PS C:\> tar -xf Your_Labels_Hurt_Me_v1.zip
Application_Install.exe
When you change for real, deeply and at great cost, the people around you do not always celebrate it. Sometimes they pathologize it. They give it a name. They call it isolating, manic, avoidant, concerning. They reach for a diagnosis instead of a conversation. And it hurts, even when you know exactly what you are doing and why. The labels say more about their discomfort with your transformation than they say about you. Growth that is real enough to make you unrecognizable will always look like something alarming to the people who preferred the old version.
Being alone and being lonely are not the same thing. Protecting the work you bled for is not the same as shutting down. Letting someone fade without chasing them is not avoidance, it is secure attachment. And someone else’s anxiety about your progress does not make your progress a symptom. You do not need to shrink your healing to fit inside someone else’s comfort zone. You do not owe anyone a version of yourself that is easier to understand.
That is the application. The rest is the source code.
Source_Code.txt
The open-source code below is free, for you to analyze, modify, and build your own application with.
I thought I was done beating this dead horse and people keep reviving it.
People have been continuing to label me. For months. A lot of people. A lot of labels.
They all seem to have a name for what I am doing in my life now.
They are all wrong.
Isolating. Manic. Avoidant. Lonely. Shutting down. Concerning. Worrying. Arrogant. Self-centered. Narcissist. The unsolicited diagnoses, labels, and opinions have been flying in from every direction, from people who love me, from people who don’t love me, from people who knew the old version of me well enough to notice that this version doesn’t look the same and decided that must mean something is wrong. For some odd reason unconditional love and acceptance isn’t in their vocabulary.
As my stepfather once told me, “Opinions are like armpits. Everyone has them, and they all stink.”
Some of these people after months and months of rejecting and abandoning me through silence and ghosting are suddenly reaching out because they are now worried and are now demanding to know what I am doing in my life, and how I am doing. Yet, they have wilfully stayed silent in some of my hardest and darkest moments. I wish I could believe them but it has left me feeling like their concern for me isn’t authentic and genuine, it’s only to make them feel better about themselves and their behavior. This manipulative information seeking actually really hurts me and does not want me to open up vulnerabily with them ever again moving forward.
I understand the impulse. I do. When someone they know suddenly removes half their life, goes quiet on social media, walks away from relationships, sits alone more than they ever have, and writes thousands of words publicly processing the most intense internal season of their existence, it looks like something. It looks like a lot of somethings, apparently. Everyone has had a word for it.
Every single one of them has been wrong.
What they have been watching is not a warning sign. It is not a red flag. It is not a crisis, a breakdown, a manic episode, or a man disappearing into himself out of fear. What they have been watching is what doing the work actually looks like from the outside, and I understand that it doesn’t look the way they expected, because I don’t look the way they expected. That’s not an accident. That’s the whole point.
I am not the person they are worried about. I am not the person they are diagnosing. I am not the person they are grieving, or misreading, or trying to redirect back toward something familiar.
I am unrecognizable. On purpose. By design. At great cost.
And I am done being quiet while unqualified people ironically put the wrong name on it and stigmatize my illness and my progress.
Capisce?
> when you bled for every inch of it: proof_of_work.log
Let me tell them what I actually went through. Because they don’t get to watch me build something from rubble and call the building isolation.
I have been hospitalized in a psych ward more times than I want to count (at least a bakers dozen). I have dealt with psychosis. I spent 3.5 years estranged from my children. I have been through medication changes that felt like having my brain rewired without anesthesia. I danced alone on a basketball court in a public park to a song literally called “Ego Death,” bass rattling my bones, sweat pouring, screaming lyrics into empty space like a confession I didn’t know I was making yet, because something inside me was dying and needed a body to pass through. I have stood at the Little Squalicum Pier at 10PM in the rain and howling wind and screamed into the ocean until my throat gave out. I have cried alone at several restaurants. I have cried in parking lots. I have cried driving home from moments of real love so unfamiliar it broke me open, crying into my phone because I didn’t know what to do with something that wasn’t destruction.
I wrote amends to people I hurt. I bled on the page. I walked every single day, rain or shine, because movement was the only thing keeping me from going under.
