Content warning: discussion of assault
This is not my first post about some of the trauma I've experienced or the first post about my suffering with depression and anxiety. However, this has a been a development that I feel like I have to share with everyone to let anyone who has gone through this know that you are not alone.
Over the weekend, my mom let me know that the mother of the guy who assaulted me in high school had died. She was very upset, but I honestly could not have cared less. Yes, her son and I had been friends prior to the attack, but that does not negate what he did to me. It felt like my mom wanted me to be as upset as she was, but I felt nothing. Like yeah, that sucks for their family but oh well. I don't think my mom fully understand the ramifications of that attack on me and how I have viewed the world ever since. There is no better term to describe how I felt about that lady passing than apathy.
Apathy describes how I feel a lot when bad things happen to those who have hurt me. It also describes how I feel when good things happen to those who have hurt me. I don't know if this is a normal reaction. That's outside the realm of my expertise. I like to think it might be, but I don't know for sure.
My mom told me about a former best friend who was having her second kid. Ok, cool. Good for her I guess. I don't care. I really do not care. I think my mom fails to realize that once someone has hurt me badly enough, they are functionally dead to me. I don't care about them. I don't care about their lives, good or bad. When I moved away, I tried to leave a lot of that behind me. I tried so hard to close that door, but my mom just won't let me escape those memories. She brings them up frequently, even after I have told her I don't want to talk about that.
It's because of conversations like this that I want to move even further away. Another chance, another slim possibility, to finally get away from all of those horrible memories from high school. To whoever says high school is the best time of their lives, I call bulls**t. Those were the worst four years of my life, and I have been in graduate school for five years. High school was more stressful and more traumatizing than pursuing a literal PhD. I was an outcast. I only had a few friends. Freshman year, after my knee surgery and after a friend died, my best friend of the time decided we weren't friends anymore. There were so many fake friends who used me just so they could copy my homework. They didn't actually like me. Once I put my foot down, they rejected me entirely. One of them accused me of cheating in AP Biology even though I sat right in front of the teacher who hated me.
There are very few people I went to high school with that I even remotely give a damn about. Those were the few that weren't mean to me or that didn't make fun of me or use me just to copy my homework. The rest of them can rot in hell. They are functionally dead to me. I don't care about their lives or their children. My mother fails to understand this concept at the most surface level. She is still so deeply entrenched in the lives of those she went to high school with, but I moved four hours away for a reason. I stopped caring about those people in September of my senior year. I wanted to get out and get away and never look back. Because of my mom, I am forced to look back. I can never fully close that door, and I hate it. I just want my past to stay in the past. I have grown so much as a person since then, but I keep having to relive those days, and I hate it. I don't want to end up like so many I went to high school with, perpetually reliving their "glory days." I want to move on. I want to close that door.
The only people who say their high school years were their best years are the ones who peaked in high school. That is not a compliment