the johnny depp and amber heard trial having the most disappointing verdict ever i don’t even know why i’m surprised by it

"all you have to do is hold on until you're a legal adult" lmao dude im almost 25 and im still stuck with my parents. stop acting like everyone can just leave at 18 and that isn't a form of privilege. like what about those of us with no friends and no one outside of our families? we get left to the wayside by the ones who assume we can just leave whenever we want because no one ever bothers to help us. we're the ones that get lumped in with the immature parasites who want to stay home because we have no skills or abilities we can utilize and get out. please stop telling kids they can just leave at 18 as a blanket statement. many actually can't. most kids in abusive homes cannot just leave, specifically survivors of religious abuse. there is an entire population of people who got pulled out of school (if they ever went to begin with) and had their heads filled with lies, were indoctrinated, and raised to fit in specific boxes (in my case; traditional housewife) thus making it very difficult for us to do anything with ourselves when we do inevitably leave. we always end up back with our families and in the same or similar toxic situations even if it's not the cult like ones. and of course i say religious but literally any form of childhood abuse that results in complete isolation will make it much harder to leave than just heading off to college or moving out at 18.

do not hold on to the idea that you can just leave at 18. if you end up where im at you'll be drowning in self loathing and regrets because you couldn't do it. instead just stick to more vague affirmations like "i'll be out some day", "nothing is permanent", "a long time isn't forever", etc. giving yourself set dates and times to get out of a situation and putting numbers to shit does nothing but put unnecessary pressure on you. i ended up having all my hard work pushed back because the people i tried to escape sabotaged my entire life and left me for dead causing me to first go to my dad who just genuinely had no idea what to do with me and now my mother who's toxic as all hell and has no idea how badly i was abused causing her to respond to my symptoms and stuntedness with hostility or bitter annoyance. rushing to get out at 18 made me the family disappointment because i wasn't ready and my abusers still had too much control. but i was always told 18 was that golden age when you can just Leave. it isn't. especially not for anyone in the younger millennial/gen z range because the economy is trash. stop letting people in their late 30s and older tell you you can just leave at 18. they're from a different world and honestly? everyone who gets away from abuse and toxicity at 18/19 probably weren't isolated and had somewhere or someone to lean on to some degree.

if you're someone who has no one and you're in the 16 age range, do not bet on just two more years. hope and work for it but do not look at people who can do it and automatically think you're gonna be ready if you haven't even been allowed to go to school. the isolation is enough to make you unready for most situations and many times people like us go back because we need to. do not put yourself in a position where you need to go back. work so that you never need to go back at all ever again but be patient because 18 is in no way ready if you're an isolated person like me. and there are a lot more of us who slip thru the cracks every day than anyone knows or wants to admit.

stop making these blanket statements about just leaving at 18 if you weren't 13 or under in 2008 and especially in a discussion about toxic and abusive families because most of us can't afford it to begin with and many people in emotionally abusive situations are victims of some form of brainwashing or extreme, forced isolation that results in mental problems, stunted development and social skills, and will often have to go back by age 20 because they left too soon thanks to that advice.

and if you want a better solution then how about we as a fuckin society start cracking down on these families and stop putting the responsibility to not be hurt anymore on literal kids who just recently have legal rights as adults, eh? how about we don't just fuckin ignore it when a kid gets pulled outta school and falls off the face of the planet like so many oft do? take people in without making them feel like burdens. just don't let kids fuckin slip through the cracks man. my life never needed to be this way but no one gave a shit about me outside of my fucked up family until college where people still would not help me get out of that house officially and for good. no one would help me with anything period because i should have known that. it's the apathy and willful ignorance of others that truly causes us to be harmed to such extreme degrees. stop telling kids they can get out at 18 unless you personally intend on bringing them in if and when shit hits the fan or are willing to sit and explain basic adulting shit to someone in their 20s without being annoyed. if you can't or won't do those things then you can't go around telling 16 year olds they only have two more years because you're creating another generation of disenchanted and virtually homeless twenty-somethings. especially now. this isolation shit is gonna last like a year or two if the influenza comparisons are right. these kids wont be able to move out at 18 unless they're taken care of. period. use your fucking head and think about current reality instead of looking back 18 years and saying "well it worked for me". like honestly fuck you.

and to those who are stuck like me, i love you and we will be okay. this sucks so fucking much but we're still alive so we can make it to where we all wanna be in the end. it's never too late to do anything for yourself and it's never shameful to take your time or go back to your abusers when you have nowhere else to go. they made it like that on purpose and no matter how it feels it's not your fault. if you're like me and went back to less bad but still toxic family, you didn't make a mistake, you just tried taking a responsible route when being faced with homelessness and got screwed. this is not your fault and you will overcome and get out just like you got out of the last one. it's so easy to hate oneself like this especially seeing people so flippantly act like 18 is the golden age of stability and maturity where we can leave home and live as an adult. this isn't the 1950s, we don't live in that world anymore. if you're alive right now and you still have the urge to leave, then you're doing just fine and it won't ever be too late for you until you die or, worse, choose complacence. just work towards a better future and don't beat yourself up when that future isn't tomorrow or go putting time limits on milestones and escape plans. it helps no one but those who want to use it as ammo when you come back in need. and many of us often do. ain't no shame in it but the shame society and its constructs put on us. you're still a kid and you're gonna be okay even if you're not ready yet. it'll happen, trust me.

