My therapist told me today, it’s night and day, comparing me now to when I first came in to see her. It’s like I’m transformed, she says. There’s a lot of mess still to deal with, but, like. 

I’ve said how the real me is taking over recently. That other person is being depreciated and packed away, and Azure is in control of their own body for once. It seems like this is a visible change.

I mentioned the nurse and some other interactions I’ve been having, and how it just seems like the last few weeks people are being nice to me to a degree that I’m not accustomed. What she said, it was… interesting. She described how the attitude one expresses toward one’s self serves to prompt others’ responses. It becomes this feedback loop, where if you treat yourself as someone deserving of respect, people tend to respect you. And, the reverse—well. I’ve been living the reverse for most of my life. 

It’s always been very clear to me how wrong I am, you see. Ergo the mask. It was only ever good for surface-level contact if that, maybe a few memorized scripts, because I can’t fake a damned thing. And when it faltered, yow did people make this clear.

Knowing how this works, it doesn’t help in itself, right. But it does help to clarify some of the dynamics I have experienced (particularly over that last decade, but really for the last 40 years). And why the more distraught I feel, the more toxic the situation seems to become. 

This whole concept sucks and is unfair and is gross, and it feels like the opposite of the way people should behave to a person in distress. But that seems to be the situation. And now, it seems I may be entering the early stages of the reverse kind of a loop—what with this new self-possession and what scant interactions I have experienced with others.

It’s so frickin’ weird, I said to her. It puts me off my guard every time. Why are people being kind? Why now? 

Well, it seems that may be part of it. It’s because I have found who I am. And, people seem to like them.