To Prove Something

A short blog; but one that was calling to me to be written.

Content Warning: Self-Harm, Substance Abuse

Just scrolling on TikTok on a late Monday afternoon–as one does.

With "A Dream" by Flatsound playing in the background

Okay... ouch.

I shaped my For You Page algorithm specifically to only show me the hopeful, inspiring, poetic slideshows, not the heart-dropping, soul-splitting, devastating ones. What is this doing here??

Oh well. Here we are anyway.

If you're like me, you spend your life proving things. I sometimes reflect on whether every decision I have made was done to prove something to someone. I will go to extreme lengths to prove myself. Dedicate hours of my time; dedicate my life.

When I was younger, I felt that one day I had to grow up to be extraordinary, or else nothing would be worth anything. I feel a lot of pressure to live up to that expectation now. The pressure of my own standards weighs on me heavier than anybody else's, though outside expectations–whether real or imagined–still pile on. It all builds up to fuel my inability to relax; my internalized shame concerning a reality where I am simply ordinary, simply nobody. Although I never felt as if there was something wrong with anyone else being that, I must remind myself as I work to dissolve this internalized shame that there is nothing wrong with myself being that either. I'm starting to realize that my compulsive need to stay busy and preoccupied 24/7 is, in itself, a self-destructive behaviour.

More importantly and more pervasively though, I've always felt a compulsion–pathological, almost–to prove my suffering. Prove it to others, but once again, equally or more so to prove it to myself.

I've done unsavoury actions in favour of proving my pain. I'm sorry to my elementary school friends to whom I laughed as I joked about how "water hurts" while revealing to them my slashed forearm. I'm sorry to the stranger I met my first time going to the club who wanted to kiss me but ended up listening to me unwarrantedly divulge my substance abuse habit instead.

That was all a while ago now. Most of all, I'm sorry to myself for the years I spent wading and plunging deeper into my own despair; the years I spent feeding that hungry despair with the media I consumed, the things I surrounded myself with, and my comfort in what was familiar to me–misery.

I can't recall whether it was in a therapy appointment or psychiatry appointment, but I remember once being asked the question, "why do/did you self-harm?" I looked inside myself and searched for the reason why, but I came up short. Amidst my struggle to identify why, the therapist/doctor began to name off a list of reasons for me to choose from. "To feel in-control, to distract yourself from the emotional pain with physical pain, to bring yourself back from dissociation and remind yourself you're real, to punish yourself, to feel something, etc." Any of those felt like they could be true, sure. But none of them felt like the real, exact reason why for me.

Eventually, I realized that a key reason as to why I personally engaged in self-destructive behaviours like self-harm and substance abuse was to prove my own suffering to myself. Engaging in one of these behaviours gave me tangible, physical proof of my pain–proof that could not be refuted, minimized, or dismissed. A marker of a true low. A marker of severe pain. A marker of going through something really, really bad.

My running theory is that this need to prove my suffering stems from going through trauma that is normalized and not widely accepted as valid in our society. As VCUG survivors, our trauma is treated as a normal byproduct of something that was supposedly meant to benefit us in the long run. Our experiencing VCUG as traumatic is treated like a fluke in the system–a flaw of ours for perceiving it as traumatic. Subsequently, we are labelled as "sensitive," "dramatic," and "attention-seeking," among other things. Our trauma is not discussed or mentioned so we treat it as a secret that we carry with us throughout our lives. The secrecy that this trauma is treated with fosters a culture of shame surrounding it. This culture of shame is fueled by the reactions of others to our trauma. We are often gaslit, dismissed, and minimized each time we bring it up to the people in our life, let alone medical professionals. Because of all of this, we grow up not knowing that the events we experienced (i.e., VCUG) were traumatic. We go years living as people with severe trauma but not knowing it, so we feel like there must be something wrong with us; we feel like we must be broken and defective; we feel like we must prove our suffering somehow. When nobody believes your pain, not even yourself, of course you feel like you have to prove it to them.

I haven't really engaged in self-destructive behaviours much since finding community and relational healing in Unsilenced. I want this blog to be a reminder–tangible proof, if you will–that our pain is valid and our trauma is not nonsensical. Any reaction to this merciless procedure is a completely warranted one. None of us deserved this and none of this should have ever happened to us. My favourite thing about this community is that everybody understands the suffering that comes with being a VCUG survivor–it need not be explained. Although our advocacy efforts require us to justify and explain our suffering, I'm eternally grateful to have a space I can always return to where I don't have to prove my pain to anyone.