i just really felt the need to get this off my chest because i never want anyone else to cry every birthday past their 18th because they "should be on (their) own by now" and i am so sick of everyone putting that age on this weird pedestal. i also don't want anyone who was in a cult like situation to feel ashamed or helpless when that happens or when they have no choice but to go back. but mostly i want people to be more fucking mindful of what they say regarding things like moving out at 18, especially if they're over 30. we need to undo the harm the "leave at 18" mindset has done as well as make an active effort to actually stop or at least help people get away from abuse and make sure no one ends up like me. i have no reason to hate myself and yet, because everyone loves shoving it in my face how supposedly easy it is, i do. let's not do this to gen z kids, guys. like please do not do this to them. i want everyone right the fuck now to realize that they're all isolated very much like i was and the ones in bad situations will come out a lot like me.

i just woke up, it’s close to noon here, five hours is good enough i guess. i keep thinking about college and how fucking suicidally depressed i was then and how ive spent half of this year being unemployed and generally just struggling to take care of myself in the most banal and basic ways possible, and how depression really does just delete years from your life. you live through them in a daze,  you’re already a ghost, you’re already dead. questing in wrath of the lich king is honestly some of the last shit i remember concretely before going into a two year gray area of passing my classes and nothing else. i remember breaking up with my boyfriend because he chose raiding over me. i dont want to talk about it again. the memory is still painful. still, even still, ten years later. and in late 2008 i was attacked in my dorm room and i was screaming and my roommates thought i was being a big ol slut. they thought any guy that came over was someone i was fucking. when i went to blizzcon in 2008 and my brother stayed in my dorm they thought i was fucking him too until i told them he was my little brother. they tried so fucking hard to suppress my interests and make me “like them”. “there’s more to life than world of warcraft and pokemon” they said as if going to college basketball games and rewatching disney movies has any more enrichment or depth beyond what i was fucking doing. my life is so full of hatred, from myself, from other people, just being fostered in me in general, and it’s only within the last few years that i’ve gotten to heal from it at all, all the time being hurt more and more

i was talking to a friend yesterday who is just 19 and thinking about where i was when i was 19, which of course puts me in 2009 again, the year i dropped out of existence, and i was telling them about how i was essentially raised by the ilk of 4chan and the piece of shit community on wow that, like, since i’m around ~liberal genderqueer~ tumblr-type spaces all the time, genuinely shocks me to remember still exists, of those fucking hypermasculine overcompensating military dudes. and we were talking about how like, nerds in general tend to have shit social skills or anxiety or are Othered in ways that have them reinforce this piece of shit pecking order where the loudest and meanest proclaim themselves the Leader and everyone just follows them because theyre too meek to challenge them or they mistake arrogance for confidence and assume any asshole crowing that loud about how Right they are all the time Must Be Right. 

and i thought of my own life, my ex QP, my old friend groups, my abusive ex boyfriend, how i mistook so long their malice as strength, how i was duped by their self-aggrandizement. they had no skills, no talents, no girlfriend (except when i dated them), no women in their lives in general, no real friends they could count on (except, for my abuser, an older man with 3 children and a brand new divorce whose house he muscled and manipulated himself into—”i cant even bear to be in the old master bedroom anymore”—and my abuser promptly MOVED HIMSELF INTO IT) no hobbies, and the one or two hobbies that they had—fishing, video games—they were fucking less-than-passable at. my ex-qp wasn’t good at video games. he would use cheat codes or just play the strongest character and rely on everyone else to pick up his slack. warrior, carry, tank, what have you; all of us his underlings to support him to victory—”I’m doing all of the damage and getting none of the kills”—he would whine, oblivious to the concept of teamwork and seeking credit within the only realm he had a semblance of succeeding in. 

anyway so when i first joined tumblr i swung the pendulum in the other direction because i absolutely had to, it was for my survival to become a virulent feminazi as they put it, and i was obnoxious about it, and i reposted rape statistics all the time and challenged people all the time because i had to. i had to let it overtake me in order to purge all of the 10+ years of toxic social conditioning that places like 4chan and their little infestations in WoW and all of my abusive partners instilled in me. i had to be vocal about rape this and sexual assault that because i spent the better part of my adolescence trying to laugh away the fact that i was raped as a child, trying to make jokes about my “delicious flat chest” and pedobear and “surprise buttsecks/it’s not rape if you yell surprise” and “delicious loli”; some of the images i had willingly saved on my ancient hard drive are absolutely harrowing to go through now as an adult knowing my mushy impressionable 14 year old traumatized mind was trying to cope with and gloss over what had happened to me and with the future i was facing as a budding adolescent in this kind of environment. men didnt want to be responsible for what happened to me or with what would happen to me, it made them uncomfortable for me to talk about it, so i was told to laugh it away, that nobody cares that i was raped, that i was stronger if i could just laugh about it, that no topics were beyond reproach or off limits, and that if i wasnt desensitized to my own suffering then i was weak, i was a sheep, i was a burden, i was letting my emotions get the better of me.

