John Livingston

Raised to hate myself, writing to discover who I am beyond that. CPTSD and the long walk home.

[John Livingston @ourhiddenselves]

If you find yourself walking a path of earnest humility to discover more of who you are, and to fall in love with what you find, I am building The Individuation Archive for you.

[John Livingston @ourhiddenselves]

Raised to hate myself, writing to discover who I am beyond that. CPTSD and the long walk home.

[John Livingston @ourhiddenselves]

Writing is the sharing of language, of giving texture to the unimpressionable soul within, that points us home. Little by little. Lesson by lesson.

[John Livingston @ourhiddenselves]

@SenseAndNon @Kekius_Sage reframing and forgiveness can be powerful. for CPTSD specifically, the nervous system often needs to feel safe before the mind can do anything with it. the body leads. reason follows.

[John Livingston @ourhiddenselves]

the second half of life, as Hollis would call it, doesn't get easier. it gets more honest.

& for those of us untangling a dysregulating upbringing, steep are the ways in which love beckons.

[John Livingston @ourhiddenselves]

CPTSD isn't the name of what happened, but rather the clinical descriptor for what we carry from it.

[John Livingston @ourhiddenselves]

@AmodaMaa beautifully said. and for those of us whose nervous system was wired in chaos, the unknown first needs to become safe before it becomes vast.

[John Livingston @ourhiddenselves]

@SenseAndNon @Kekius_Sage Philosophy is beautiful, but when you wear it like a costume it becomes spiritual bypassing. The work I was describing lives in the body.

[John Livingston @ourhiddenselves]

I am the accumulated wound, the complex, and all of the adaptive strategies of a frightened child dressed up as a personality. Strip the social constructions and what is left for most of us is a lifelong reckoning with the self we betrayed to fit in. Then the second half of life begins.

[John Livingston @ourhiddenselves]

creosote after rain. something in the body loosens. the work starts there. not in an office, not at a desk.

[John Livingston @ourhiddenselves]

@brianmaierhofer (for those of us with CPTSD) the body has to feel safe before the mind can do anything with it. uncertainty tolerance is built in the nervous system first. the DMN work follows.

[John Livingston @ourhiddenselves]

@rashi_kakkar an LLM can't average its way to human feeling

[John Livingston @ourhiddenselves]

i found my greatest truths in my darkest parts

[John Livingston @ourhiddenselves]

With the light drizzle comes a certain creosote-soaked petrichor. Within comes the 9th league, a wind. I am moving towards an opening, to what remain unknown.

[John Livingston @ourhiddenselves]

Brutal are the ways that CPTSD can shape a person, and confusing.

I'm still learning what's mine, from what's theirs.

[John Livingston @ourhiddenselves]

the tricks a mind plays when it longs for connection,

distractions, noise, the next dose of comfort.

[John Livingston @ourhiddenselves]

potential in one hand.

something harder, less legible in the other.

[John Livingston @ourhiddenselves]

@conductr_ the gnawing turns inward and becomes self-absorbed, experience collapses and narrows, and gets mistaken for inherent character flaws by those around them. A role, an act. A creative reclamation of what has always been ours, a new role, a new act.

[John Livingston @ourhiddenselves]

You're not finding your way home. You're building it for the first time, from scratch, with no blueprint. Against everyone who needed you lost. That's not tragedy, that's your own lived mythology.