I self harmed again this week.
I’d exercised a lot of self control recently but events conspired against me and the pressure got to me at last.
I’d gritted teeth and pushed on through the pain barrier becoming more and more conscious of the constant pain assailing me in my joints, the lack of good quality sleep and the suffocating exhaustion.
But everyone has their breaking point.
I was on a forum trying, as I often do, to see both sides of an argument and ask for reasoned, coherent discussions partly so that I could actually follow what was being said and partly because the abuse being hurled at each other by individuals was sapping my energy.
I shouldn’t have bothered.
It was a forlorn hope.
The abuse started, as it usually does, with comments about my Mother. Sensitive topic that considering she committed suicide and I take comments about her very personally. I won’t detail those comments here but they referred to incest in a deeply unpleasant manner.
When the posters had tired of that they aimed their sights on me. I was brain damaged, retarded, my brain was deformed, my mother was the cause of my deformed brain…
There were other comments about my prowess, or lack of, in other areas of my life. Those were quite mild by comparison.
So I reported a few individuals to the moderators who, I know from past experience, will just ignore the reports but it’s the only “power’ available and I tried, as I usually do, to respond in a decent, non threatening, non swearing way. I was polite. I tried to be “nice”.
Needn’t have bothered.
If one stopped then another started. My posts were deliberately misread. People chose to read between the lines and draw all sorts of strange things from them.
Apparently I was getting “roasted” (I have no idea what that means but take it to be something not to my benefit ?) and that, and other words were used with such relish and delight I wondered, seriously, how people could be so nasty to someone they’d never met and who hadn’t been nasty or abusive to them ?.
Again, although admittedly I should know by now, I was stunned at the depths of nastiness people will sink to when they are asked to be reasonable. They seem to take it as an affront. They scream abuse at me almost as if I’m denying them something or I’ve been beating them. Of course any attempt by me to ask them to stop or explain why they’re doing it is met with further hostility. They seem incapable of simply disagreeing or answering in a rational manner.
I really wanted to understand people’s issues. I wanted to put things in perspective. I wanted to see through the ranting and swearing and abuse to understand the arguments. I wanted to see both sides and be able to see where I stood.
But it simply drove me to harm myself.
Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me. A fine wish.
But I was hurt.
I really try to be nice. I do.
But I think it’s impossible.
PiecesOfPatrick 