obviously, tumblr as a whole DIRECTLY acts in opposition of this: everything is rooted in our traumas, which we are expected to lay bare for all to be taken seriously: 4chan demanded that we invalidate the trauma by making a joke of it and allowing the masses to pick it apart for their own entertainment, to become part of the anonymous “legion” by offering up our individuality to be consumed by the group (as a currency of “lulz”, basically); tumblr, reflexively, demands we validate the trauma by making it an open and public integral asset to our identity, to have easily digestible and categorized characteristics so as to fit into the tumblr hierarchy of needs, their own misinterpreted facsimile and microcosm of existing systematic oppression, and obtain a sort of fixed currency of privilege or “woke points” dependent on identity politics. so i definitely needed to purge my previous conditioning with this reclamation of my identity as a survivor, etc, and had about 7 years of misplaced anger and fury condensed into a good two or so years instead, and even now im still parsing details. 

it wasnt until i was 22 that i had even heard the term asexuality and it wasnt until i was 25 that i realized i was bi (or “could be” bi), even though i had already been in love with and sexually active with women years prior lmao. i had been told by every possible source that having a dick inside me would change my life and change my outlook and change me into a better person or whatever the fuck, that i would “understand” and “grow up” and “become a woman” or whatever and guess what it did fucking NOTHING, just like every teen drama romance or whatever tries to stress over and over, sex is not a magical lifechanging event that hands you a million dollars and a healthy brain. it changes your life in some ways and it’s definitely not something to be taken lightly but in no way is it a cure for anything.

i dont know where i’m going with this, im just fucking pissed off about my life, im pissed off that healing takes so long and that i had to do any of it in the first place. im so pissed about all of my time wasted with this fucking piece of shit body and fucking piece of shit brain and i wish i could just go back to work and be a functional human being but im like just a short leap away from doing any of that. i have to get in touch w my previous HMO once the new year starts now that im confirmed for medi-cal, and i should have done it months ago, but i have to just accept that this whole time ive been not USELESS but just utterly CONSUMED by self-preservation, that it is taking most of my effort to want to be alive and stay on this planet any longer. especially now with my teeth bugging me so bad because i cant fucking take care of myself so im grinding my teeth and clenching my jaw and i guess eating improperly or what have you idont fucking know. im going to buy a waterpik even though it’s fifty dollars and i have not made ANY MONEY in the last 6 months or done ANY of what i wanted to do and i still have a number of commissions needling at me that i genuinely like cant fucking even look at withotu fucking hitting myself and crying, and im seriously not trying to make fucking excuses, i am so fucking ashamed and consumed by self-hatred about this, this has been a problem for me SINCE COLLEGE where i was an ART MAJOR that i had to fucking beat the shit out of myself to try to draw anything “seriously”, and i do mean literally beating myself, bludgeoning myself with my morris sticks and smacking myself in the face/head and clawing at my skin, and i fucking hate it

i just know i need like SO MUCH recovery or healing or whatever the fuck, i feel so long overdue for very basic shit, and part of me feels like a withering plant, like pouring water over dry leaves thinking it’s just going to saturate itself and be instantly rejuvenated. im losing leaves in the process, as it were, and getting no “water” all this time. i feel like i’m in drought mode. these last six months are me basically conserving all i have, toeing away from the edge of the cliff because iw as so ready yall i was so fucking ready, i was ready to jump off, i spent whole lunch hours just ready to fucking leap, staring down the void, staring at the winding road that went up the mountain, staring at the deer who stared back at me, hiding my face from Adults who treated me like a wind-up doll, i just couldnt take it, ic ouldnt be somewhere that sterile, i couldnt be spending so much of my life getting so little back, i coudlnt see my friends ever, i couldnt breathe, but in general my brain is sick and i need to heal from all of these things, i need to figure out how i can cope with being alive because i am going to be alive at least a little longer and i need to not fear and crave death simultaneously. i do not want to die, I DO NOT want to die, but i cannot live in a constant state of recuperating. my life has just felt like the Shutting Down... screen for the last 2 years. 

NEED a new dentist NEED my teeth fixed PLEASE GOD open the stem cell dentin treatment to clinics worldwide GOD fix my TEETH PLEASE let me REGROW my TEETH NEED therapy NEED to fix my brain NEED to figure out how i can cope with being unable to support myself in this shit fucking economy NEED TO RECOVER NEED TO GET BETTER PLEASE IM FUCKING SUFFERING