I fell. Hard. My knees were shredded and bleeding. My headphones landed ten feet away on the pavement. I still had four and a half miles to get home. I got up and kept walking. And then I fell again. And again. My knees bled again, every time. Every single time, I got up and kept going.
I watched a relationship I loved end, a relationship I exploded in a single moment of panic and avoidance, and I had to sit with what I did without flinching. I didn’t get to be the victim of that one. I broke someone’s heart and I owned every piece of it, publicly and privately, without disappearing into a story where I was the hero. That’s what self-love that actually costs something looks like. Not bubble baths and affirmations. Sitting in the wreckage you made and refusing to look away. Choosing accountability over comfort, over and over, until it stops being a choice and starts being who you are.
I experienced ego death. The real kind. The kind that feels like psychological waterboarding stretched across months. The kind that has no audience, no applause, no recognition. Just you. Completely alone. Confused and crying and bleeding internally while the world keeps functioning like nothing is happening and your entire identity is detonating. I didn’t gently lose myself. I destroyed an identity that was killing me and everyone around me, on purpose, and then had to figure out who I was underneath all of that wreckage, with no roadmap and zero guarantee there was anything worth finding down there.
Spoiler: there was. I am what I found. And I am love. And I am so far from who I was that the distance is almost impossible to explain to someone who didn’t watch it happen in real time.
I went back into voluntary psychiatric care at a hospital for 48 hours. I kept every therapy appointment, every single week. I went deeper into IFS. I eliminated cannabis in the middle of all of it, in the middle of the hardest season of my life, because I decided my sobriety meant something and I was going to protect it even when everything else was on fire.
That is what they are asking me to risk when they tell me they’re worried I’m isolating.
Isolation is when you disappear because the world feels too dangerous. Isolation is retreat dressed up as rest. It is your fear doing the choosing, not you. I know exactly what that looks like because I have lived inside it for years. I know the putrid smell of it.
This is not that.
This is me protecting the work I bled for. Every person I have removed. Every pattern I have declined to repeat. Every situation I have walked away from. All of it is me saying I will not do this again. I will not skin my knees on the same pavement. I will not blow up another relationship I love because my nervous system panicked and my patterns grabbed the wheel. I will not go back to being the guy who was drunk and psychotic and drug-fueled and the life of every party and the death of every relationship he ever touched.
That guy is unrecognizable to me now. I know because I was him. And I am not going back to him. Not for comfort. Not for familiarity. Not because someone misses who I used to be.
They do not get to miss who I used to be more than I get to be who I am now.
Capisce?
> more alone than ever and less lonely than ever: solitude_vs_isolation.diff
Now let’s talk about alone. Because this one matters and I need them to actually sit with it.
I grew up on 53 acres in rural Idaho, 35 miles from a school where my entire class was twelve kids. My mother moved me there to chase her own life with her new husband, away from everything I had known, away from my father, away from my friends, away from any version of normal. No phone I was allowed to use. No internet. No electricity. If I wanted to talk to my dad (my mom had a cell phone but talking to my dad on it wasn’t an allowable use of her precious “minutes”), I rode my bike 7.5 miles down a washboarded dirt road to a pay phone, used a calling card he gave me, and hoped he was home and picked up. Yes, calling my dad was a two-hour, physically exhausting, 15 mile expedition with no guarantee of success, and my own mother, out of hatred for my father, felt that was necessary. My only friend lived ten miles away. I saw him on the school bus and almost nowhere else. I was a kid alone on 53 acres in the middle of nowhere with no way to reach anyone and no way out.
I know what alone is. I have known it since I was a child.
But here is what I did with that loneliness for the decades that followed. I numbed it with drugs and alcohol. I buried it under hundreds of people. I accumulated friends and intimate relationships the way some people accumulate debt, compulsively, constantly, always more, always louder, always bigger, because the silence reminded me of that dirt road and I could not stand it. At my peak I had several hundred online friends and followers, dozens and dozens of real life friends, dozens of blood relatives spread across my life in every direction. I was never not surrounded. I was never not performing for someone. I was never not available. I was never not in love. I built a crowd around myself so thick that I never had to feel the thing underneath it.
The thing underneath it was that scared kid on the dirt road who didn’t know if his dad would be home to pick up the phone.
