To further this person’s sentiment, thick skin does not mean protection from damage. Put a couple of drinking glasses in a leather satchel and as hard as you can hit it with a baseball bat a few times. I would wager the satchel will be fine (at least on the outside), but the glasses will be shattered on the inside. If anything, trauma makes you really good at hiding the damage; not protecting you from it.
Yeah but try hitting those glasses with anything short of a bat now, huh?
This post not autobiographical in any way.
Having thick skin isn’t a superpower. It just makes you less sensitive to both positive and negative emotions. Either way there is damage that needs to be healed.
There’s a lot of options, but basically no adaptation to extremely fucked shit that isn’t alienating, that doesn’t put you apart from people in some way, or read as damage in itself. Kind of the nature of it. You’re built for different stuff than the rest now-or you’re not, and there’s nothing left.
it also is just what you have if you have healthy self-esteem and a sense of humor.
Let’s not forget those of us who had a thick skin (from it) because there was still hope in our hearts that the parade of fuckery couldn’t possibly be “normal”, much less get worse…
Now we’re rattled, fried, cross-wired, and taped together in spite of it all. Like abandoned mining dynamite in the movies. No real fuse left, and a paper-thin wrapper with illegible instructions around a heart that might be as much a dud as take out a city block with a stray spark.
Whee. Let’s hang out in a crate until our collective purpose happens along! 🤣😶
Fuck I thought it was just me whose lost resilience. Is this a process that happens often? Why is this even possible?
People in my life been trying to tell me I was just bitch-made the whole time and I’m starting to believe them
I can only speak from experience, but I’m willing to bet that “bitch-made” is low-effort projection on their part, NGL. 🤌🏼
FWIW, I’ve nearly died/been killed ~7x now, IIRC, and I’m fully fragile AF these days.
While still unreliably heroic in short bursts (like dwarves hunting uruk across the steppe), there’s a hefty non-zero chance that my internal Not Today, Death engine sputters & chokes at the starting line, too. Might even need a flatbed to get to triage. 🤪
No one’s journey is anyone else’s, and those that would judge you for yours in times like these? They’re cowards, and trying to shift the blame to you for how terrified they are that they’d never be able to endure what you’re going through. You can pity them, or tell them to fuck off. Regardless, you’re still a motherfuckin’ badass for sticking with it. 🤘🏼❤️🔥 Don’t suffer the backbirths. You’re better than that.
Thanks Otter. Just knowing it’s plausible helps me string together a through-line that tracks with my experience as I remember it. There’s a realistic narrative missing from my culture about what a man should do after devastation so I appreciate hearing people talk about it in ways that don’t include caricatures of cowardice.
So, so thanks for still being alive to speak your truth. 🤘
Traumatic growth is real, but its not the thing that necessarily occurs
And crucially: keeping yourself open for things you do not have, being someone who can heal back to something with the same emotional parts as normal leaves you relying on things you don’t have, empty places prone to collapse.
Or you give up on that shit, and patch those gaps with other things to heal; become something alien and strange. Not necessarily better.
Oh we be maladaptive asf up in this bitch. Or more likely always were, in the absence of constructive help in formative years.
But say I want to not be a workaholic burnout anymore, what do you mean by relying on simmering that you don’t have? Is that something you’ve done before?
No I mean if you for example leave room in your heart for supportive friends while not having supportive friends you’re gonna have a much rougher time than if you just close the wound.
Oh. Brutal. Maybe I needed to hear that, there was a part of me that waited for way too long for “found family” until recently. Maybe at least I don’t have to feel bad about giving up on that
It’s not a judgment on whether you should or shouldn’t, but the more you leave in place the standard o0enness to/reliance on a thing, the more not having it is going yo hurt/disable you. That’s not to say it’s a binary. There are creative adaptations and shit¹, and sometimes its smart to hold out, its not purely scar tissue/bleeding. More like having a room for someone to stay, and cleaning out their shit yo be a mechanical room or gym or torture dungeon or whatever. No value judgment here; I’m not your mom.
¹with their own cost in alienation and legibility
No, that’s sound. There’s a lot of lip service paid to how fundamentally wrong and what a moral failure it is to ever be lacking something. You know, like in the current crisis of meaning that men in my culture are widely experiencing. But very little discussion about what addressing that lack even looks like, so I appreciate your weighing in. Also for not judging my torture room.
It’s also survivorship bias, like a lot of the people that didn’t develop thick skins didn’t make it.
And the ones that did usually had people around them providing some love and support while they rebuilt their damaged self-esteem.
Or exactly the right drugs to get over it without killing them. Which is a really narrow margin and I must stress the right ones not just the right amount.
“He’s my emotional support drug dealer”
Mine sells diazepam but only if I have a prescription.
No, don’t have do that, you’re burning a great source!
What doesn’t kill you just rewires your brain to go into overdrive with panic at the slightest thought of anything even remotely resembling it.
Makes you stronger.
that’s why you need to see an electrician.
I saw someone trying to pep talk a misanthrope (lmao) recently pull out the 'ol survivorship bias stank and blah blah many paragraphs, but what stood out to me was a common saying:
they fall down, they break, they get up
Makes my skin crawl, disgusts me. “They get up” fucking hell, so many do not at all ever again. Or if they do it’s with permanent damage. I don’t just mean humans either, all life. Extinction rates back me up.
What doesn’t kill you will make you wish it had.
History written by the victors, or in this case, those who came out stronger. “My experience was xyz, therefore it’s everyone’s experience.”
I haven’t experienced what I would describe as “trauma” but I definitely feel like I’ve become more fragile as I’ve gone through life.
Who is trauma
Omg who is she, what is she wearing, do I know her from somewhere?
Thnx.
Didn’t kill me.
Didn’t make me stronger.
“Under pressure, you don’t rise to the occasion, you sink to the level of your training” -Bruce Lee or some Greek nerd or some shit
Who downvotes this?
Yah, the thick skin may be armor, but it shuts you off from so much. Some, some, of the bad stuff is easier to survive, but all the good out there has just as much trouble getting in.
I don’t think any given trauma recovery paradigm is without a lopsided benefit/drawback ratio. You’re left with scars, period.
