"Maybe you just 'needed' someone to yell at you"

20 Aug, 2025

I started journaling, even going as far as to write the entry in the shortcuts I use for typing. The idea is for it to be useful in a skill-building way, in that it helps me practice my shortcuts besides just tiring out my hand. But I don't know if adding that extra step actually makes the whole thing less useful because the physical exhaustion is what makes the body think that the matter has been solved enough for the time being, or something.

After about 4 pages I got bored and started thinking I really wanted to type here instead. So I don't know how useful the exercise was or if it's just that my thoughts tend to go faster than what I can actually write, even with shortcuts because I have to look up a lot of them when I don't remember how I type them (& I also get a lot of my own shortcuts wrong even when I type and have to go look them up anyway, lol.)

The thing I really wanted to express that I didn't get to in my journal was that my sister put on The Biggest Loser documentary on Netflix, and I half-watched 2 eps or something — and the abusive way the coaches talked to the contestants really reminded me of the attack dog in my head. My attack dog doesn't actually use words, but there was a segment where they talked about how Jillian would always yell at the contestants and berate them to push them past what they said they could do, and afterwards she would say something along the lines of, Look, you could do it after all. You just needed me to yell at you. That part especially reminds me of the logic that goes on in my head. And how I got over selective mutism to begin with was basically using that logic (after getting scolded very harshly by my 4th grade teacher, in a way that felt like yelling to me), and now I have to fear that for the rest of my life because it did work. Maybe the truth is that I'm just not yelling at myself hard enough; I'm not breaking myself enough so that I can be useful and do the things every "normal" person out there is supposed to do.

There is a festering wound that goes unacknowledged when someone hurts you to get the result they want to see. Maybe it's even a result that you wanted to see yourself, but what you learn from that — if it works even a tiny little bit — is a deep distrust in your own existence. You learn that the result matters more than you could ever, and that people don't want you if you can't perform. You learn that you deserve to be hurt because you weren't good enough, and you just have to continue to hurt yourself until you get to where you're "supposed" to be.

And what happens if you never get to where you're supposed to be?

Might as well kill yourself then.

Other people get go exist just how they are if they were born right, but don't think for a second that you can ever have the same privilege. Because of something that's mostly out of your control. (And yes, there is only so much you can do for weight and dieting literally doesn't work long-term. We just hate people for being. And it makes easy money for the dieting industry.)

The illusion of control makes the crashes hurt more. And it makes you think that you just need to hurt yourself better, and then maybe you'll see some sort of progress.

Something about seeing it being done to people who I know did nothing to deserve it¹ actually made me angry. I can't believe people can just abuse others like that and it's so widely accepted that it becomes a smashing success of a franchise. It actually makes me frustrated and upset enough to cry.

A thought:

Maybe I didn't deserve it either.

Maybe it's actually twisted to berate a 9-year-old kid in a hallway for not speaking until they're crying. Maybe it's fucked up to tell this kid that they were the one being rude and that they hurt other people because they couldn't read their project out loud and they couldn't give a compliment on someone else's project because the boy scared them.² Maybe you shouldn't send this crying kid to the principal's office, like they had done something extremely wrong, just to sit and cry while being ignored by everyone else there for an hour. Maybe that's actually really fucked up of you and you're the one with the goddamn problem.

Just maybe.

I don't know if being hurt in the way I was, so that I could manage to speak in the classroom, was worth it. I thought so, and maybe still do, even though I know that teacher was cruel.³ The effects, unlike dieting, actually stuck with me, after all — any time I felt afraid of speaking, I would recall that worse things could be done to me and I would force myself to speak.

Except for what it taught me, of course. I had to trade in any self-worth I could've had. Granted, it probably wasn't much, considering that I had already experienced a bully-friend who latched onto me (probably because of my condition) from K-2 just to have our "friendship" ended by a 2nd grade teacher who also acted like selective mutism was a personal failing of mine. But what did I have after the incident? People don't like you when you don't speak. When you don't perform according to their standards. People only like you when you're convenient and useful.

When you make that kind of trade, it comes to bite you back later. I wanted to die before I was 18, but the world didn't send a lightning bolt down from the sky to put me out of my misery. I wanted to kill myself after graduating college and getting a job so I could afford an apartment to kill myself in to avoid traumatizing my roommates or my sister, and then I proved incapable of dealing with the sheer performance anxiety of interviewing so I never got a well-paying job.⁴

>trade self-worth to be able to speak
>need self-worth to be able to talk self up in interviews
>or really good acting skills
>got neither
>still worthless because I can't achieve
>can't do anything because I'm paralyzed by fear
>where did this fear come from
>

To begin with, selective mutism is usually from some disproportionate fear response. And it would so happen that finding something else to fear more, rather than dispelling the fear at its roots, results in all sorts of fucked ways of coping. I did try cutting myself for a few years. And then I quit because I was bad at it.⁵

Is it possible to have overcome this in a different way? Is it possible to have built some level of self-worth so that going to interview doesn't feel like I'm lying to the interviewer about my capabilities while also being judged on whether I deserve to even be alive on this planet?⁵

I don't know. I usually think it's pretty worthless to think about the way things could've been, because no amount of thinking about that will ever make the past different. But they also say that imagination is important for building systems that work differently rather than being chained forever by the pitfalls of the old.

It's hard to say that I didn't deserve to be hurt and to actually believe it.

But I do know that other people don't deserve to be hurt like this. And I hope that anyone out there who is told this lie knows not to believe it.

I hope they have the courage to try an alternative path and to live wherever that brings them. Regardless of whether they achieve the thing other people wanted them to achieve so badly.

#moping