I am currently working through therapy in a trauma group. I’m desperately trying to process far too many emotions after really only opening them up last year. I’m unwell in some unspecified way and I’m pursuing diagnosis for mental health treatment on top of everything else.
I am normally pretty chill about men’s physicality. A butt slap, a squeeze of the waist, a hug that goes on too long and I tell them off and then move on with my day.
I couldn’t work out why instead of that I had a good cry. I didn’t really make much of a showing of telling him off either, I just wanted out. I did the thing of putting it up on Facebook mostly because I had the vague thought that men pay more attention to men and that was a way of having that happen.
I still feel like some of the comments on that status were over the top. But there was one that said they bet the guy in question was mortified that he’d got his timing wrong. That’s the thing, he really really did because twenty minutes earlier we’d had a conversation about how I wasn’t interested in anyone outside of my girlfriends right now because the world was a bit much, about how this was a positive choice as opposed to the negative feeling of inability that he’d discussed with me years ago.
Afterwards I cried pretty hard and I really wanted to message my pandemic friend to talk to him, but I couldn’t, because one of the truly awful things that happened last year was I lost my friend. The one who I could talk to about feelings and therapy and now we can’t and sure, getting groped is fucking shitty but I really, really hate reaching for someone who isn’t there anymore.
I’m raw and skinless and the wind is cold and everything just keeps on piling on. Presumably it doesn’t really, presumably I’ve just been stressed to fuck since November and everything has just felt awful since. I just want to climb out of this please? Or get back to a place where this is becomes manageable.