Modern American Friendship Is Transactional & Competitive | Love is Not an Accepted Currency
an essay by Daphne
Modern American Friendship Is Transactional & Competitive | Love is Not an Accepted Currency
an essay by Daphne
This is my trauma, through and through: everyone is a competitor in America and trans women have the least privilege (a notion unacknowledged and oft deemed insulting to others). My counselors are still hearing everything I honestly say and asserting that a non-medical route is healthiest for me.
My disability is confusing to people who want me to strive for my own place—for how great I am face-to-face—to other people, I seem quite intelligent, they presume that must be enough. I’m also a kindest and most heartfully rewarding person to speak with. In person, by language, I am able to convey myself quite well.
Mentally, I am unable to take care of myself. I’m fighting for the assisted living I need despite the confusion… and I will get it once I’m run through a brain scan of some sort.
Through great amounts of PTSD, TBI (blue lotus flower abuse), and the resulting organizational dysfunctions; I cannot do math—my brain hurts often when thinking about the many stressors I am supposed to tackle on my own and without a shoulder to lean on or cry on.
Neither hope nor love is a currency accepted in our friendship trade. Hopelessness is the way of life under Donald Trump. Everyone is competing about who has it worst.
Traumatization in every direction has turned my life into a mess of pain and suffering in every direction I turn; American culture is about pretense, posturing, coolness, and pretending we’re not all disabled. It’s about being hot and pretty.
Nobody wants to be my friend, or help me, because the help I need is friendship. But friendship is earned by what people take from each other.
I’m being advised to take things slow. I’m being advised to not traumatize myself by seeking a route free of this horrendous, homeless loneliness I find myself within. Psychology would like me to ignore the relational nature of my trauma. It’s teaching me to develop practices where I can cognitively train myself to be okay with sorrowful loneliness—to detox from the trauma of my past by recognizing the signs which trigger me and finding a means to use mental pathways to de-stress.
I just need a nap when I have to cry. I’d rather not do pills, but I will now. Still, the people I work with do not suggest anything other than having the option to take something on the severe occasion I need a counteragent to diffuse my time-bomb of sorrow. I’d rather cry and sleep. I’d rather do it near a friend.
I’d much rather hold my daughter and be safe for once in a longest while.
My inner-heard external voices are loneliness manifest. They are my own voice. It’s about not having friends. They don’t tell me to do anything—they make false guesses about what others might be thinking of me, which always disappoints and traumatizes me further.
Ahead, my path looks like this: I will be fighting tooth and nail until someone puts my head in a device which can clarify my TBI. That’s a traumatic brain injury. And I will be seeking a new ID, a primary care provider. Then I will be planning for a route towards having clothes, a living situation, and a job which is appropriate.
I will need some form of caretaking. I will need an easy job.
I need assisted living and I know this. I need it because loneliness and sorrow turned into walls of traumatization. It’s about isolation, abandonment, and betrayal from all directions atop my TBI. It’s about me having been an abused trans woman that nobody wants to do anything but blame for getting sick.
Why do so many trans women kill themselves?
It’s because America is psychotic for psychiatry’s way of problematizing our relational issues. It’s about the denial of trans women’s place as people who exist beyond mental delusion.
I’m not delusional. People who think gender-incongruent (trans) folks are a construct of our own imaginations are delusional. We’ve been two spirit teachers, eunuchs, forest fairies, and cross-dressers. We’ve never been respected enough as the valid human expressions we are.
Shame on you all—is what I think.
I miss you all—is what I feel.
The lack of one brave person to be my friend because it would feel good—that’s why I cry so often.
I can’t wait to have a cat.
A Relational Epistemology of The Mind - The Most Important Research of The Last Century to My Humble Estimation
Please Do Not Use Blue Lotus Flower - Blue Lotus Flower Is Something We Need Science About
The Science of Gender Incongruence - A Call for People to Open Their Eyes
Daphne’s Hometree - What We All Need
