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thederivativeofrad · 7 years

Text

Update

I ran into an old friend today (if you can call him that being my mother’s age) and I think he was exactly who I needed to see in that moment, which is pretty rad. He said a couple things, things that were--unknowingly to him--exactly what I needed to hear.

I’ve got a lot of things going on right now, but of those things the most important is improving myself--both physically and mentally--for the sake of doing it, to be happier, to be healthier, to be more capable of all the things I want to do.

I have a lot of emotional baggage that comes from things that I’ve been through from childhood to now, and quite honestly, to view learned behaviours through someone else and to be able to identify that in oneself can be something very useful when it comes to bad habits and trying to fix them. I grew up with both of my parents, no matter if that should have been the case or not, and they tried very very hard to make sure that I had everything I needed, most everything I wanted, and was supported in everything I did and most everything I said. I was spoiled, but that weird line just before spoiled rotten. I didn’t expect these things, I appreciated them deeply and knew how to show genuine gratitude, and though most of my years so far I have quite deeply respected my parents and the decisions that they’ve made, but over time I can see that they made a lot of mistakes, enabled me in some areas too much, and have quite honestly shown me in a few different ways/examples what an unhealthy relationship is and how to create such an environment. They didn’t realize they were doing this at the time, but that doesn’t mean that bad habits hadn’t been formed, and that damage hadn’t been done over time.

For a long time I saw most people as above me, especially those people that I liked, respected, cherished, and loved. I’d still argue that up until very recently that I very consistently felt this way, and to this day I still feel that way on occasion and that I am trying very hard to quit making these assumptions and letting them dictate how I act in my relationships, whether they be with people I have closely known twenty years, sixteen years, seven years, five years, or three years. Some of these people are people that I try very hard to please, ultimately giving up a lot of my own self to attempt to fulfill this. These are people that I want to constantly impress, people that I want to constantly be happy, people that I want to say I’ve done something for, that I’ve helped them in some significant way.

The ironic thing is that by putting some of these people on such a pedestal I have unfortunately pushed them away at times, and in some cases with past relationships I have irreparably damaged bonds that likely could have gone on. I want to do so much for these individuals such as my mother, a particularly depressed friend of mine, and a majority of my past girlfriends (good thing Freud’s theories are trash, amirite) that I have gone and trashed so many good things just because I felt so insignificant, like the help that I was giving wasn’t help enough, as if everything I was doing wasn’t good enough or wasn’t exactly how the person would have wanted it to be done, and that was ammunition for me to hurt myself and to make myself feel even more low. I become a different person while dealing with this mess. I become a shadow of myself acting as a servant to the individual in question even though all they wanted from me is me.

Yes, it’s taken me a decade to realize it, but people want to hang out with me, talk to me, be friends with me, be in a relationship with me whether platonic or romantic, because they like me for who I am. My real friends didn’t give a shit if I couldn’t help with every single problem, or if I didn’t drop everything I was doing to answer a text within ten seconds. I don’t need to not only text constantly but be interesting the whole time to stay friends or even more with someone. I don’t need to be awake for every possible amount of time it’s possible to talk to someone else for them to feel loved and important. On the same note these people shouldn’t have to constantly affirm that everything I am doing is correct; I need to act for myself, I need to feel like I am enough, I need to understand that they love me for who I am and not only because I can perform these actions and I have to perform them perfectly for them to still love me. The last girl I made these mistakes with just rebagelled a post actually that I will quote here because I actually feel it for myself now instead of just knowing it’s a healthy thing to think:

“If your friend is crying over a break up in the middle of the night, and you have a Psychology final at 6 AM.. it’s okay to choose the test and support her in the morning. If you’ve promised someone that you would see a movie with them but stayed up all night coughing your brains out.. it’s okay to reschedule. You do not need to feel obligated to sacrifice your own self for the sake of someone else all of the time. The only person I was born to nurture is me.”

— disappoint people and be okay with it (what I’m learning)

And what that means to me is that I am first when it comes to me, and that those people that love me and support me that I have found and been able to surround myself with are not going to leave me just because I can’t be completely there for them all of the time without any sort of hesitation. I can’t throw myself away for other people, no matter how much I love them and care for them and look up to them and respect them. I can’t treat those I love like they are so far above me when they are trying to be with me.

I do not give a single fuck how fucking ridiculous that sounds, how easy for some people it is to realize that, how stupid I must be to not have been able to see that with my own fucking brain for nearly twenty-one years, but this is not a joke. I had this epiphany today, and I feel wonderful having come to the realization. I cried today when I was standing in my room and I managed to come up with the words that explained how I felt to the core: “I want to be myself.”

I was on a completely different page with so many people for so much of my life without even realizing it. I was trying to be the most desirable individual in their lives so that they would never want to let me go because I was afraid of them letting me go and all that did was either overwhelm them in such a way that they couldn’t take it any longer or gave them means to just take and take and take from me until I was just a shell of what I once was. I did these things, I let people do these things to me. I hurt people by trying to help them because I didn’t think that what help I was able to provide normally, the help that they were expecting, the amount of help they could conceivably expect from another human being on their level, was not enough. I didn’t think I was enough, even though I thought I didn’t think that I still thought that because I couldn’t get over those deeper thoughts in my mind that tell me no one will ever love me for me, no one will ever care unless I give so much of myself that there’s nothing left for me.

