Feed Yourself Not Your Abusers

FINE stands for “Freaked Out, Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotional” and I’ve always loved that phrasing because it is closer to truth.

Over the many generations of language shifting, the word “fine” has become much closer to ringing truer to being a nonsense concept that people call it out for.

“This is fine.” now means that things are anything but and I greatly approve the shift towards a more honest language given that language often evolves in the opposite direction.

I have always preferred the definition back-formed from Latin 𝙛𝙞𝙣𝙞𝙨.

In Latin, “fini” can refer to the word “finis,” which means “end,” “limit,” “boundary,” or “conclusion” and that was closer to the reality-based language of the existence I desperately tried to carve out of the nightmare of my childhood; scrambling for purchase above oppressive, manipulative abusers who held all the power over my early life.

The only power I had was over myself and my perception of the limited world I lived in.

The power I chose was language. From the written words in my journal, to my obsession with language and linguistics (A word I didn’t know back then. To be honest I didn’t even know it was a thing until I got to college). I found power in redefining the words my parents often tried to use against me or to control me. In discovering their deeper meaning and focusing on the truth of that meaning, I took the power out of their mouths when they spoke.

“Stop crying, you’re fine.”
“Stop making a big deal out of everything, it’s fine.”

𝙛𝙞𝙣𝙞𝙨 … End. Limit. Boundary. Conclusion.

Epictetus spoke to me more than any other philosopher primarily because of his status as a slave. Most of my early insight into reason, understanding, and self-mastery came from his writing. In taking back the word “fine”, I took back power and reason.

𝙛𝙞𝙣𝙞𝙨 … End. Limit. Boundary. Conclusion.

Fine meant the end of my fear, became the limit of my weakness, the boundary between me and their madness, and the conclusion of the story where they were the victors and I was the victim.

There came a point where I had to stop with the fear, end the anger, and find my way through surviving being powerless without losing myself to the madness they tried to infect me with.

Crying, getting angry, feeling helpless, feeling persecuted, even physically fighting back … those things didn’t serve my end goal which was primarily survival and secondarily betterment.

All of the aforementioned things only gave my abusers more power. They fed on it and it seemed to encourage them even more.

𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘐 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘱𝘰𝘯𝘥, 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘭𝘢𝘳𝘨𝘦𝘳 𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘦𝘦𝘮𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘣𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘦 …  I wrote in my journal back then and you can take that however you wish, you’ll get the point no matter how you wish to visualize that.

It was easy to map what my abusers fed off of and how they emboldened themselves.

Denying them the food they needed to sustain their madness weakened them and they just looked more pathetic trying to get any response from me.

It took more strength and more time to recover from what they did to me, than it did to simply resolve myself to not feed them. That was effortless once I decided that no one would be the master of me but me.

𝙀𝙣𝙙. 𝙇𝙞𝙢𝙞𝙩. 𝘽𝙤𝙪𝙣𝙙𝙖𝙧𝙮. 𝘾𝙤𝙣𝙘𝙡𝙪𝙨𝙞𝙤𝙣.

I watched them wither and watched their madness die on the vine when there was no one to feed and water it to keep it thriving.

My simple resistance and ability to see them as childish, tantrum-throwing madmen is what allowed me not just survive, but thrive.

Responding like them (in anger and madness or dysregulation) or responding how they needed me to in order to strengthen them … these were the keys to the prison they kept me in. It wasn’t their power or authority as much as it was the ability they had to manipulate and feed on my emotions.

For me it’s an easy choice between being …

Freaked Out, Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotional

and choosing …

End. Limit. Boundary. Conclusion.

One is about wisdom, inner strength, understanding, reason, and turning the pit’s darkness back on itself. The other is about falling into the pit.

One is about defining the self, preserving the self, strengthening the self, and embracing the self. The other is about losing control of oneself to another’s.

One is selfNESS.
The other is not.

In taking back one word I redefined how I saw myself through my own eyes instead of falling apart beneath the gaze of someone else’s.

All the battles ended when I ended them … when I finished them by simply not playing along.

I had the last word and then there was simply silence.

It takes 2 people to battle and when you take yourself out of the fight then you leave that madness infected person to simply fight themselves which is what anger is all about in the first place; the spread of one’s own chosen self-destruction to other people.

What my abusers were experiencing to lead them to become the kind of people who beat, whipped, controlled, and tried to break their own children had absolutely NOTHING to do with me and was happening long before I became the target. And my participation in it was only going to perpetuate it, not only for me, but also for them.

When you leave someone suffering from madness to silence, it eats them alive and they only suffer themselves. It will either break them on it’s own or it will drive them to a resolution that has everything to do with them as it should.

It’s their choice to live the way they live, you have your own choices to make that are about YOUR life and YOUR future.

You owe yourself, not the abusers.

Feed yourself, not your abusers.

It doesn’t matter who your abusers are. It doesn’t matter if it’s your family, your friends, your boss, your coworkers, strangers, or even your government …

Your power is yours. What you do with it is the difference between your survival or theirs and you owe yourself more than you owe ANYONE else.

If you do not value yourself highly enough to make yourself a priority then you cannot make anyone else your priority and by that I mean those you choose to give your heart and soul and strength to.

Stoics consider anger a “passion,” an irrational emotion that can lead to poor judgment and actions.

Passions, including anger, arise from misperceptions or misunderstandings of reality. Therefore, reality-based living has no need for pathological, dysregulated emotional responses.

Find YOUR best way to thrive far beyond negativity.

Anger is the desire for revenge and Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor, reminds us that: 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙗𝙚𝙨𝙩 𝙧𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙣𝙜𝙚 𝙞𝙨 𝙩𝙤 𝙣𝙤𝙩 𝙗𝙚 𝙡𝙞𝙠𝙚 𝙮𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙚𝙣𝙚𝙢𝙮.

Negativity only feeds your cowardly abusers and takes needed strength and energy away from you that you could be using for both surviving and thriving.

Remember that surviving is not the same as thriving.

Surviving is simply the bare minimum.

Thriving is what you deserve as a living, breathing, wondrous one in a million random creation of the universe.

One is just something you do.
The other is something you ARE.

Decide. Live well.

Feed yourself, not your abusers.