[CW: Mental Health, Racism, Suicidality, and Trauma]
Context:
Anyone who has read some of my posts that go into personal detail, Iām sure you know that Iāve been in a stressful situation for some time now. Iāve been unemployed for a bit, seeking out jobs and struggling to land one, and receiving mutual aid assistance to adequately keep me afloat. In the first post I made in reaching out for mutual aid assistance, I vaguely refer to an unexplained āmental health crisisā that got me in these circumstances to begin with. Well, now, Iām gonna talk about it because the context is relevant for the explaining what āThisā in the title means.
On February 10 of this year, I left my complex to go to a restaurant to get some food for the night. Upon leaving, on the porch, I saw one of the residents. He seemed all friendly and kind, and he didnāt show a hint of a bad mood and even happily greeted me. Upon coming back home, it was around 6 PM, and I still see him on the porch, but this time, heās livid.
He told me that he noticed a mess on the shared kitchen stove, and he seemed to be very accusatory in thinking that I was responsible for it. There are 6 people in this complex, all who use the same kitchen, so it seemed there would be a possibility that it couldāve been someone else, but he was really centering his frustration with this towards me. He tried to gather just ONE piece of evidence to figure out if it was me who caused this, and apparently this was enough for him to lose his shit. He asked me:
āDid you use the kitchen today?ā
In this situation, I said āYes, but-ā, and then he got mad and shouted at me saying to āclean it the fuck upā and that āWe donāt live in a dirty house here.ā, and this fucked with my mind really harshly. Itās incredibly reminiscent of how my parents had a tendency to put me down for every shortcoming that occurred in my childhood and even my early adulthood, and they always assumed bad faith. If I fucked something up around my parents, they would assume I did it on purpose, with the intent to sabotage, and I got yelled and shouted at, and harshly degraded for it. This just sunk in memories of how Iāve had to endure treatment like this throughout my whole life, even beyond my parents.
Let me clarify a few details:
- I did use the kitchen, but I mentioned the time of arriving back home at roughly 6 PM for a reason. I used the kitchen around 10 AM earlier that day, and that was it.
- At the time of the incident, I didnāt consider this, but later on, I realized that it definitely wasnāt even me who left the stovetop mess, which makes sense because I take adequate care to deal with it every time Iām done using the stovetop. I know that it wasnāt me because I put away the dishes after I washed mine when I was done eating around that 10 AM time. When I came in the kitchen a bit later, like possibly around 3 PM, simply to get some water to drink, I noticed more dishes in the dish rack. This means that someone besides me definitely used the kitchen before this altercation. Obviously, the dishes didnāt just show up themselves.
- I sense that it could possibly be due to a sense of bigotry that he felt so inclined to get upset with me in particular. There couldāve been ageism too. Iām black and queer, and this resident is an older white man who said the n-word with a hard R in front of me, although not at me, and since Iām the youngest resident in the complex, he might also be putting me down due to age.
- The very next day, immediately after I woke up, I walked into the kitchen to make breakfast and saw a huge mess of crumbs and shit on the stovetop, and the āstovetop on, hot surfaceā light on, and I JUST WOKE UP AND LEFT MY ROOM.
With all of this in mind, for him to be so aggressive, and not only speak as if heās automatically assuming that I was to blame for this incident, but also to assume that, if I were to mess up the stove, that I did it with bad intentions. This explains why he went with phrasing that assumes it was done out of malice rather than ignorance. This explains why he felt prompted to say āWe donāt live in a dirty house here.ā, which comes at an angle assuming that he thinks I knew of the mess and was just like āWell, fuck! I donāt give a shit about cleaning THAT up, so Iāll just leave it!ā instead of, in the case of me actually making the mistake, that it simply couldāve been done by accident.
I was so distraught when this happened that I actually became deeply suicidal, and I immediately performed impulsive actions because I thought my life was over because of how bad I felt. Some may say āIt was just a small mistake. Itās no big deal!ā, but to me, this was deeper than that. Like I said, my parents and other people have put me down and shamed me and believed me to be incompetent and worth nothing. Any incident for someone to get really upset with me over a mistake I did is something I see as a part of a series of examples of my āworthlessnessā as a human being, and the intense emotion this man had put far out of my ability to properly reason about why I should possibly carry on.
