Wanting it all to burn is normal.
Why you might struggle with being wronged and what feels like the unbearable silence of the world around you when you feel like screaming.
I’ve been doing the Non-Monogamy Help column and podcast since 2016, built for quick, practical answers to your questions. This is where I want to put the slower stuff instead, the pieces that need more room than a column gives them. This one is going to be more of an emotional reflection than anything. Stick around if that’s your kind of thing.
Within me is an incredibly, unshakeable discomfort for when things happen that feel wrong to me. It’s hard for me to witness, growing up in a country and with a religion that says that my existence, the things I want, the way that I live my life is also wrong. I should know better. It’s hard to experience as someone who needs evidence for their or anyone else’s conclusions. I can’t simply just accept that this feels wrong. I have to have reasons for it.
Still, I can’t shake that feeling when I feel wronged.
My first instinct when I am wronged and hurt is to minimise it. Denial. It wasn’t that big of a deal. It wasn’t that bad. I do this to myself, not because I am glutton for punishment, but because it’s what has helped me survive for so long. If I think I am to blame, this means the outcome is within my control. If I can control it, I can prevent it from happening.
But slowly my feelings eat away at the denial like acid and the pain of what has happened, of being wronged, finally seeps in. I can’t deny that pain. I can’t pretend like it is not there. People in my past have expected me to hide my pain either by explicitly demanding it or through their reaction to it. My pain is uncomfortable. My pain is a problem. My pain is inconvenient. It has taken me so long to learn not to hide my pain anymore that it now feels unbearable to do so. When I hurt, it is hard to hurt quietly. When I am wronged, it is hard to be wronged quietly.
But even though I am now okay with allowing my pain out, I sometimes still believe deep down that I am transgressing a boundary. I still question myself. I still doubt the pain I feel. I still don’t feel justified. Despite the deep sense that I was wronged and this cannot stand in silence. And it is for that reason that I want and sometimes need to see the anger on other people more than myself.
I want other people to be as upset as I am so that I can feel like my feelings are justified. When I see them less angry than I am, when I see that they are okay with things I cannot sit with, when I feel that no one is paying attention to my pain, it makes me question why I bothered crying out to begin with. If I am wronged and no one agrees, then has it even happened?
This is wrong. Doesn’t anybody else see it? Am I alone? More alone than I would have felt if I had just stayed silent? If I had just continued being okay with it? If there are no witnesses to your pain, is your pain even real? Did it even happen? Maybe you have not been wronged. Maybe you are just wrong yourself.
It is easy to think in black and white. Anyone who refuses to scream with me may as well be screaming at me. Anyone who doesn’t vehemently call this out for the wrong it is can only be saying they are happy it happened. Anyone who doesn’t shout as loud or louder than I am is accepting it gladly. I paint myself in a corner with black and white to reflect the binary my mind is forcing me into: I am either safe or I am not. And I want to be safe. And I need to find out who is safe now.
But, I can see myself do this and stop myself before I hold everyone around me hostage. I can see my desire to demand justice from everyone around me for what it actually is, as a desperate call for validation for the wrong I feel. I try my best to remember that the world exists in the greys and not everything is as simple as I want it to be — and that doesn’t mean that I am not safe.
No one can guarantee me safety in the way I can give it to myself. Those who would join my mob are perhaps only desperate to join my cause because of the own anxiety they feel about their own. We get to exchange righteous anger so that both of us get something out of it — a false sense of security. The illusion of safety.
When it comes to non-monogamy, where everyone’s lives are so tied together sometimes, the aggressive continuation of business as usual can feel unbearable. How can everyone go along with what is wrong? Which is really to ask: how can the world continue to spin while it feels like my world has been knocked off centre? I want to knock everyone else’s world off centre so the outside can reflect what I feel on the inside. It’s in those moments we want it to burn so that it is light enough that you don’t feel like you’re fading in the background. You don’t desire suffering. You just want to stop feeling like you’re about to disappear.
I don’t know if the little spotlight of this article will provide anyone else who is struggling some respite, but that is what I am hoping. It is normal to feel this way when you feel wronged. It is normal to feel the coarseness of normality against your freshly damaged skin. It is normal to feel like you need other people to scream with you so that you can tell yourself it is normal to scream.
I see you drowning in the sea of the grey. I know that we can all silently scream with each other.
If this is the kind of thing you want more of, subscribe and it'll land in your inbox. I'll be here weekly with the longer, slower version of what I usually have to summarise on Instagram and TikTok. And if you're after something completely different from me, Clean Slate is the sci-fi serial I've been writing on the side, memory, identity, and what's left of you when your past turns out to be manufactured.