Still trying to figure this site out, and find a theme that works for me. This is pretty, but doesn’t do the job. Can’t format to paragraphs, can’t cut and paste. So bear with me through the growing pains. But in the meantime:

I realized earlier tonight that I was talking to myself, and I heard a voice I hadn’t heard in a while: my inner teenager. You can laugh, say I’m full of it, that I’m mocking people who say they have an inner child. I do have an inner child. He’s in a safe place, with a bunch of stuffed animals and comic books. But I have an inner teenager as well. That guy’s pissed. He’s been pissed for decades. Because I haven’t done a good job of protecting either of them. I’ve let narcissists and emotional abusers run them over and hurt them repeatedly. It’s only in the last year or so that they’ve begun to speak to me, an I’m beginning to heal, to work to be a better person. So if they do speak to me, both of them are usually angry.

Except today he wasn’t. The last few days have been rough, mentally, for reasons I won’t go into. But after a few days like that, I was busy beating up on my favorite target: myself. I spiral down and am just horrible to myself. That’s why if you’re going to try and hurt me, better realize I’ve probably already said it to myself a dozen times before. I was in the thick of it, when I heard him. And he was singing.

“When you gonna make up your mind? When you gonna love you as much as I do ?” It shook me to the core. Usually he’s good for Bad Religion, like “Drunk Sincerity” or “Hooray”. But Tori? And then I realized: he was singing to me, and by extension, to himself. Stop it, he was saying. Stop hurting yourself when there’s so many people out there willing to do it for you. Love you, all the parts of you. The parts you forget in your whirlwind of trauma reactions. Love yourself, especially during the hard moments.

I went to the bathroom and had a meltdown. Not a shocker these days when I cry at the drop of a hat. But I felt better afterwards, which is happening more and more. Maybe if we all showed ourselves as much kindness as we’d like to show to others, maybe we’d all shine a little brighter and the world could be better. That’s all I got.