I threw away a lot of my personal belongings, I called my boss and told her I am quitting without notice, and I just lied in bed and was going to go to a department store the next day to pick up a rope to end my life by hanging. I really wanted to make this seem like it was irreversible. I also didnāt bother reaching out for help because I felt extremely and actively suicidal, and I considered the fact that my parents, whenever I brought up suicidal ideation to them, literally told me things like āSuicidal people donāt reach out for help. They just go ahead and kill themselves! You just want attention!ā in the past. This led me to believe that suicide was the only way forward because the suicidal feelings just seemed so bleedingly genuine.
(Un)fortunately, when I woke up, I decided, despite the moves I had made last night, I was going to carry on, and that led me to here. I was able to get caught up in some ways and even repurchase many of my belongings. But thatās just the backstory and context for you to know exactly the details of why what happened today pissed me off.
What Happened Today:
I go into the kitchen to cook some dinner tonight, and I take a pot to boil some spaghetti. I look in the pot, and I see a ton of stains, mostly red and brown in color. Immediately, it dawned upon me, and I got extremely pissed when I realized what this meant.
The older man that got pissed off on February 10 used this pot literally two days ago, and I saw him using it. He was using it to make a huge pot of chili, as this was the biggest pot the kitchen has, and to make it worse, I was the one who BOUGHT THE FUCKING POT. Obviously, this kitchen stuff is for community use, but thereās some layer of that factor that makes it seem even more awful. In addition to the residue on the pot, another piece of evidence that it was definitely him is that the huge pot is rarely even used, so I highly doubt that, within the span of two days, someone else couldāve been responsible.
The pot was pretty fucking awfully stained. I had to wash it out extremely well to see the markings on it, as there were lines that measured the amount of water in cups and liters, and I could hardly continue cooking my dinner with how mad I had become.
What this tells me is that this huge piece of shit who got mad at āmeā (assumed) for leaving a mess in the kitchen, literally fucking left a huge mess on a dish without washing it out properly. To think that this man is the one that drove me into this crisis and has the audacity to pull a hypocritical move like that fucking made me insanely angry.
Iām disgusted, grossed out, and just completely torn that this entire incident has led up to this, and Iām still not over it, hours later.
Itās no surprise that a man who got extremely vexed with me simply because I said I like Iron Maiden more than Judas Priest would be this fucking terrible.
I am often accused of shit I didnāt do and have absolutely no mind to doāand no matter how hard I insist I didnāt do anything, the accusative shit persists.
One day this awful fucking person in a Facebook group decided I was scamming the group to buy meth. They āknew,ā too, because addicts will of course say or do anything for dope, and theyāre a former meth addict too, so of course theyāre right that Iām lying. I absolutely had a meltdownāmy knee-jerk way of responding to shit like this is to melt down, the idea being, they will take it to suggest genuineness, but it never worksāand even after screaming insane voice messages about how they were making me want to kill myself, they persisted.
This other little shit from the group kept calling me a scammer, and when I said she was making me fucking suicidal, you know what she did? She replied with the link to this trans suicide hotline. What an absolutely smug, heartless response. And these people were in an āAnarchist Buy Nothingā group.
The one instigating this clearly has brain worms. One bit of their āevidenceā was that I had posted a request for a guitar in the group, and when someone replied offering me one, Iā¦didnāt reply to them?
They also screenshotted this comment from a little Two Minutes Hate that took place after I left the group. Someone who had responded to a request I made for wigs, almost a year before, lamented how ācoldā I was, and how I made another request of them or something, I forget whatāwhich they never expressed any opposition to. So Iām such a mean piece of shit because I wasnāt in a good mood, and because I asked something they couldāve said fucking no to.
And then a year later or so I start getting tone policed in another group, because I wasnāt happy with the patronizing tone of a comment on a post I made about looking for a car. One of the admins of that Anarchist Buy Nothing group chimed in to say how much of a nasty, rude person I amāsomething she had absolutely no right to say. When I DMād her calling her out for being a lying bitch, she screenshotted it and commented with the screenshot attached. I was kicked out of the group.
All of these people were aware that I was trans, and homeless, but they didnāt care. I wasnāt one of the trans lives who mattered.