve from this realisation I think this is where we start getting into the roots of it, into the real processing:
- Oversharing Due to Trauma
Childhood trauma specialist and social worker Patrick Teahan shared a really cool community post yesterday on Youtube which shed light on something that's for so long been a struggle for me: I can't seem to help oversharing, and that gives me a sense of not actually being in control of what I do or say.
What really makes me feel that I'm getting to the root of buried trauma is how uncomfortable and unfamiliar it is to admit this. It feels like breaking new ground, and even acknowledging this vulnerability makes me feel uncomfortably vulnerable, visible and exposed.
I grew up with insufficient boundaries, from the whole evangelical-cult-upbringing thing. If I'm not aware of everything... If I'm not in control of what I share... That can't be overstated.
"No Going Back"
So maybe it's all of these, but also.
- Another Point Of No Return
Maybe it's another line in the sand, an even bigger point of no return than the ones before it: that of making the commitment (in writing, on my blog) to write every day and then even worse, boldly declaring it to a few chosen close friends who could then see it.
I tell myself it's easier showing it to people who know me, that they will still see me as the same person worth investing their time and love in, even if I have a meltdown or a breakdown and fail to deliver on said commitment, because rationally (even if not always emotionally) I know that they will love and appreciate me for who I am, as a full person, not just disregard me as easily as content on the internet.
In reality I'm not sure if showing it to friends and close, chosen family was easier.
The fact that actually showing people my blog feels like another point of no return where people can see my vulnerable self splashed onto the metaphorical "pages", and it's no secret that that is something that scares me.
"But I Can Do Hard Things. I've Seen Worse".
I said I was scared, but I'm used to doing things that scare me, I learned to do that all the time in my upbringing - enduring the trauma and discomfort of being constantly out of my depth and way too visible all the time and somehow pulling through.
Telling myself I survived it. Hey, it didn't kill me, so it must have made me stronger... right?
The real question is: was it healthy?
If I Overshare ... then What am I Doing on this Blog?
The realisation that I couldn't stop oversharing (at least at some point in my life, and I don't know if it's been resolved) really threw a curveball, in making me realise that I'm not doing what I think I do, not in control or as healed as I like to think, and maybe taking steps that are harmful, maybe dangerous for me.
Which makes me think: Am I doing the right thing?
1 - Is it Cult Conditioning to Force Myself Onward Without Thinking?
Just like cults condition people to not doubt what they're doing, only to ask themselves whether they have the strength to do it, and people do the thing because they believe, no, they don't consider doubting that they must have what they see as the strength do the thing, no matter how harmful it is.
Maybe this is that old stirring, this old warning that I may lose myself in performance - even while I think I am finding myself - by doing instead of being because I still don't know what that is. Maybe I should be thinking more, instead of responding to the pressure do just do, and define myself by doing. Maybe the doing, or what I am doing, is harmful, if I don't actually know what I'm doing.
This is countered by:
2- Is this a "Necessary Experiment"?
Or maybe those old fears are right, but also maybe this is one of those situations where I won't know until I've done it, or started the process of doing it, whether I truly can know the answer at all.
Which is all well and good but it kind of ignores 1) entirely, not to mention the whole spanner-in-the-works issue of how to resolve my of oversharing, in favour of simply "just try it".
And raising this kinda leads naturally on to the question: What am I doing?
3- Is this a repeat of my old Fawn Response to Trauma, where I make myself vulnerable to defuse the Perceived Tension and Judgement of the Silence Around Me?
Am I re-living that old trauma response of being vulnerable, as just something I do because nobody else would do it?
Does that mean I've learned nothing and am simply, as in the past, oversharing, without sufficient boundaries due to still-remaining blind spots, and about to get hurt, to no end?
Maybe I Shouldn't be Doing This
The realisation that I overshare is the reason I pause and ask myself again what it is that I truly want to do.
And what I am doing, sharing myself on this blog - not just sharing writings as a potential career course, but what am I doing to set a boundary to protect myself - as I explore introspection through a public online medium which may or may not be healthy for me in finding myself.
Because thanks to the cult and my parents' abuse, I still don't have a sense of the boundaries that would protect me, or even how to communicate that fact to the people in my life who are trying to help me learn them.
True, publishing publicly is freeing, and I tend to feel like I'm imploding when I keep everything to myself. Sometimes I just need to set my creations free upon the world. And maybe for me, that means telling my story verbally, getting the actual words out. Maybe that's a type of external validation, a taking-up-space and feeling like I belong, like I have the right to tell my story, to exist, and to say what happened.
There's also the fact that what I'm doing is processing and that I can easily step into the territory of feeling like I have to justify myself when there's someone else listening. It's hard enough to not do that when I'm alone, with all the learned self-policing and self-censoring of my own thoughts, thanks to the cult.
So I don't know whether this actually can help me through externalising, or whether it will make things worse and open me up to worse problems through not keeping my processing private.
I also don't know how I can know what I don't know, and some things it seems one can't know without trying, as scary as that seems.
The thought feels kind of gross, and sad tbh, given everything I've explained above and how much being vulnerable has cost me.
And then I ask myself if there is a better way to experiment, even though I know one can't just live inside one's head and hypothesize.
I tried that for so long and I had to step outside of my "comfort zone" and live as me to find out what is me. Ultimately that is what led to my coming out as trans - I couldn't hypothesize that, I had to try living publicly as me in order to know how that felt, risky as it was.
I couldn't no the answer and I don't know the answers.
To be honest, there is no real conclusion to this in my mind. I don't know what the "right" answer is. The "healthy" answer.
But I know that I've written this and that I want to share it anyway.
And with that said, I resolve to press SEND.
And weirdly...
Though I don't know if it's the "right" decision or a "wise" decision, and though uninformed feelings aren't something I want to go by ...
Still, strangely, it doesn't feel scary anymore.
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