Damages: Part Six – No Safe Distance

When you over-receive, even kindness can collapse you.

There are people who can put things down.
They can close the door on a moment, walk away, and come back with clarity.

That’s never been my system.
There’s no safe distance in here.
No mental shelf. No emotional buffer.
Everything comes in all the way.

If you’ve read the first five parts of this series — you already know the architecture.

• Synesthesia isn’t metaphor. It’s how I encode memory, sound, and emotion.
• Trauma doesn’t hit and leave. It seeps, spreads, rewrites.
• Rot isn’t symbolic. It’s presence.
• Dust isn’t the past. It’s the weight that coats everything I try to build.
• C-PTSD isn’t a scream. It’s a system rewired by contradiction.

This post is the thread that ties them together.
It’s about over-receiving.
And what it means to live in a body that never filters impact.

What “No Safe Distance” really means

In my world, there is no edge between me and the thing I’m feeling.
I don’t observe pain… I ingest it.
I don’t notice emotion… I become it.
There is no “processing later.”
It all happens now, and it happens deep.

This is what I mean when I say I over-receive.
There’s no margin. No delay.
No ability to sense something without it coloring every part of my system at once.

Most people can handle contradiction.
They can hear love and criticism in the same sentence and hold both.
But in me, those contradictions collide like fault lines.
I don’t just hear the words…
I feel the texture of the lie beneath them.
I taste the guilt that wasn’t named.
I see the moment before the betrayal and the echo after it at the same time.

That’s what synesthesia does when trauma is present.
It doesn’t just intensify a moment.
It removes all distance between perception and impact.

The consequences of over-receiving

When you live like this, even love can wreck you.
Even softness can overwhelm your nervous system.
You flinch at kindness because the last time someone touched you that way,
it came with consequences.

And because your body remembers in flavor, in heat, in tension…
you don’t just feel afraid.
You taste fear in the shape of someone else’s comfort.
You hear comfort in the pitch of someone’s withdrawal.

The signal is never clean.
The over-receiving makes everything a collision.

There’s a line I wrote that says:

You learn to breathe the dust
You learn to bleed the rust

That’s the cost of no safe distance.
You adapt.
You learn to survive in the echo.
But it never becomes comfortable.
You just get better at breathing it in.

Why this matters

This post isn’t here to explain a song.
It’s here to explain the system behind the songs.
Damages wasn’t written from one wound.
It was written from the accumulation of all of it.
From things I couldn’t filter.
From falsehoods I couldn’t unsee.
From a reality with no safe distance between self and sensation.

That’s what makes this record what it is.
It’s a map of what happens when there’s no shield.
No delay. No space. Just input… and survival.