i lost the night again sitting naked in my toilet unable to shower

it’s 4am and all i did was scroll through the TL, vaguely thinking about the curse of envy, and how i can’t tell if I’m gaslighting myself into thinking i’m incompetent or if my friends are gaslighting me into believing in myself

i should already know that i have poor self esteem, but my problem is probably that i don’t think my poor self esteem translates to an inability to assess myself accurately. that is, maybe i have poor self esteem because i genuinely **am** bad at whatever i do, **raw**, always

and it’s fine if it translated into hard work, or a determination to be the person i’d like to be, but instead it often translates into a certainty that i should simply flee this life, change my name, and disappear from the people who love and believe in me

i began with envy, bc when i feel this way, i turn towards additional self persecution to confirm my badness. i look at the people around me and feel, transparently, how much better they are at me, how, unlike me, they are not creatures of the undergrowth

i want to accept that i have a voice, that i am a person https://twitter.com/ntclmzq/status/1385325912070053891

i told nat this the other day that i’ve never felt like a real person, that i’ve always felt like the warped, inverted image of a camera obscura. that i was always just someone else, just in reverse, and that i would always only move because they would.

nat, over chicken rice:

you’re one of the few people i feel human with in this world, so it hurts so much to know that you see yourself as subhuman

i simply do not know how to begin seeing myself as a person.

Junot Diaz on Monsters: There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, any reflection of themselves.

I worked backwards from there. Because I do not have a reflection, I must be a monster. Because I look mangled like this, I must be a fraud, I must be a copy, I must not be human.

It is my duty as a living person to say now that yes, i am human. all these feelings are proof of my humanness, but each time i accept i am human, i notice people are better at being human than me. now, i am ironic, defensive, posse-posed, faux pretty.

i can do better than this, run myself into the mill and grind myself into dust