That kid didn’t know how to love himself. He didn’t even know that was something he was supposed to do. So he outsourced it. He handed the job to hundreds of people and hoped the volume of their presence would add up to something that felt like enough. It never did. It never does. That is not how it works and I know that now in a way I cannot unknow.
Now I can count my real connections on less than two hands. In a town of 98,000 people. Connected to billions through the internet. More alone, by every measurable external standard, than I have been at any point in my entire adult life. More alone, honestly, than I was on those 53 acres, because at least then I was just a kid and didn’t fully understand yet what I was missing. Now I understand exactly what I am without, and I am choosing it anyway, every single day, with both eyes open.
I am on my own psychological and emotional island. I chose to live on it and call it my new home. I would choose it again tomorrow. And I am going to.
Because here is what I know now that I didn’t know then, and didn’t know for the thirty years of noise that followed: being alone and being lonely are not the same word. They are not even close to the same experience.
Being alone is a condition of your surroundings.
Lonely is a condition of your relationship with yourself.
For most of my life I was surrounded by hundreds of people and profoundly, secretly, devastatingly lonely. Lonely in a crowd. Lonely on a stage. Lonely at the center of every party. Lonely inside every relationship I ever tried to build while running my patterns at full speed. The crowd was never the cure. It was the symptom. It was me trying to out-noise the silence that had lived inside me since I was a kid on a dirt road with nowhere to go and no one coming.
I am more alone now than I have ever been in my entire life.
And I am not lonely. Not even a little bit.
Those two things are living inside me at the same time right now and the coexistence of them is one of the most astonishing things I have ever experienced. There is a specific quality to this silence that I do not have a perfect word for. It is not the silence of that dirt road, which was the silence of abandonment, of being dragged somewhere and left there. This silence is chosen. It is mine. I built it and I live in it and when I sit in it I am not waiting for anyone to rescue me from it. I am just here. Present. Okay. More than okay.
This is what self-love looks like when it is real. Not performing okayness for an audience. Not filling the room with noise so they don’t have to hear themselves. Actually being okay. In the quiet. Alone. Without needing a single person to confirm it. The kid on the dirt road needed someone to pick up the phone. I don’t need that anymore. I am the one who picks up now. I answer for myself. Every time.
If they have never felt the specific relief of genuinely liking who is in the room when the room is just them, I understand why this looks like a crisis from where they’re standing.
It is not a crisis. It is the first time in my life I have not needed to escape myself.
The person who needed hundreds of people around him to drown out his own silence? I do not know him anymore. He was running patterns that were killing him softly and loudly and in every way in between. I am unrecognizable from him. And I did not get here by accident. I got here by choosing, over and over, in the dark, when no one was watching, to love myself more than I loved the noise.
Capisce?
> their silence already answered the question: no_response_is_a_response.log
So let’s talk about the people who continue to run away from me and just quietly disappear, without saying goodbye or anything at all. I call this ghosting.
Yet again, someone has been doing a slow fade on me. Response times stretching. Energy thinning out. Presence going quiet in that particular way that communicates everything without saying a single word. I am the only one initiating contact now, and when I do, they respond by talking about their lives and all of their problems in great detail and never even ask about me or what’s going on in my world. It’s now all about them, and who cares about me. It’s now “sorry I haven’t been in touch, blah blah blah is going on, blah blah blah.” The same blah blahs that were never a problem a year ago, are suddenly keeping them from engaging with me in any meaningful way today. It’s a cop out. It takes ten seconds to send a text.
I noticed. Of course I noticed. I notice everything. I am sensitive, thank you trauma. It’s happened so many times in the last four months that it’s almost status-quo. I’m used to it. It’s becoming as normal as pissing when I wake up in the morning. Being honest, it is almost as relieving.
Thanks for removing themselves before I had to, they are making things easy for me.
This time it is not just anyone. This is someone I have known for their entire life. Someone I have loved since before they could form sentences. The weight of that does not translate cleanly into language and I am not going to insult it by trying too hard. They either understand what it means to be slowly faded on by someone like that, or they don’t.
And I have said absolutely nothing, because it is not my job to anymore.