Now I want to be myself. I don’t want to be afraid of what people think of me anymore. I mean, I’ll always be nervous for job interviews, or meeting new friends, but that’s not what I’m getting at. I don’t want to fear that my mother doesn’t like the way I’ve swept the floor and that she’ll love me less for not doing it exactly as she would have. I don’t want to fear that sending an email to a good friend will push her away from me just because I can’t always read her tone accurately. I don’t want to be this stupid motherfucker that feels like he has to make every single day of someone else’s life the new best day of their life just to keep them interested, or like every single random conversation, long-winded goodnight, or description of someone’s picturesque beauty has to be better than the last just to be able to ensure that they will want to hang out again. Just the same, I can’t expect every kiss emoji to be returned, every I love you to be heard, every hug to be as tight and long as the last, just to hold the belief that this other individual actually loves me.

I feel so stupid for not being able to get that through my head.

I forgive myself and will work hard to not repeat my past mistakes.

I want to be myself. I want to write until my hands hurt, I want to feel comfortable singing at the top of my lungs (or a respectable volume given context) no matter who’s around to hear. I don’t want to be embarrassed of the things I love unless it’s in a cute sort of way that people pick on each other sometimes like I always pick on my guy friends when they have unconventional sorts of interests. I want to talk about the things I love and not feel like I’m boring or annoying someone just because their eyes are wandering. I want to trust that the people who love me will love me no matter what (barring extreme circumstances) and that the people who still want to be my friend after seeing my quirks and hearing my interests, after knowing how strange I am, will be by my side until the bitter end. These are not things that those friends can do for me, these are things that I have to accept, things I have to feel, things I have to trust. I need to feel important, I need to believe that my help is enough, no matter how much or how little it happened to be at that time. I need to see that I should not have to work my ass off doing everything possible to make myself feel like I’m doing something in order to feel as if I am appreciated.

There are times where I have done so many things for someone in hopes of being the greatest thing in their life. I worked my ass off to allow for certain events to happen, I was always around, always there to help with menial tasks and attempt to take it beyond what was asked, and to be honest: a few of those people I did those things for never even knew who I was. The tasks I worked so hard for, that I put so much of myself into, weren’t even noticed. They did nothing for the relationship that I was trying to build, all they did was take away from what I had for myself.

I’ll always remember a girl, Donna, who I tried so hard to make happy in every way that I could and I always managed to just make myself look creepy due to comically bad timing. I did everything I could to try to brighten her day and all I succeeded in doing was making her uncomfortable.

I’ll probably never forget another girl, Abby, who I worked so hard to please her family to try to have them accept me, who I wrote enormous notes to multiple times a day which were probably some of my best writings to date. I tried to help her see in what ways her family was hurting her and in what ways she should probably try to break free and find new pieces of herself, but she only took and took, likely just enjoying the dedicated attention of an older boy.

I was putting parts of myself into these people, but I was not myself. I was attempting to impress them, attempting to change something about them to make them happy as often as possible at my own expense. I created unsustainable relationships, in some cases before a relationship was even formed, just because I wasn’t confident enough in myself to know that everything would be okay, or at least turn out the way it ultimately should, if I could just behave normally; be myself.

Today has been my first day taking my new medication. I feel like I can think more clearly. I feel better about myself. I hope it’s not a placebo effect just because this is my first day taking it, though I haven’t had any positive placebo effects in the past, so that’d be a wild new experience. I’m not sure if I would have been able to come to this epiphany today without the help of said drugs, but I don’t feel like less of a person if that is the case. I don’t feel like less of a person for being able to cry today and work through the associated problem with the assistance of a drug. I don’t feel as if anyone should. In fact, I feel better. I feel like I can make strides forward with my mental health as well as my physical health with this new perspective. I feel a little behind, sure, but people have been telling me for months that I’ve got my whole life ahead of me, and while sometimes it doesn’t feel like it, it sure does help to know there are people quite a bit older than me who have gone through a lot less shit.

I still don’t feel like I’m ready to be seriously romantically involved with someone, and I don’t think I will be for quite a long time. I may not know how long a long time is, but I know that it’s definitely not something I should even be thinking about right now. I’ll be resuming my education soon, I’ll be looking for work once I’m ready after I’ve settled into that, and hopefully I’ll have a lot of time to spend with the wonderful friends that I’ve had around me this whole time, working through this with me, keeping me in their thoughts and occasional check-ins as their lives move forward at their varying paces. I suppose if anyone dislikes the adjustments that I’ll be making over the rest of my life, they aren’t really my friend, no matter how much that hurts... but, to be honest, I think that a few people will be happy that I can perhaps see this relationship problem I’ve had a bit more clearly now, and hopefully they can help me stay on track.

To wrap it up, that guy that I talked about in the “intro” of the update: his name is Tim. He watched me grow up, he’s essentially family since I have so little extended family that I would actually consider family. I hadn’t seen him in probably nine years, but I ran into him today. He commented on how I had grown, he shared some stories, we talked for a while, and he accidentally answered a struggle that I had been having with myself for a while. I won’t go into that here, mainly because I don’t want to talk about those sort of “plans” publicly (apparently there are more personal things than my relationship problems), but sometimes people just kind of show up in your life at the right times to keep you oriented in the right direction.

I think that’s all I really have for now, though. Besides the mention of new medication and a new mindset it wasn’t much of an update, more of an explanation of how I keep fucking myself over with the people I love, but I wanted to put this somewhere. I made a major step today in discovering a new way that I can work on myself. I’m disappointed in how long it took for me to come to the conclusion, but I’m proud that I can say I came to the conclusion at all. At this rate and vector, I’m pretty curious to see where I’m going to end up. Can’t think too far ahead, though--that hasn’t been turning out too well. Instead, I’d just like to keep a positive outlook going one day at a time.

Update done, peace out.

#personal #update

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