It’s being so desperate to be in a relationship that you settle for behavior that you wouldn’t even tolerate from friends, let alone something you should tolerate from the person claiming to love you.

The diametric opposite of abuse is respect. If you respect someone you don’t abuse them, so the first step is to learn to respect everyone and that’s hard. It’s very hard to respect my mom when she’s drunk and I do my best, but there is so much frustration and pain from all of the years of dealing with that persona, that very aggressive and mean persona she has when she drinks, where she doesn’t listen to anything anyone else says, and there’s no getting through to her, that I just explode.

It’s been like that for years. And since I’m reacting, and in such a violent and volatile way, I look the crazy one. Oh, I must be bipolar, or have BPD or something or another, diagnosis after diagnosis, scapegoating myself because I developed that habit of internal blame being raised by someone who skirts responsibility any time she can. I didn’t see I was really doing this until I got into another relationship of course, and then the trauma of your childhood comes full force.

Why did I choose to stay with a man who didn’t respect me? Had I been deluding myself? He was never really that nice. Ever. And I guess I found that “authenticity” to be liberating in a way. He was someone who didn’t pretend, but the first sign of disrespect I should have left. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t see it.

His constant degrading and disrespect made me resentful. Well, the resent came from being unheard. All the times he would say “are you crazy” or “you’re being irrational” and I would kowtow and agree. “Yeah I am crazy, it must be me. It must be the drugs. It must be that I’m not on medication. Something is wrong with me, why do I react this way?”

I was wrong for my reactions, but I am here to say I don’t instigate it. I’m respectful until I’m disrespected. I don’t give unconditional respect, and maybe I should for my own mental health, but I see now for sure that people were disrespecting me and then triggering me and I couldn’t control my emotional outbursts and my reactions were always overreactions, no doubt, but underneath all of that, beyond the veil of believing that I was “in the wrong,” was that undercurrent of “they are treating me like shit.”

I told you I’m sober right? So what would explain the blowups I had over the last couple of days? Is it that Jasmine is an unstable maniac who lashes out at people randomly? Now I see that’s absolutely not the case. It hasn’t been the case at all. There is truly a method to this madness.

I take responsibility for needing to get my emotions under control, and learning to ground myself and center my body and mind so I stop overreacting, but that doesn’t remove the point of contention: these people weren’t respecting me or even listening.

My mom doesn’t listen to me. She constructs stories in her head about me that aren’t true. She puts together narratives that are wrong and shift the blame on me and then she holds it against me for a very long time, bringing it up in conversation whenever she’s trying to circumvent responsibility. And don’t even get me started on the gaslighting.

I’m sober now and I’m going to be honest with myself. I hate my mom.

And now, I hate him too.

I hate them both for taking advantage of me. I hate them for yelling at me and treating me like trash. For not seeing my worth or valuing what I did for them. For being impatient anytime I shared my feelings because they couldn’t empathize. I hate them.

Another relationship has ended, and I’m not in therapy yet, but I’m doing much better with this than I have in the past. I didn’t run to YouTube or anyone who would listen to blab about it. I didn’t vent online in out of control rants about how I’m hurt or how they’re this or that. I’m writing it down, here, for you to read, to see that while I do have a semblance of emotional instability in the situations, I am however lucid. I see through it now. I see why I didn’t attract the relationships that I want. I was settling.

The first time he lied to me, I should have listened to myself. I didn’t.

I told him he needed to learn how to be alone, then I let him pursue me relentlessly and then it went all down hill for months.

He didn’t respect me. He manipulated me. It was always manipulation because he couldn’t be honest with me about anything, until it got to a point where I didn’t trust him so much I became paranoid to the point of psychosis again. The same sort of psychosis I experienced when my alcoholic mom would gaslight me.

I know I’m still spinning tales of victimhood here, reader. I know it. But I have to get this out, because now I’m in the middle of nowhere with no one to talk to and I cut contact with my ex and my mother, the two people I thought I could count on. And they both let me down.

It’s time that I count on myself.

It was my fault that I ended up dumped, cheated on and humiliated by Goatis.
It was my fault that I ended up demoralized, silence and shamed by my mom.
It was my fault that I ended up ignored, disrespected and played by Druid.

Here’s another song.