since I'm feeling voluble;

I grew up with this idea that I HAD to be special in order to be worthwhile to myself AND to be treated by others in a way that was safe, comfortable and dignified.

My world, as a kid, was about being denied safety, comfort or dignity, so I assumed that either I'd failed to be worthwhile enough (and I was frequently told how stupid, ugly, weak, fundamentally evil, etc I was, which definitely helped jam that home) OR that the goalposts had been moved again to engineer someone ELSE being the special safe kids where I was the convenience. WHO I actually was, wasn't important because what WAS important was me doing something an adult or peer wanted.

To make this worse, I'd been in a terrible accident while very young - tread water for hours to avoid drowning, nearly lost a hand while stuck and trapped - and everything about school, about having to go right back there to be unsafe day after day after fucking day, felt like being stuck, trapped, treading water and waiting to get out of class, out of school for the summer, out of grade into high school, out of high school into college, with no promise of ever getting to actually SWIM instead.

ADHD meant I'd feel terrible just to feel involved in boring ass dreck so vital to the adults and my peers, and trying to avoid punishment for being an out of control little rage monster meant I directed pretty significant amounts of anger inwards as self hate. All of this while being underfed and maybe underslept.

And of course it got to be force of habit.

The real world is about not NEEDING to be special to be worthy (it'd be literally impossible to be special in all possible ways especially by comparison to a world full of people likely to be way better than me at any one or another thing I do, which makes the whole thing pretty academic) and certainly not about my innate worth being reflected in how safe, comfortable or acknowledged I am.

This is pretty easy to say right now while I'm in my apartment at the end of a day off with enough food readily available, without anything external "saying" how awful, unsafe or merely convenient I am. Whereas when I'm stuck in traffic, treading water at work, or trapped looking for a new job, I feel bombarded by the old messages and I just don't have enough emotional resources to resist them.