Got told to not belittle my own achievements bluntly in a very silly and unimportant context (a post that did well) and started tearing up because I suddenly thought about how I've really only known belittlement or a kind of ruthless pedestalization my entire adult life. I make myself a social leader among my friends by acting as self-actualized and as bold as possible as a shield, causing them to see me as more than human, while at the same time, those I've lived with or worked with professionally have pretty much always disrespected, belittled, and systematically isolated me; one compartment compensating for the other.
I honestly don't know how to cope with just being treated with normal respect and I think when it incidentally happens I mess it up by suddenly oversharing because I am just so used to being treated like shit or treated like a micro-celebrity depending on the context that the fleeting opportunity to be a human being is overwhelming and perplexing.
I've spent my entire life accumulating creative skills and forbidden knowledge and NDAs and lesser known powers of survival and theorems and half baked wonders just enough to light up the eyes of my friends but certainly not enough to be universally useful, and all of it exists in such a lonely and isolated compartment with no real escape route. I stopped sharing any of my art or music when I was a teenager on account of bullying and I can't share most of the work I'm actually proud of because it belongs to someone else.
I gravitated towards partners with a sick power fantasy they could take out on me back when I was still a looker because it's the most familiar mode of being in an old money family that neither I nor my parents have had any access in for a long long time now, but the baggage and the twisted impulses remain. People are there but they're so far away. I don't know how to be treated like a person.