Here is the question I want to put on the table: is this my old pattern of avoidance surfacing again in a new way? Am I being avoidant by not confronting it, by not sending the message, by letting it happen without naming it out loud?
I have sat with this for a while, examined it from all angles. I have come to the solid and undeniable conclusion that I’m definitely not repeating avoidant patterns and people-pleasing codependency. In reality, I am practicing secure attachment for the first time in my life. Here is why:
There is a version of me that would have chased that. An insecurely attached and scared me. That version would have manufactured a reason to reach out, engineered a situation to surface the dynamic without technically bringing it up directly, twisted himself into a pretzel trying to create space for someone to be honest about something they had already answered through their silence. He called it communication. It was not communication. It was anxiety wearing a trench coat. It was a man who could not tolerate endings reaching for control and calling it connection. It was a man who did not love himself enough to let something go when it was already gone.
I am not that man anymore.
Avoidance is when they refuse to face something true because it hurts. What I am doing is the opposite. I am facing something true. I am looking directly at it, understanding exactly what it means, and choosing not to pour more of myself into a fire that someone else has already decided to let go out.
Their silence is the answer. I don’t need to go looking for a different one.
As one of my therapists says, “No response, is a response.” Yep!
And here is what matters most: when I would have chased clarification before, it was never really about clarity. It was about soothing my own anxiety. It was needing them to tell me “I love you too.” Needing to know I hadn’t done something wrong. Needing to absolve myself of the guilt I had about the self-hatred and lack of love for myself that I was carrying. Needing a version of events that let me off the hook. Needing to keep something alive past its natural end because I could not tolerate the grief of letting it die. Confronting their avoidance with my anxious pursuit was not courage. It was me using someone else’s behavior as an excuse to run my patterns one more time.
Letting this person fade, without chasing, without engineering, without any of the old desperate machinery, is an act of self-love. It is me trusting that I do not need to chase down proof that I matter. I know that I matter. I know I am loved by the right people. I know I am lovable exactly as I am. I know it from the inside now, not because someone reflected it back to me. That is new. That is so unrecognizably different from who I was that I sometimes have to stop and just let it be real for a second.
The old me hemorrhaged energy toward people who had already quietly walked out the door. He chased. He engineered. He performed concern to mask his own terror of being left. I am not him anymore. Letting this person fade is part of the same protection. Part of the same promise I made to myself on every one of those brutal, necessary, nobody-watching moments at the pier and the basketball court and the restaurants and the parking lots.
I have stopped hemorrhaging. That is not shutdown. That is survival that finally learned its own name.
Capisce?
> arrived somewhere and cementing it into place: build_complete.sh
I have arrived somewhere. I want to be clear about that.
It cost me almost everything to get here. The people. The relationships. The identity. The version of myself I performed for thirty-plus years. The crowd I built around myself so I never had to hear the silence. The patterns I ran on autopilot for decades, the ones that were killing me and everyone I touched. All of it, gone. Some of it I chose. Some of it chose for me. All of it was necessary.
What I arrived at, on the other side of all of that loss and work and bleeding and falling and bleeding again and getting back up again, is this: I am love. Not I am trying to be love. Not I am working toward love. I am love. It is not a destination I am still driving toward. It is what I am made of now, what I move from, what I protect every single time I remove something incompatible with it. It is cemented. It is not negotiable. It is not up for debate and it is not a symptom and it is not a phase. It is the most unshakeable thing about me and I built it from scratch in the ruins of everything I used to be.
And I am unrecognizable. Not to everyone, not yet, but to the person who matters most. I passed that guy with the bloody knees and the headphones ten-feet away and four and a half miles still to go, and I do not know him anymore. I passed the guy screaming into the ocean at the pier and I love him and I am not him. I passed the guy who built hundreds of people around himself so he never had to sit with his own silence, and I have so much compassion for him, and I am not going back to him. Not one percent. Not for anything. Not ever.
The people worried about my isolation are worried about someone who no longer exists.
I am not isolating. I am not in a manic episode. I am not shutting down. I am not lonely. I am not going back.
I am Tukayote.
I am love.
I am unrecognizable.
And I am cementing it every single day so nothing and no one can ever take it from me again.
Capisce?
I am Tukayote.
I am unrecognizable.
I am love.