Christi/Enni/lemji ('lem-jay')/Chris is only for The Bit // 26 // Australia // Abstinent // CisFem // Faith, Memes and Fandom // Member of Crab Day Rogue Squadron // Several Shenanigans Later // Sometimes I create stuff (tag: My creations) // In this world it is Beak or be Beakered // Reblog is Love, Reblog is Life, Reblog your Bretheren to Bits // Icon Commissions Open on ko-fi! https://ko-fi.com/christi_in_space/commissions
Growing up is pretty violent, actually. It breaks your spirit. It teaches you to be ashamed of the things you love, to temper your actions and reactions for the sake of people who couldn’t care less about you, to make yourself small and docile and inoffensive.
Do you mean learning ‘life skills’? Because, like, if you weren’t taught that growing up, or if you happen to be disabled to a point where you can’t be self-sufficient, you’re at an obvious, major disadvantage. Cooking classes cost money, not to mention time and energy, which when you’re an adult, is in short supply.
Like, it’s easy to say ‘suck it up, it happened, get with the program’, but do you know what that actually entails? Do you get that trauma isn’t just, like, someone’s backstory? That it affects them, physically, psychologically, every second of every day?
The first couple decades of your life are necessarily your most formative. It’s the foundation on which everything else is built. If you have a shitty foundation, through no fault of your own (which, like, you were a kid, so it couldn’t have been your fault to begin with), you’re gonna struggle just to meet other people’s ’normal’ for the rest of your life. For whose sake? Yours? Theirs?
If it’s the former, OP, this is not the way to reach them. This is cruel. If it’s the latter, fuck off. Just because life isn’t fair doesn’t mean we need to accept that. Show some patience. Show some courtesy.
So. I liked this post because i thought it summed up this idea very succinctly, but let me expand on it a bit.
There are no set milestones in life. You don’t have to be normal, you don’t have to conform to some rigid definition of adulthood, you don’t have to replicate the behaviors of the adults you grew up with.
Also, being raised in a shitty/abusive environment? it fucking sucks. it deprives you of critical life skills and leads you to develop unhealthy coping mechanisms as a matter of survival, which then have to be unlearned later in life. none of that is easy. it all fucking sucks.
The point of this statement, at least the point I reblogged it for, is not that we all have to meet the same goalposts on the same timeline. It’s not that you should be entirely independent and do all this yourself (that’s more or less impossible, imo.)
The point, to me, is that as much as being deprived of a good, safe, healthy childhood sucks, it happened. Time marches on. Life is finite. If you let your trauma and the way you were raised be the driving force in your life, it will consume everything, it will become the sole singular thing at the center of your life dragging you down and holding you back.
This isn’t to say you need to just “buck up and get over it” or whatever. But it does mean you need to seek out growth and healing. And it means that, yes, you do need to seek out learning opportunities for the life skills that you need to get by. You don’t necessarily have to sign up for cooking classes. Learn about cooking online. Ask friends with more experience to come over and help teach you how to cook.
It’s amount moving from “I can’t do this, because of how I was raised.” to “I never learned to do this, can you help me figure it out?”
To borrow your own metaphor, when bedrock is cracked and unstable, we don’t give up on building on it, and we don’t build buildings on the unstable foundation. We drill down into the bedrock and inject grout into the cracks and the fractures at high pressure, forcing cement into every hairline crevice until it cures and forms a single solid stone. We stabilize it. We sure it up until it’s strong enough to build on, and then we work from there.
Yes, time and energy are in short supply. you’re not on anyone’s timeline but your own, so take it slow, especially at first. But you can’t wait for someone else to show up and solve your childhood trauma, and you can’t live your entire life in mourning over it. There is a point at which you’ve mourned enough, and you need to start seeking out growth.
You might not be there yet. That’s okay. Take all the time you need to mourn what was lost and where it’s left you. But at some point it’ll be time for you to stabilize that foundation, and build on top of it. If you don’t at some point learn those core skills, especially the core social skills like maintaining relationships, navigating differences of opinion, conflict resolution, displays of affection, meeting new people, public smalltalk, etc., it will only worsen the impact on your life overall. you’ll lose friends. you’ll get in big fights over small things. you’ll struggle to form new relationships. you’ll have more difficulty navigating the realities of the adult world, like work, or interacting with bureaucracy. And when those things happen, if you throw your hands up and say “you can’t expect this of me, I have childhood trauma”, nothing will get better. It will only tell people that they can’t expect any change or growth from you with time.
