A Neglected Child

Toxic masculinity, suicide, and bullying.

Heavy trigger warning
This is a completely raw unfiltered emotional story of releasing a childhood wound. It covers topics like suicide, toxic masculinity in women, and bullying – without being rational.

Please don’t read this if you’re not open to being confronted emotionally.

Secondly, I’m sharing this as close to the unfiltered version that I wrote it in as is possible, because that’s what true emotions are like. They’re messy, they’re triggering, and they need to be shared with yourself in this way.

However, we tend to make problems that we overcome into a heroes journey, while the dark moments are anything but pretty or epic.
I hope that sharing my pain in this way will prevent someone from killing themselves; because I’m done with pretending that suicide isn’t a huge issue in today’s society. And if we don’t at least speak up about problems, we’re choosing to let them continue.

The Morning

I asked the woman of my dreams if she was open for a conversation through a DM, after which the rest of the day was spent in an ever increasing agony. It started with feeling insecurity and then the inner fight started.

The protector started speaking on my behalf. He said she wasn’t safe to be around:

She’s ghosting you again. She’s just like all other women that have neglected you. There’s no difference between her and the rest of them, they all just see you as a utility. They just want you to die for them and keep you around when it’s convenient for their purposes. But nobody actually cares about you. Everyone is just out for themselves. That doesn’t make women a problem, they’re the same as men. They just don’t own up to it, they just place the blame on men. Thinking they’re superior because they get the time in society to actually sit with their emotions.
Meanwhile as a man you’re supposed to just handle it all without issues. Even as a child, your explosive emotions are seen as a threat that requires containment. You’re not supposed to express emotions as a man – that makes you a threat.
Unless you’re expressing emotions that make people feel at ease of course. Everybody loves the laughing caring man. Smiling is allowed, but not too much because then it’s lecherous. And don’t look too long at someone, because another man will see you as a threat that needs to be fought, while a woman will see you as a rapist. It’s best to just look down and mind your own business. It’s these kind of rules that keep you safe. By keeping to these rules, you won’t get exiled. Because showing emotions that aren’t appreciated, are a burden to the community. And when you’re a burden, you get separated; banished – a timeout is the best version you can experience. The worst version is that you get shamed, blamed, and guilted until you submit. Therefore the only safe way to exist in a group is to disappear and not get noticed.

“But”, my heart calmly replies: “she hasn’t said anything. You don’t know what’s going through her mind and heart. These assumptions aren’t beneficial to get together with the woman you love”.

“That’s fine” the protector replies, “we don’t need her. She doesn’t choose -”

“We don’t need her, but we want to be with her”, the heart interrupts: “This is why we sent the message remember?”.

The now heated protector replies: “Yes, but this isn’t safe. It’s causing us to get blocked in moving forward with our own life. She’s the reason we don’t progress. That’s not her fault, but we need to cut our losses. We can’t handle this stress, we must initiate defensive protocols to survive.”

“No.” the heart says with rigid determination.

The protector with gritted teeth, ready to lash out replies: “What do you mean ‘no’?”

“There’s no threat”, the heart concludes.

Photo by Zdeněk Macháček on Unsplash

The arguments of the protector get stronger over the day, as I try to distract myself and avoid the chaos in my head. As I do this, I’m not aware anymore of what’s going on. The intense fight in my head causes me to dissociate from my emotions altogether. I retreat to standard protocol in order to function – exactly as I’ve been taught.

This is what it means to be a man. You repress your emotions in order to fight another day. Except that I’m not following that programming anymore, so my subconscious is a war zone. I’m getting physical symptoms of distress as a result. My shoulders tense up so much, that I get a headache. The activity that I can’t name in my head, is sucking my energy away.

The protector demands and bellows that I must reach out again to the woman of my dreams, he doesn’t understand why we don’t resolve the situation. He doesn’t understand where the threat is, but he knows that her reply is the solution.

“Truly it’s the only solution”, he says. We must explain this to her. Something. Anything that will create that she will reply. We need to apply some type of force in order to relax again.

But the heart remains calm and denies us to act on this. It was tried before and it made us look like a fool. We followed your advice already and it failed. You have no more authority.

The protector tries to argue, but soon realizes himself that he has no footing.

The defense breaks, leaving me in a state of despair.

All I can do is wait. And I’m too exhausted to get anything done, but I try anyway. Until I physically can’t handle it any more and nearly fall asleep on the couch. Defeated I move myself to my bed and sleep – a welcome relief, but also an empty reprieve knowing that when I wake up I’ll be energized to continue the same pattern again.

