At the time of my last entry I was working at a bakery, but have since moved on to a place with much better conditions and work environment and pays me even more than I've ever made before. I have worked in multiple bakeries prior to this one and have experience that I had hoped would get me promoted to management, but the upper management decided to promote a 19 year old with barely any experience working or being out of high school with no leadership skills whatsoever. Within a few days of her officially becoming a manager I managed to find a new job in a factory/plant type enviorment which I have to come to realize I actually heavily prefer. I get a break every 2 hours, get to listen to music and watch videos while I work, and there's absolutely no customer service and hardly any team work involved. Easy access to bathrooms that I can go to whenever I need to and a lunch room with vending machines and water bottle refill. Checks all of my job green flags and I'm so grateful I managed to get it. Only downside is that it is much farther than my previous jobs, but I've been trying to get better at time management so I can be early every single day because its worth it. I would rather come in super early and play my 3ds in the lunch room than work somewhere where I have to do customer service or a lot of team work that involves talking with people a lot.

A big part of why I'm so grateful for this new job where I don't have to talk to people and can just focus on work is because...my CPTSD has been negatively impacting me extra hard for the past year or so. This is something I have been struggling with since I was young, but last year I went through several traumatic events that.....really really effected me. They not only reopened wounds I spent years trying to close but also very very new wounds were created that I don't know how to deal with. I haven't talked about this much anywhere but I don't really know where else to say it and I consider this a safe space for me and I'm so sorry if reading this makes anyone sad.

Later the same year.... I brought a new person as my plus 1 to an anime rave I was a guest at (this new person also ends up betraying me as I mentioned in my last entry) and while I was there a man grabbed me by the forearm and pulled me into a dark corner while talking to me. As I'm sure you can imagine, reader, this scared the absolute shit out of me so I got away from him as quick as I could. I feeling very upset at my plus one because they were close and within view when it happened, but they were so deep in the conversation they were having with a stranger they didnt notice me being in possible danger and this bothered me and triggered me a lot.

Lastly towards the end of the year I discover one of the people organizing a new anime convention near me has still been in interacting with men who groomed and raped me when I was a teenager. All of this abuse was fully public and many of the people organizing/affiliated with this convention saw it enabled it by laughing at it or seeing and choosing to say nothing. I tried my hardest to be brave and come forward publicly about what happened for the first time ever with real photographic evidence from when I was a teenager and screen shots of the interactions etc but to no avail. The community chose to continue to support the enablers and it makes me not so much sad for myself but sad and scared for the minors that are now probably at risk as a result of the communities decisions. I didn't speak up about what happened to me so that I could get justice or revenge or whatever all these years later. I spoke up to try to prevent what happened to me from happening to others and I'm scared it will still keep happening to other young girls and I can't stop it because I am now banned from the convention for coming forward.

After all this shit happened I lost the job I had for most of 2023 because in december and january I was crying almost every day non stop to the point where it would become hard to drive to work and I would just pull over and call off. Discovering neocities and getting back into retro gaming were two of the main things that really brought me true happiness again after all that happened. After losing my other job I ended up going back to bakery stuff purely out of desperation just to have more income but it ended up making my already shitty mental health even worse because of how terrible the team work at the job was and how shitty the customers often were (during one of my last few shifts I literally got screamed at by an old white man so imagine how tired I am).

Slowly and surely after everything I am finally getting back to a place of feeling kind of normal and okay. I am way more financially secure now so that takes a lot of anxiety off my shoulders and gives me more room to really feel and process my feelings. I am really grateful to be in the place that I am in now and really proud that I have survived this far to to get to this point

Right as things were getting better they have started to get shitty and sad again tho. Recently my sister asked why I had stopped talking to a girl we used to hang out with a lot and so I called her and talked to her about it. I told her that the girl hadn't made much effort to reach out to me since she moved away and that when I learned that when she was 29/30 she had started dating a 20 year old girl I thought that was super weird and creepy and didn't make effort to reach out to her tbh. While telling her about how I felt about this I actually broke down and started crying and finally told my sister about feelings I was holding in my heart for years.

Told her about how I felt that she paid more attention to her friend and her friend's relationships but didnt pay enough attention to the amount of creepy guys hanging around me when I was younger and I wish that she had and that I was sad after all this time we never really talked about it and that she never really asked me about it. She told me she was sorry and that she wished she had reflected on it more and that's all I really wanted to hear after all this time tbh. But then she must have talked about it with my mom because hours later when I had healed from crying and cleaned up and was about to start doing my makeup to play dress up and take pics she texted me "you know you told me [REDACTED] was 19". This made me feel a wild mixture of emotions. Mostly infuriated, sad, and confused. Infuriated and sad because she didnt text me like "can we talk about this" etc. She just texted me that blunt ass bold ass statement about a conversation she wasnt even in out of the blue and was essentially putting the blame on me even after all this time even though i was a literal fucking child. Big sad because I love her so much and wish she would have more sensitivity and tact when approaching a conversation about an extremely sensitive situation for years ago. And confused because my mom consumes a lot of true crime, has watched a bunch of SVU, and engages in very liberal politics very frequently so for her to suddenly jump to victim blaming after all these years is truly baffling to me.

I just asked her to take accountability and responsibility for her neglect in the same way that I have tried to take accountability and responsibility for my problems with lying and trauma.

A lot of people are afraid of aging and growing up but.....I'm not. I'm actually so grateful for it. I love to say "I wish I could take my brain out and give my frontal lobe a kiss because I love it so much" and it is sooooo true. I mourn for my younger self so much. She was so stupid so annoying so naive. It feels so good to grow older and become more mature. It feels so good to have more empathy, to have more gratitude, and to put more thought into my decisions.

I will say though....part of me misses the version of me that existed before all the things that happened last year happened. I miss being excited to do my hair and do my makeup and make and edit cute videos but it's felt really hard to feel that for most of this year. Another part of me doesn't miss that version of me because she was still so naive about friendship and facebook so i dunno.