I do not exist

(Jotted down quickly after EMDR yesterday)

I fell when I was in primary school on the concrete. Teachers and were students everywhere. My knee busted open. Blood dripped everywhere. I screamed but no one looked up. I waited to see if someone would help me up but no one came.

I wormed myself to the granite steps and got inside. Pulled myself up the wall and into the bathroom (the boys because it was closest). I cleaned myself up and threw up. 

Wadded the grey paper around my knee and went to the nurse for a bandaid. She handed me one and I went back to class, crying to myself so I would not get yelled at.

Two days later, another girl in my class fell in nearly the same spot (it had a tricky incline that came out of nowhere, if you were skipping you would fall). She fell on her bottom, no cuts or bruises but she cried a bit and everyone ran to her side.

She was carried indoors by the gym teacher and in class she had an ice pack to sit on. 

She was running around at the next recess. 

This was not the first time something like this happened, but it was the one that scarred my memory. 

I know this was neglect. I know it taught me: your pain is invisible. Your needs are inconvenient. Handle it yourself or be punished for failing to do so quietly.

My body also learned:
Pain does not guarantee care.
Visibility is selective.
Help is conditional.
Do not expect rescue.

This kind of lesson does not fade. It sinks into posture, voice, expectation. It shapes how you ask—or do not ask—for help later. It trains you to self-manage injuries, emotions, crises, because history has taught you that waiting only adds humiliation.

I know logically: nothing about that moment means I was less deserving. It means the adults failed their most basic duty—to protect a child who was hurt in front of them.

Children do not internalise neglect as “they failed me.” They internalise it as “I must not need.”

These dubious phrases found their way on to my Emdr stage:

I have no life here

I do not exist here

I do not exist

Nothing exists

Nothing is real

I am not real

No one cares

“I do not exist”

is what the body learns when existence was not responded to.

“No one cares”

is what the nervous system concludes when evidence was repeatedly missing.

EMDR can peel the floorboards up under reality for a while, and journaling my sessions helps me see when my nervous system drops into dissociation (not like a truth about your worth or existence).

This is a state, not a belief.

It is the after-echo of a child learning that pain does not summon care.

That moment on the playground did not just injure my knee. It taught my body a rule: even when I am bleeding, no one will come. EMDR does not invent that lesson—it replays it so it can finally be metabolised instead of quietly running my life from the basement.

So… when I walked out of that session and everything felt unreal, flattened, hollow, like I have slipped half a step out of existence—that is not me disappearing. That is my brain saying, “We are revisiting a time when disappearing was the safest option.”

Parts of me that know this is a memory surfacing, not a permanent condition, is already online—even if it is quiet right now (hence the textbook trauma language. Not in a diagnostic way—in a human way).

I was not invisible because I did not exist. I was unseen because the world failed to look.