I’m not really used to speaking clearly out loud...
But I do it when making affirmative statements because I have to put the effort into making myself not just know these things, but believing in them at my lowest depression and my highest mania.
I have to know that I’m doing everything I can to help myself after a catalog of setbacks so I’m aware that I’m not losing out from lack of effort.
This goes from my constant attempts to better my situation falling apart to when I’m feeling misplaced guilt for making myself rest when I need it instead of doing what my mother does and pretending that ignoring everything and then blaming the result on others because she doesn’t want to feel guilty or anything else.
The thing is, if I was my sister, it probably would have worked. If I was ANYONE ELSE, it likely would have worked.
Instead, I get the double-edged autistic sword of an inability to internalize her BS and allowing her to affect my self-worth (this is also a person who had me look in a mirror after lifesaving surgery and wanted me to think I was ugly, but I think I’m beautiful and I said that to her and she needed to ask why, and I said because I’m alive and she couldn’t understand why) she really wanted to destroy anything positive about what had just happened to me or inside me at all and gets really bitter and ugly about her failure to do so.
The other end of the sword is that when she is cruel and doing her best to goad me so that she feels like I deserve being abused and she doesn’t want to feel guilty about that. When I told my aunt about a particularly egregious example of this, she acted like she really thought my mother didn’t really mean it.
Um, yes, yes, she orchestrated the entire thing so she could gaslight me and withhold desperately needed assistance or anything else.
She has threatened me many times and I have no reason to believe that she was just screwing with me. That’s not the way I have ever been considered and she will never do so, because she doesn’t want to.
I’m not worth it to her.