The Evening

When I wake up, I have energy. My headache is gone, but somewhere in the back of my head, the issue isn’t resolved. I ignore it, I need to make food, there are priorities. After food, I attempt to dissociate through doom scrolling – telling myself that I’m educating myself. But it’s false and I know it: I can’t focus as a result. So I switch to listening music, which helps for a bit. But soon that also doesn’t work. Lost in confusion and scrambling to find what else I can do, I switch back to watching TikTok. I get inspiration telling me that I need to focus on my enterprise. Finally! Guidance.

The Night

It’s not what I wanted to hear and definitely not what I felt like doing, but now I have something to focus on. So I move myself out of my usual environment and go sit in the car. Armed with pen, paper and phone – I drive to the village to make use of the street lamps there to write.

It seems to work, I’m inspired. This is also something I care about deeply. It’s on equal level to my passion for being with her, so it drowns out the chaos. I create a mind map to note my ideas, but as I get to the point of actually writing – my energy falls flat again. I’m aware of this pattern though. I’ll do what I’ve done before and just go for a drive to clear my mind. It worked before.

And so I drive aimlessly. I enjoy it at first, but the longer I drive, the more I lose interest in things. The subtle depression kicks in, but I’m unaware of it. It just translates into an equally subtle rage, making me want to drive faster and take the curves of the road with more intensity. The G-forces of driving match the experience I have inside of me and therefore the world starts making a bit more sense again. I know that something isn’t right, but I just don’t know what. My dissociation and compartmentalization system has been triggered sufficiently for me by this point, to no longer know myself. I’m effectively unconscious – a zombie. And how I’m driving isn’t an issue at this time of night on a country road: nobody’s around. There’s no danger.

Photo by Ilyas Dautov on Unsplash

Until I suddenly get a flash of a vision so vivid that it feels like a glimpse into the future. One where I don’t follow the road anymore as it curves. One where I see the trees come closer to the windshield and where the tree branches surround me, as the car starts flying off the edge of the mountain. The feeling of freedom, from the knowing of my impending release washes over me with a deep satisfaction. It would end the torment; finally. What’s the point of life anyway. All that I need to do is... nothing. It’s so simple… Within a minute this can all be over.

In the second after that vision, I return to my body in shock. The dissociation broke. I’m aware of my surroundings now; and I do want to live! But I’m terrified: the car is still moving. The bend in the road is coming closer, my instincts kick in and my body acts without my input. The car slows down and moves through the bend gracefully. The terror I’m in causes me to slow the car down even more. I desperately want to get out of the car, but there’s no place to stop. I can’t stop in the middle of the road: that would make me a burden. I must continue. It seemingly takes an hour before I am able to park the car next to the road. But in physical reality it was about 30 seconds. Within this time, the tears already built up in my eyes, but I needed to remain focused. The protector whispers: “See. This is why you need me”.

When I finally park the car, I immediately turn off the engine. Afraid of the murder weapon I suddenly find myself in, I fill the next hour with sobbing outside of the car.

I thought I was past the suicidal thoughts, but after the first half hour of sobbing, I realized that I was afraid to return home: the origin of my desire to die originated from when I was 8 years old. But until this moment, I thought my will to live was destroyed at the age of 16. Apparently it runs even deeper.

Something else happens as well as I continue purging this history. Since I’m not resisting the event, and I’m not trying to make it end quicker than it needs. I yet again was able to clear some of my subconscious burdens and remember who I am at heart.

I realized that the reason I’ve stayed alive this long is for one simple reason: I love people.

Before I was 8 years old, I was a very social and outgoing person. Which is a mindfuck when you have a protector telling you that people are essentially evil. It just showed me once again, that my neglectful feminist mother and my Catholic school programmed me in ways that annihilated my confidence and self esteem.

And until now, I couldn’t really say a bad thing about my mother, because the kid in me was still protecting his mother.

She was the only one I could rely on back then, even though she neglected me and didn’t remove me from a toxic situation when I was begging her to bring me to safety. She just told me that I needed to follow what the teachers said. And the teachers just separated me to do their jobs efficiently. Meanwhile my class beat me up in a variety of ways: physically, mentally, and emotionally – the playground was the place I fled more often than I can recall.

It got so bad, that one day I was sitting in an alley after having fled from school; deeply stuck in sorrow. I didn’t want to go home, because there I’d be scolded by my mother for not listening to the teacher. And I didn’t want to return to school, to be having a “class discussion” that effectively caused the class to hate me even more. I considered jumping into the channel to drown myself, but then remembered I could swim and that people would probably get me out before I would die. I considered running away and living on the street, but I knew the adults would spot me and bring me home. And because I lived in a foreign country... nobody would understand my situation. How could they? Not even my own mother did.

So I did the only thing I could. I created a safe place for my true expression deep within me, a compartment where nobody but me could touch it. Not my family, teachers, friends – just me. And on that day I vowed to myself that I would leave the country that denied my true existence the first moment I got. It was the day I became a rebel against the system. The day I learnt to take care of myself – because nobody else did. And it’s the reason why I only feel safe when I’m alone, while equally craving a mother figure in my life...

