It's like when I realized that actual incidents of my parents completely losing it at at me or hitting me were relatively uncommon, but they snapped at me or denigrated me fairly often, so any time I was around them I was braced for the full fireworks display -- and I was *always* around them, except when I was at school, isolated at home, or the few occasions I actually got to be on my own. School was a similar thing (and I was always at school, except...).

Such that fencing changed my life not just because I was doing something spatially oriented or felt acknowledged as an athlete for the first time in my life (like I used to think) but simply because I wasn't in that dynamic.

This week I've been thinking about how because of my childhood's focus on worthiness, earning, deserving and punishment, I parsed all of the brutal requirements of school, set waking hours, having to clean etc as punishment. None of it was phrased more accurately as stuff someone had just decided to do and which I was stuck with, and I think I also gravitated towards the punishment interpretation because that implied some agency to escape. It certainly dovetailed into the idea that I'd do Something Right and escape all this miserable bullshit forever. I definitely took this interpretation of being punished into an adult life of set hours, commute, day job etc -- and it doesn't help that at some places (like in 2017) some of the trappings of adulthood *were* used as someone's power trip.

It also fits into this belief that everyone else is more wanted and valued than me, fits into the sort of competitive aspect my schools had. Now I'm realizing that most of the other kids in my schools were like me; they really didn't feel exceptionally safe, they didn't necessarily want to be there, they didn't actually enjoy it. This sure seems to carry over into work as well (there are how many songs about how everyone looks forward to not having a day job on the weekends?). Heck, this describes the teachers, and their bulk handling and favoritism, partly because they were as with any other day job, going through the motions.

Which gets back to the punishment/worthiness thing. When these people lashed out, they lashed out from the only worldview *they* knew, *they* had all these assumptions about punishment, worth, deserving.

So much of my worldview was a complete lie and there was literally no way I could *not* have bought into it.