It sucks, that things are this way. I get it, believe me. And there’s nothing wrong with taking it slow and learning at your own pace. There’s nothing wrong with asking for help, and leaning on other people to teach you things you never learned, or to help you realize and improve upon the issues that you struggle with. But at some point, it is your responsibility to seek that out. And that sucks even more, because “being under the burden of self-responsibility” is often one of the great issues with childhood trauma. Being expected to hide your emotions or take care of yourself and others or be the “adult” in a situation you were far too young for. And you’re right. You were a kid. It wasn’t your fault. But that responsibility to grow doesn’t go away because you reject it, or because you have already suffered under that burden.
It does truly, deeply, royally suck. but you gotta do it, because patience and courtesy are great virtues, but they are temporary states. You can’t ask people to hold patience for you forever. Patience is a temporary state that can only exist under the expectation of growth. If you aren’t growing and changing, then asking for patience is just asking for a delay in the inevitable.
I say this speaking from a decade of experience in mourning the loss of my own childhood. I say it now when I am really only a couple years into that genuine drive for growth. I say it having spent years rejecting that responsibility, and having spent more recent years emerging from the fallout of that rejection, dealing with the consequences, and learning to move forward and grow beyond the trauma. It’s not easy. I would never in a million years tell you that it’s easy, or that you need to get it done ASAP, or that you ever need to reach the same point that a “normal” person would, especially at your age. I say this with a lot of empathy for what you’re going through, and an understanding of how deep that pit can feel and how fucking impossible it can seem to climb out of it. But someday, it’ll be time for you to do just that. That’s what this post means to me, and that’s why I wanted to share it. Not as a ticking clock or an unmet expectation, but as a promise, as a responsibility, and as something that I now look back on as hopeful, even if it felt like a crushing burden at the time.
Regardless of how you were raised, it’s your job to grow up.
i think one of the highlights of being an adult is getting to create little happy spaces in your life, so here’s mine – a corner with a (usually) sunny window for me to write and edit photos and just generally, be a nerd.
i still think my bookcase corner is a little but better but this one’s growing on me 🤣 just wish it wasn’t all the way across the room from my turntable. nothing more annoying than getting in the rhythm of writing and hearing your vinyl hit the end of a side lol
As of yesterday, I highly recommend making “$0 White Elephant Gift Exchange” a new year’s tradition. Standard rules (everyone brings an unmarked gift, in random order each person picks and either unwraps a gift or steals someone else’s gift and that person picks a new one. bonus Stealing Round encouraged) but it can only be something you already own and want to get rid of. Perfect for post-Christmas when you have no IDEA what to do with the stuff you’ve just gotten. I offloaded a whole ton of candy I don’t want and the happy recipient passed it around the whole table for us to snack from. I got a Bundt pan from the newlyweds who had no intention of ever using one. Three packs of Jonas Brothers pens are on their way to someone’s very serious government job. We have cranberry juice now. A Sims 3 Supernatural Expansion Pack case had $10 in it. No one went home unhappy.
idk what beginner artist needs to hear this btw but you’ll never be able to draw everything you want without struggling a little bit. It’ll get easier and you’ll be able depict what you see in your mind decently well but it’ll never get *effortless*. You always have to put in the effort to create something, which in turn doesn’t make this an indicator of art skill . and thank the heavens we do, honestly, because we are not an AI art generator
Hot take but praise is a good tool for encouraging healthy behavior. Positive reinforcement is good. Relying exclusively on punishment to change people’s behavior is both cruel and ineffective. If someone does better than they did yesterday, let them know you appreciate it, let them know that they’re improving!
“Don’t praise anyone for doing the bare minimum” is a shitty take that prioritizes your sense of superiority over the actual betterment of people. I understand that things shouldn’t be as bad as they are, and anger can often be justified, but you need to get over the propaganda that kindness is naïve, that cynicism and bitterness are intellectual. Withholding praise from those who haven’t caught up with you doesnt actually help them, it doesn’t motivate, it doesn’t encourage, it only discourages them. It breeds bitterness and apathy, which are antithetical to empathy.
Growth isn’t something you do on your own. People need support, they need community. Bootstraps won’t get them there. Kindness will. Do you want results or do you just want to feel superior?
Also, if you don’t praise people at least a little, you’re literally expecting them to mind-read whether what they did this time was the “correct” thing, and somehow magically know they got it right this time, as opposed to all the other times they said something and you stayed silent.
