Dinkaltranen

I realise I haven't written here in checks calendar a month? I also left with what sounded like an implication of suicide.

No, I didn't try anything. I mostly had a bit of a mental crisis and things went back to (mostly) normal.

Now that's out of the way, how are you doing?

I'm... not doing so hot. I cannot help but feel that the more I try to improve things, it becomes clearer that there is no way to really fix or recover this. It simply feels beyond the realms of reality. I know I come here and just doomerpost 24/7. But that's what it feels like. When I stop and think about things logically, I don't become more optimistic. It becomes clearer and clearer that I lack the tools to traverse this challenge.

I am stuck in cycles. The most obvious one is freezing my social accounts, only to unfreeze them within a week or two, even though there are people on there who probably really care for me. If you found this block, it might be because I shared it with you.

I visited my parents today. It is clearer and clearer to me the abuse I suffered as a child was their failings. My new standing hypothesis for why Mum treated me the way she did while growing up is that Dad was (and still is) a heinous sex pest. The second order of this is that she took out his poor treatment of her on me. Her following horrific behaviour lead to me getting sexually abused. I don't know who I hate more. My family or the person who raped me.

Despite them not doing the things they should have, and doing far too many things they shouldn't have, I still desire love and affection from my parents. A week ago I offered to come up for a day in the next few weeks before Christmas to help them with renovations.

I don't get a response for a while, then I get hit with a message that basically says "OK here's what's happening you're coming up for a week see you next Monday here's all the stuff we're (you) going to do."

I tell them, no, ask them if it's okay if I just come up for a day or two, and do what I can. They say yes. How gracious of them to dictate the terms of my freely offered time and help.

Take into account, these are people who have more money that they can spend in a lifetime. My dad quite literally said that they don't need anything, don't need money...

We go for a walk when I arrive, which becomes a coffee. My dad, in the attempt to get attention (not the serving kind) of the barista (he comments that she has a sexy ass), complains about his drink and acts vindictive. We come back to the house and start the gruelling work of digging out this water placement from the ground. It's about 3Kiloliters of water, all stagnant, slime-green from algae, dead animals, and whatever other debris. The container for this fluid has changed texture and colour from the extended exposure and contamination of the water.

Eh... Let's backtrack a bit. I don't have an eating disorder, thankfully enough. Unfortunately, I have been unable to keep food down for the last 3 weeks. It seems that my sensitivity to disgust has extremely increased, most likely due to the immense stress of my life.

This started off relatively mild. I would feel ill and like bursting into tears when I saw minced meat. Another time I saw maggots (not because of me) on the street bin while putting out the trash, and immediately evacuated my dinner. As it is summer, there are lots of bugs. Bugs like food, bugs like water. Humans like food and water. Unfortunately due to the overcrowded and terrible living conditions of the share house, this has made it a great home for bugs, even before summer. I would pour a glass of water, and find less than a minute later midges drowned in its border. I would go to eat food and find bugs in it or on it, not cooked in it, but just... contaminating it. Then I would see something like a sesame seed and double take that it was a midge, because again, that's mostly what I've been dealing with, and a sesame seed is similar visually to an adult midge.

If the other noise in the house doesn't wake me up, the constant discomfort from the midge bites and their movement do. They don't make noise like mosquitos do, and they're also incredibly tiny. I started photographing them when I would see them, killed and their bites, just so I didn't feel like I was imagining the whole thing. Two weeks of endlessly swiping and clapping at tiny little unkillable balls of bloodsucking hatred, and I felt great defeat. I had long since removed anything with potential as food (I had water though), started cleaning almost obsessively, and still it didn't seem like there was an end to them.

So when I offered to come up, it was partly to avoid the misery of bug-hell that was the sharehouse. Maybe if they couldn't feast on me they would stop coming into my room and when I come back they would be dead (they won't, they live for a few weeks).

Anyway, finding bugs in your food and drink is disgusting.

The bugs and the vomiting started around the same time. Go figure. I guess something has to break the camel's back.

Now, again, we have a stagnant body of water that would probably outdo the Yamuna river for levels of contamination. Bugs obviously love this environment too. So we're doing hard work digging up this fence next to this body of water, and Mum brings us water. I don't immediately drink the water, and put it down (away from the contaminated water). When I go to drink it 5 minutes later, what do you know, what did I expect: bugs, multiple, already drowned in it. There are so many bugs flying around, I don't remember summer being like this.

Dad sort of just laughs it off and says drink it through your teeth, which, yeah, I could do. It's just that I came here to escape that precise experience.

We're digging up fences poles which have been laid underneath a mixture of mulch, sand, and dirt, and grounded with about 15kg of concrete. Digging through that I crack open what seems to be some kind of cockroach nest. They go everywhere. In the past I would never be upset by this, but I keep a tough face and keep digging through.

This entire time we've set the tanks to empty the contaminated body of water onto the ground we're standing on by the way. We're digging and kneeling in it, and mud made from it is covering us. Bugs, again, are everywhere, constantly flying around and biting us occasionally for the four or so hours it takes us to remove half the poles and the majority of the fencing between them. I don't want anything to do with the water, and suggest we use a pump that we have lying around to expedite it for us now that we can no longer rely on gravity to do the work for us.

When we do so, it of course, does so in such an absurd way that I am soaked. Fluid gets in my mouth and eyes and if I wasn't already half-wet, now I was soaked.

I have a flashback. It is probably the worst flashback I've experienced in years. I will not go into it in detail, but covered in that horrible slime, I am reminded of the uncomfortable wet dampness of clothes and sheets after sex. The viscosity reminds me of semen and vaginal secretions. I'm confused, because mentally I'm lying down, trying to sit up, and so I sort of wave my hand behind and in front of me. I'm in two places at once but seemingly unable to operate in either situation.

The same words ring through my mind for both.

I'm cold. I'm wet. I'm cold and wet. Why am I cold and wet and alone?

I start shaking uncontrollable and sit down in the flooded grass. Bugs are flying around me. I can hear my parents arguing in the distance about something completely unrelated, whilst Barbie Girl follows a cheerful, shrill song from Rocky Horror that I don't know the words to. I'm cold. I'm wet. I'm alone. Am I in a bed? I think I can feel a pillow supporting me. What happened? What is going on? It's all distorted, I can't feel my arms, my hands, nothing feels connected, like my entire sensory system is sliding in a direction away from my body a little bit at a time.

I do not know how I was not violently ill or burst into tears in this moment. I was not capable of controlling my thoughts in any sense. Eventually it finally passes, and I stand, soaked, shaking uncontrollably. I go inside, uncaring for my state, and sit down on a chair. When my Dad comes back to help me with the work, I tell him I feel horribly ill, and he says I am very pale, whereas before I was red as a tomato from all the exertion and digging.

We take a break. I sit drinking water on the front veranda. Mum notices my state and very kindly says she'll make lunch. There are sesame seeds she's added to the meal, and she starts talking about bird poo as a pair of magpies supposedly always wait for them at lunch in case they will be fed. I do not comment. Dad asks if I'm been eating okay, and I say "that's not the problem" which comes across as dismissive: I correct it and say vaguely that I've been having trouble eating large portions of food, which is true. The more I eat, the more likely it is that when I get a disgust response I will be sick.

I will write more tomorrow and see what I've processed mentally since then.

Edit: I didn't write more 'tomorrow'