Phorm The Vixdjinn

Insightful writings on our state of being aren't written by null voids. The sucking pit of nothing inside you is pain, nothing more. You feel defined by it, because pain hurts. That sounds stupid, but the toxic stoic-ish value of contemporary culture is to deny that pain even exists. To never show pain or weakness. We are classically conditioned into building our internal panopticon, the superego installed as the cop in our heads and given super serum by the legacy of McCarthyism and related social monitoring. The limits allowed to us by the internal cop, the part that you described making you need to live up to expectations, cut off so many essential parts of us from understanding and exploration.

Believing in the self is important, but we can't get there alone. As the great sage of the spiral said: believe in the me who believes in you. It takes someone else's belief in us to build our own self image, most times. And that's good. We can support each other in solidarity.

How much does our individual perception and belief matter? It isn't the perception of ourselves, therefore, I believe matters so much. I believe that's a dependent, derived factor of being in healthy relationships. What matters in infinities is that we perceive and believe in friends and the family we choose (may or may not be blood family).

I believe you are a person, of infinite value for that very reason, inherently beautiful and fascinating. I believe you wouldn't hurt this way except that you care deeply about people around you, and that is virtuous by my beliefs, even though tuned up to painful excess which is hard to moderate. I believe you can and will survive and thrive.

Long one incoming. I'm not sure if this is too much personal experience to be reassuring, I just want to express that I deeply understand you.

I feel this in my bones. It has taken years, years of effort to deprogram even some small percentage of "meeting expectations" out of my brain and body and soul. For decades I felt like the best thing I could be was invisible, a shadow. I threw myself into supporting my wife, trying my best to "sublimate" everything that I was into something I thought I should be. It didn't really work out the way I wanted it to - I was less supportive than I could have been, and I was deeply unhappy.

I too felt my heart was weak, my anxiety strong, and my core hollow. I almost collapsed under the pressure with nothing inside to support my structure. I completely lost track of who I was.

Lots of things have changed since then - I came out to my wife (and later everyone else), I finally found a good therapist (they practice Internal Family Systems, highly recommended), spent the past 4 years sweating every god damned decision because I felt like my desires are inherently bad somehow, and finally (finally!!) i feel sorta-kinda comfortable in my own skin.

I still struggle a lot with feeling like whatever I want is somehow bad - impractical, toxic, harmful to others, etc. I try to look inside to see the parts that are informing this and be kind to them, so we can work together and find a better way. But it's still a struggle.

I wouldn't say my heart or willpower are any stronger than they used to be. If anything, I'm just more honest about being weak, vulnerable, strange, awkward, etc. But instead of trying to shove those things down, I let them guide me to where I want to go as much as possible.

(Also: self-diagnosing as autistic has made a lot of this make more sense, for me personally. Specifically the masking and constantly trying to "meet expectations" in a society that doesn't accept how I interact with the world.)

Anyway, from one "nothing" to another - you are not nothing! You are You, only one person in the world could be You and it's You!! This is a deeper truth than anything that can be perceived - the You that is You contains multitudes of infinitely reflecting mirrors and gems, moreso than anyone can understand. I don't even understand myself that well, but my life's work is to keep excavating and exploring - I think this is the work of being human!!

It's never too late to start, I promise promise promise. You have already done more than I ever have in finding what your heart desires. Your heart is not weak, she is just overwhelmed and scared. She has strong desires and that is beautiful.

I didn't start getting my head on straight until very, very late in life. Even now, I struggle. I have made progress but I still struggle. So I feel a lot of this. I struggle with societal expectations. I have a hard time telling the world "no, fuck you" when it fills my mouth with sand and worms.

Societal expectations are a motherfucker, but you have us. I have cherished every minute of our years of friendship. To the extent I can be in your corner: I am. Just as you've been in mine, so many times. Soulless voids don't help trans women get their fundraising goals met. But you have.

I am so immensely proud of the progress you have made. It took courage to get to where you are! You should be proud of yourself. Your existence is an act of courage.

you can unwire your brain, the moment you stop convincing yourself you can't.
get on some medication and go to a therapist. you're not dead yet.