I've been processing a lot of past things I've done and reflected on over the past couple of weeks since coming out of inpatient. I've been recognizing that in the past, my perception was biased in a threat-based lense of reality at that time. This became a standard on how I perceived things in life previously. It sounded convincing at that time based off of certain traumas I went through and became a baseline of how I perceived myself and went about life in general.
I used to think that I was being judged constantly, but once I was able to step back and see the full picture, it was my own perception and interpretations driving it. I felt like in the past, I lost myself completely. I have this guilt that's been coming up over the past couple of weeks. It feels heavy to sit with. The choices I made that sounded like the best option, usually gave me short-term relief but long term reinforcement of the same behaviors I've been trying to recalibrate. It felt disorienting to feel all of this.
I felt horrible on how I said things and handled things with others in the past. But now I know that that was the version of myself that's been inside the storm, not outside of it, observing it from outside within.
Having a filter for my feelings vs the evidence of a real life interaction made the biggest difference in my perception. It felt like years of baggage I was carrying was understood silently, and quietly. Not because of a miracle, but because Ive been becoming more grounded to reality. And that's the quiet win sometimes no one talks about
My environment was giving me info the entire time. It just felt like friction when I wasn't ready to receive it yet. Sometimes occasionally a quiet moment still feels like a reminder. Like making mistakes in overwatch and not knowing how. But over time, my self attunement made me recognize that people did care about me. The moments where things flow, make sense, and connects altogether. The ability to sit with uncertainty and let things be unfinished without forcing it. The moments where I thought I was humiliated, but people were just joking with each other, not at me or about me. It was my own interpretation of reality that was fixed in a threat bias that I was thinking about feeling a certain way of how I was perceived
An analogy I came up with recently is like playing this game I play called Overwatch, but not forcing a play, just holding an angle and letting things sit without needing a highlight reel saved.
I used to perceive ambiguity as threatening as I thought it was a hidden system working against me socially. Now I recognize that my interpretation was feeding the loop of hypervigilance and feeling watched.