Today I feel a swelling outrage at how often my ex insulted everything about my dolls and vintage toy hobby as often as possible and thus kept me from pursuing things that gave me joy unless they were on her terms for six fucking years
The ponies that were so precious to me as my childhood collection were ugly (she hated the angle of their eyes), the little calico critters I bought because I thought the cats were so sweet were childish (“I’m too old to play pretend.”), Barbie was a waste of space unless I could prove an individual one was not frivolous in some way, enjoying Hello Kitty meant she could just buy me any old thing with HK on it and it counted as a thoughtful gift even if it was dollar store junk, and she never bothered to defend me or explain me to her parents, who thought I just hoarded toys indiscriminately and told me more than once how weird that was. She considered it a failure that I hesitated to customize anything back then, even though I was still pretty freshly brainwashed by my dad into thinking I could not touch my own things, and then when I got brave enough to try she criticized the way I tried to do it.
I lost several of the things that were important to me when she abandoned me and forced me to move, all ‘cool, non babyish’ stuff I’d tried to bring from my mom’s to show her and hopefully appease her constant disdain of it all. It hurts to have lost it. She liked to casually and without thinking break anything that wasn’t serving her, including things that belonged to me, and I formed deep attachments to things and have always been very careful with my possessions, so it was scary to lend her things. So it’s a wound to be missing things, and it feels like one she inflicted that keeps getting reopened every time I discover one more thing missing, even years later.
