Context:

Anyone who has read some of my posts that go into personal detail, I’m sure you know that I’ve been in a stressful situation for some time now. I’ve been unemployed for a bit, seeking out jobs and struggling to land one, and receiving mutual aid assistance to adequately keep me afloat. In the first post I made in reaching out for mutual aid assistance, I vaguely refer to an unexplained “mental health crisis” that got me in these circumstances to begin with. Well, now, I’m gonna talk about it because the context is relevant for the explaining what “This” in the title means.

On February 10 of this year, I left my complex to go to a restaurant to get some food for the night. Upon leaving, on the porch, I saw one of the residents. He seemed all friendly and kind, and he didn’t show a hint of a bad mood and even happily greeted me. Upon coming back home, it was around 6 PM, and I still see him on the porch, but this time, he’s livid.

He told me that he noticed a mess on the shared kitchen stove, and he seemed to be very accusatory in thinking that I was responsible for it. There are 6 people in this complex, all who use the same kitchen, so it seemed there would be a possibility that it could’ve been someone else, but he was really centering his frustration with this towards me. He tried to gather just ONE piece of evidence to figure out if it was me who caused this, and apparently this was enough for him to lose his shit. He asked me:

“Did you use the kitchen today?”

In this situation, I said “Yes, but-”, and then he got mad and shouted at me saying to “clean it the fuck up” and that “We don’t live in a dirty house here.”, and this fucked with my mind really harshly. It’s incredibly reminiscent of how my parents had a tendency to put me down for every shortcoming that occurred in my childhood and even my early adulthood, and they always assumed bad faith. If I fucked something up around my parents, they would assume I did it on purpose, with the intent to sabotage, and I got yelled and shouted at, and harshly degraded for it. This just sunk in memories of how I’ve had to endure treatment like this throughout my whole life, even beyond my parents.

Let me clarify a few details:

• I did use the kitchen, but I mentioned the time of arriving back home at roughly 6 PM for a reason. I used the kitchen around 10 AM earlier that day, and that was it.
• At the time of the incident, I didn’t consider this, but later on, I realized that it definitely wasn’t even me who left the stovetop mess, which makes sense because I take adequate care to deal with it every time I’m done using the stovetop. I know that it wasn’t me because I put away the dishes after I washed mine when I was done eating around that 10 AM time. When I came in the kitchen a bit later, like possibly around 3 PM, simply to get some water to drink, I noticed more dishes in the dish rack. This means that someone besides me definitely used the kitchen before this altercation. Obviously, the dishes didn’t just show up themselves.
• I sense that it could possibly be due to a sense of bigotry that he felt so inclined to get upset with me in particular. There could’ve been ageism too. I’m black and queer, and this resident is an older white man who said the n-word with a hard R in front of me, although not at me, and since I’m the youngest resident in the complex, he might also be putting me down due to age.
• The very next day, immediately after I woke up, I walked into the kitchen to make breakfast and saw a huge mess of crumbs and shit on the stovetop, and the “stovetop on, hot surface” light on, and I JUST WOKE UP AND LEFT MY ROOM.

With all of this in mind, for him to be so aggressive, and not only speak as if he’s automatically assuming that I was to blame for this incident, but also to assume that, if I were to mess up the stove, that I did it with bad intentions. This explains why he went with phrasing that assumes it was done out of malice rather than ignorance. This explains why he felt prompted to say “We don’t live in a dirty house here.”, which comes at an angle assuming that he thinks I knew of the mess and was just like “Well, fuck! I don’t give a shit about cleaning THAT up, so I’ll just leave it!” instead of, in the case of me actually making the mistake, that it simply could’ve been done by accident.

I was so distraught when this happened that I actually became deeply suicidal, and I immediately performed impulsive actions because I thought my life was over because of how bad I felt. Some may say “It was just a small mistake. It’s no big deal!”, but to me, this was deeper than that. Like I said, my parents and other people have put me down and shamed me and believed me to be incompetent and worth nothing. Any incident for someone to get really upset with me over a mistake I did is something I see as a part of a series of examples of my “worthlessness” as a human being, and the intense emotion this man had put far out of my ability to properly reason about why I should possibly carry on.

I threw away a lot of my personal belongings, I called my boss and told her I am quitting without notice, and I just lied in bed and was going to go to a department store the next day to pick up a rope to end my life by hanging. I really wanted to make this seem like it was irreversible. I also didn’t bother reaching out for help because I felt extremely and actively suicidal, and I considered the fact that my parents, whenever I brought up suicidal ideation to them, literally told me things like “Suicidal people don’t reach out for help. They just go ahead and kill themselves! You just want attention!” in the past. This led me to believe that suicide was the only way forward because the suicidal feelings just seemed so bleedingly genuine.

(Un)fortunately, when I woke up, I decided, despite the moves I had made last night, I was going to carry on, and that led me to here. I was able to get caught up in some ways and even repurchase many of my belongings. But that’s just the backstory and context for you to know exactly the details of why what happened today pissed me off.

What Happened Today:

I go into the kitchen to cook some dinner tonight, and I take a pot to boil some spaghetti. I look in the pot, and I see a ton of stains, mostly red and brown in color. Immediately, it dawned upon me, and I got extremely pissed when I realized what this meant.

The older man that got pissed off on February 10 used this pot literally two days ago, and I saw him using it. He was using it to make a huge pot of chili, as this was the biggest pot the kitchen has, and to make it worse, I was the one who BOUGHT THE FUCKING POT. Obviously, this kitchen stuff is for community use, but there’s some layer of that factor that makes it seem even more awful. In addition to the residue on the pot, another piece of evidence that it was definitely him is that the huge pot is rarely even used, so I highly doubt that, within the span of two days, someone else could’ve been responsible.

The pot was pretty fucking awfully stained. I had to wash it out extremely well to see the markings on it, as there were lines that measured the amount of water in cups and liters, and I could hardly continue cooking my dinner with how mad I had become.

What this tells me is that this huge piece of shit who got mad at “me” (assumed) for leaving a mess in the kitchen, literally fucking left a huge mess on a dish without washing it out properly. To think that this man is the one that drove me into this crisis and has the audacity to pull a hypocritical move like that fucking made me insanely angry.

I’m disgusted, grossed out, and just completely torn that this entire incident has led up to this, and I’m still not over it, hours later.

It’s no surprise that a man who got extremely vexed with me simply because I said I like Iron Maiden more than Judas Priest would be this fucking terrible.