waiting

Now Playing: Recover by Chvrches (and if I recover will you be my comfort, or it can be over, or we can just leave it here)

I had the most horrifying dream last night, and it was horrifying because, in some ways, it was real.

(I very rarely dream, and when I do, they're almost always lucid dreams)

The gist of it, because I know accounts of other people's dreams are boring, is that I had agreed to meet someone at a certain place to do a certain thing, and they weren't there, and I couldn't contact them, and even though in the moment I knew it was just a dream I still could feel the panic rising in my chest until I could taste it in the back of my throat.

I woke up with a nosebleed, which was scary.

This may sound..,stupid, but I am deathly afraid of waiting. The kind of waiting where you're alone, in a public place, or you're with a group of people and they all know you're expecting someone to show. The kind of waiting that stretches to an uncomfortable period of time, with no message or apology or heads up about traffic or broken down cars or whatever. Just endless, endless uncertainty.

I have anxiety, and my anxiety stems largely from my abusive relationship and yes, my abuser was in the habit of doing this to me, a lot. I remember distinctly begging him to just send me a quick message that he was going to be late and I would happily wait for any amount of time, but every time he point blank refused. I was crazy. I was always so demanding and neurotic. I genuinely thought I was being a terrible, selfish person for asking him to send, like, a three word text every time he was like an hour late, which was 90% of the time.

I am not any more or less impatient than any other person; and I'm not particularly picky about weird social etiquette; if anything, I am in the annoying habit of sometimes being a little too easygoing. But I don't think it's too much to ask of people to send a heads up to someone they claim to care about who is waiting and waiting and waiting, on the verge of a panic attack - I have more than once burst into tears waiting for people.

I'm getting better at insisting on being treated like an actual human being, but to this day I still can't get people to not fucking do that, and I really don't understand the lack of kindness or care that can justify it. I think we have romanticized mental illness so much, especially young women with mental illness, that when the inconvenient things about mental illness arise - like having your sanity hinging on a text from someone who claims to care about you - people don't want to know. And I'm still not great at navigating and validating my own feelings, to insist that what I feel is valid and that my safety is important because a long time ago, in my younger and more vulnerable years, someone I cared about who claimed to care about me convinced me that standing up for myself was colossally self-obsessed. And that is a difficult bone to break.