This is why the protector was so desperate for receiving validation from the woman of my dreams; after I reached out to her. He just wanted comfort and was still desperate like a child, while feeling slighted about the past.

But I don’t want this woman to be my mother. I want our relationship to exist without those burdens. I want to stand side by side with her as we walk into the future.

So as much as it sucks... I have to accept that I became an orphan on that day, surrounded by controlling women telling me how to live my life. It was the day I voluntarily chose to lose my mother. And by the age of 35 I was finally brave enough, to cut that person out of my life for good.

Photo by Daiga Ellaby on Unsplash

Now I finally understand the deeper layer to my conviction to change society. And I understand why I never acted on killing myself in the hundreds of scenarios I envisioned before. The only person that was allowed to reach my heart and make that decision, was a very specific version of me: one who was by himself, outside of the Netherlands, and in an environment where he was allowed to express himself without restrictions.

It’s the same reason why my ex couldn’t help me with this, despite 10 years of marriage. She also projected controlling behavior onto me. And it’s the reason why I know that men aren’t the problem to our dysfunctional communities – mentality is the problem. Toxic masculinity lies within us all, because it’s a systemic wound in the western world. It’s why we colonized, burnt witches, hung men, waged (‘holy’) wars...

Controlling the other is the way for us to avoid truly looking at our own pain. And that is why my heart wouldn’t allow me to reach out again to the woman of my dreams. I refuse to become the scourge that plagues society. I fucking hate people who try to impose their will on another and tell them how to live; and this effectively made me hate myself as well. That rot lived inside of me. It was the only way I could survive back then – I had to take on some of the problem in order to hide in plain sight. There was no other way to stay alive and I didn’t know how to successfully kill myself back then.

But that time is finally over. I’m finally clean of that rot... I survived society. And I can stand on my own two feet.

---

The Purpose

I told myself I would write this out as I was leaning on the hood of my car after my heart finally calmed down. Suicide is such a huge issue right now, and I’ve survived suicidal thoughts for 20 28 years. I’m finally able to express how I do it. So it might just safe someone’s life.

Meanwhile I expect the response on this piece to be:

• False sympathy that tries to make me a safe part of the community, because I’m supposedly a danger.

• A projection of rage because I do not conform to the norm of repression or the narrative that women are inherently angelic.

• Bleeding hearts that don’t deal with their own emotions and try to heal me, in a way to avoid healing themselves.

But guess what? I’ve been imprisoned for suicidal thoughts before – I’m very intentional about not sharing things that will get a community to take my freedom away again. So just to be clear: I don’t need help with this. That I’m able to write this, shows that I have enough command over the situation to manage my own life. But I could use assistance - because life is tough right now. However I’m tougher, I know I can handle more. So honestly, I’d rather have that you help the suicidal people that are in your environment than me. Or that you hang around until I publish what I intend to do with the Dragons Tails:

And I know that I’m not 100% healthy, but honestly, I don’t know what a safe response would look like. It’s why I advocate for solitude. The greatest problem in my life has been community. Everyone feels entitled to project their opinion on you when you’re feeling shit. It’s either that or awkward silence where people want to act like you don’t exist, because you’re confronting them with something they don’t know how to deal with. True compassion is rare; even though it’s at the heart of humanity. Our communities need to be reset and rebuilt to normalize this again.

An Epilogue

Thank you for reading and holding space. I considered writing an extensive epilogue that explains that I don’t see women as the scourge of humanity and over explain myself as a way to appease and make people feel comfortable. That’s what I’ve always done: pleasing people.

Just to be clear though, I’m not shaming, blaming, or guilting anyone here. I understand that everyone has a background – including my mother and the teachers I had – and that they were acting based on what they thought was best at the time. But equally, I have been locked on a balcony by my sister with a cigarette around this age, because she too was raised by a mother who saw men as inferior. Thereby feeling justified in her behavior. And if I don’t speak up about the issues around feminism and the shadow that is being projected by women who haven’t addressed their pain; we will never break the cycles that cause violence.

Repressing emotions isn’t a male attribute. It’s the attribute of those who were raised in a Christian based culture. A culture where you’re told that you need salvation, because you’re inherently evil. A culture that says you need to listen to a leader, rather than yourself. You could call this patriarchy, but it’s not a father who chooses to lead a household that needs to be blamed. It’s not even Christianity that needs to be shamed. There is no guilt that needs to be passed around – the true issue is a lack of accountability.

The only way to stop these cycles is by healing yourself and then standing firm in your individuality, as you reflect back to society what they don’t want to see. It won’t make you popular, but it will make you the change that this world needs.