Even subversion suffers inflation. It doesn’t matter how many times you feel it all happening in your head or how well you learn to deal with it.

“You’re never booking on again, punchcard. Don’t you fucking get it? You can’t even go to your son’s soccer practice alone and stay sane and dry-eyed the whole time. Hell, all this therapy and you still talk to yourself like this reflexively afterword before even thinking that maybe you should challenge the negative self-flagellating habits”.

I went, didn’t I? I stayed, didn’t I? I used the tools and settled myself, didn’t I?

Yes. I did.

I normalized overdoses, extreme injuries, violence and suicide the way someone else might normalize the traffic in their daily commute, but I can’t normalize self-kindness and self-compassion.

The things I used to accomplish on a day off after a set of shifts without batting an eye at or feeling defeated over are regularly a struggle and a frustration to complete nowadays on their own. There’s always someone pulling the trigger on a gun they don’t even know they’re holding.

Sanity is accepting whatever may be with dignity. I get things done again. Slower. Mostly. Those other things aren’t normal anymore. That’s only statistical and they still seem quite familiar, but it’s a start. The triggers are going to keep getting pulled. Over and over. But the armour improves and the velocity slows.

We know ourselves the least. Solve and coagula. As above so below. I know where those other things belong and where they don’t. I have no currency in a shock-value economy. Only assets.