Fahckmylife's Blog
Crap adult, OK human.

Safety is a fundamental human need, yeah?  To feel secure and cosy.  Children unquestioningly have this blind faith, trust and reliance on their parents to do the right things for them – to keep them safe and protect them.  We are their role models, we need to be strong and show them not to take shit, but we also need to shield them.  At the same time parents (and I’m including myself here clearly) have an obligation to teach them how to protect themselves, because the world isn’t going to change for your child but your child clearly needs to be tough enough to be able to deal with the shite life throws up at you.

These thoughts passed through my mind as I looked at the snow from inside my house and compared the relatively calm looking snow with the weather warnings.

YOU NEED TO BE SCARED OF THE FUCKING SNOW!

Someone told me the other day that I was an optimistic person which I found, to be quite frank, fucking redonkulous.  The world is a scary place and I’ve been scared, or at least super apprehensive, quite a lot in my lifetime.  It’s nearly become a complete exhaustive way of life at times.  And, this isn’t based on the bullshit that the tabloids would spew to instil fear into you – it’s based on life experience.  It has only occurred to me in the last few years that I rarely feel safe any more and I can’t remember the last time I did.

What’s your agenda?  Is this a load of lies?  Should I be left alone with this person?  How can I escape if I need to?  I should just leave.  I should just go before I get hurt.

So, yeah I’m bit of a paranoid person, perhaps.  Despite what you might think though, I’m observant – most certainly when it comes to people.  You can’t write properly without being observant to a certain degree, or at least look at things in a different way to most people.  I can see those little microexpressions, I can feel the tension in a room and I’m always on the lookout – because my dear dear friends – the world isn’t safe and people are shit.  I can tell when a fight is about to brew.  I can see when someone is in a bad mood and volatile.  I can predict whether someone is whispering shite about me or someone I care about.  I’m nearly always right too, as much as I wish I wasn’t, because things nearly always go the way I predict.  I wish I was fucking oblivious.  I wish I didn’t care.

You might think I seem relaxed but I’m not.  Even my baseline for being relaxed is really skewed.  I think the easiest way to try to describe how I feel is to get you to imagine waiting to be punched.  Maybe it’s like a second before the fist gets your face.  Imagine that anticipation for a long extended period of time.  You’re trapped in this perpetual limbo of agony.  I sound like a squirrely motherfucker don’t I? Inside I am.

And what do I do?  Freeze – play dead – literally in some cases because I can’t process stress or if I feel in super danger (or more likely someone I care about) fight mode is activated.  This is normal, I think – yeah?  The whole fight or flight thing?  But imagine someone shouting at you and literally shutting down like a powered off robot.  Well either that or just burn everything to the ground and walk away.  At best it permeates so much through my regular life that I try and avoid situations where I feel vulnerable – not so much in a physical (although that does happen) but emotionally.  So how close can you get to that, eh?

Being frightened a lot of the time and withdrawing can be exhausting.  Or constantly waiting for shit to go down isn’t really conducive to being productive – unless you want to actually run and I never do that so….  I’ve kinda tried adopting robot mode generally.  It’s super rare I trust anyone properly anyway and I don’t feel like I’ve ever really been protected so I’ve learned to protect myself.  You can’t expose that super raw little underbelly of mine – oh no!

Let’s keep it fluffy and light, eh?  I mean constant reassurance and cuddles and slowly gaining my trust with inciteful conversation could help – but seriously who has time to do that like?  And I’m not a needy fucker but that seems like I’m totally on needy street right there.

Seriously, the media are crazy for making us terrified at every single turn.  Murder, war, recession, homelessness, joblessness, rape, abuse, healthcare, pandemics….

THE WORLD IS GOING TO EXPLODE LIKE A DUMPSTER ON FIRE!

You can’t look anywhere without fear being sold to you.  Well, maybe more even forced on you.  And scared people are easier to control.  Talk to them with any authority and they’ll let you make decisions for them.  Seriously, wear people down enough and they’re easy as fuck to manipulate.  Especially, if it seems like you’ve got the situation handled.

All I can hope in many ways that my ultra vigilance in many ways (cos although my anxiety is at an all-time low it’s inherently still a massive part of me) protects my kid and that he feels safe.

If you don’t understand these feelings still – even objectively – you might need to take a step back before casting judgement.  I still feel sometimes that people just don’t get how paralysing feeling like this can be at times and a lot of the time I feel like my feelings are invalidated or dismissed.  And there’s only so much of that I can take when I expose a tiny tiny bit of that raw underbelly only to hear that it’s not a big deal.  If you can’t empathise, try to sympathise, yeah?  You’d be a bit nuts too if you felt like this (with good fucking reason).