I Regret Being Born
CHAPTER 11: DECEIT ichigonya CHAPTER 11: DECEIT ichigonya

I Regret Being Born

Have you ever thought about the fact that none of us actually asked to be born? For people who have no experiences with mental illnesses like mood disorders or personality disorders, the thought might be something they find baffling to even think about. Generally speaking, if you enjoy being alive and living your life, you probably don’t have all that many reasons to be thinking about how you never gave consent to being brought into this world: if you’re having a good time, something so fundamental and philosophical might be of no use for you to think about. “Yeah sure, I didn’t ask for this, but who cares about that, I’m glad I’m alive!”

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Use It Against Me
CHAPTER 11: DECEIT ichigonya CHAPTER 11: DECEIT ichigonya

Use It Against Me

Over the years, I have struggled immensely with finding the courage to trust other people’s intentions in getting to know me. The process of befriending someone is still a great mystery to me, as in how I am even supposed to approach the issue, and I’m sure a lot of you share the same sentiment. How am I supposed to know what to tell the other person about me without coming across as too forthcoming? How am I supposed to differentiate those who genuinely want to be friends with me out of those who wish to get closer to me only for the purpose of gathering more things to hurt me with?

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The Invite
CHAPTER 11: DECEIT ichigonya CHAPTER 11: DECEIT ichigonya

The Invite

There are a lot of things my Friends did that I still find myself being confused by. Things that just simply do not make sense in the context of our persistent dynamic. Things that seemingly served no purpose – until I sit with them long enough to finally be able to see it. This has taken me multiple years to get to, but better late than never, I guess. 

But even then, I can’t help but wonder why anybody would go to such lengths for those purposes. How any of it benefited them personally is still a mystery to me. But maybe that is something I will never be able to understand, because our ways of thinking are so fundamentally different. 

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The Bait
CHAPTER 11: DECEIT ichigonya CHAPTER 11: DECEIT ichigonya

The Bait

Do you know the feeling you get when you realize that someone has completely bamboozled you? There’s a proverb in Finnish that we use for this action: “They pulled you at the nose.” I’m embarrassed to admit that I’m not familiar with the background of this saying, but maybe that would have been different if I had actually finished those damn university studies. But I didn’t, because certain bozos pulled me at the nose a bit too many times. Kind of.

It is one of the most humiliating situations you can find yourself in: you just sit there in disbelief, completely awestruck with the reality; that they really fooled you so fucking good, and you were none the wiser. The level of anguish and physical pain that I remember myself feeling at those moments in indescribable in any of the languages I know and speak. 

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With Pure (?) Intentions
CHAPTER 11: DECEIT ichigonya CHAPTER 11: DECEIT ichigonya

With Pure (?) Intentions

What does it take for you to have trust in another human being? What kind of criteria do you personally have for deeming someone as trustworthy? Or is it something you don’t even think about, something completely based on intuition? 

If you are one of those people who have been victimized by their peers, you most likely don’t go ahead trusting every single person you ever come in contact with.

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Taking Advantage
CHAPTER 9: FILTHY ichigonya CHAPTER 9: FILTHY ichigonya

Taking Advantage

 When I go back to those years, those days, those moments, a paralyzing sensation of dread sets over me. It makes me feel violated all over again, and in a lot of ways, I think I am just now truly experiencing the horrible emotions those events caused within me, because I just wasn't aware of any of it. I just didn't know what it even was that I was facing, and why years and years after, I felt uncomfortable and scared around other girls.

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Stop Taking What's Ours
CHAPTER 7: VALID ichigonya CHAPTER 7: VALID ichigonya

Stop Taking What's Ours

 A big part of my trauma invalidation has consisted of other people exploiting the word meant to describe the abuse I went through and by extension making it almost impossible for me to be taken seriously as a victim. Because of how generally unknown the actual definition of the word is, it's very easy to just take it and use it however you want to. This is one of the reasons awareness and education on bullying is so important and should be a mandatory inclusion in the curriculum of basic education at the very least. Because when you don't know what a word means, it's very easy to misuse it, y'know?

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