in other news, my friend took this of me the other day, thought it was neat.

the morphing, breathing.

dance with it, keep the light low.

what can i do? learn to love with little or no boundaries attached? cling onto ideas that ultimately don't fit who i want to be? live constantly in fear?

it would be wrong to say that my family has never “been there” for me. they’ve mostly been supportive in many difficult times in my life. what i'm learning is that the level and capacity of the support i need is well beyond what they can or are willing to provide. but it's also no one else's responsibility to take care of me but myself, so i don’t expect much on that end. i just don’t get good reactions when i’m not doing well mentally. in some ways i’m also feeling this away about my close friends. it’s not that people don’t care or want to help, often times the methods of support are just incompatible with my own needs. 

i’ll often have periods of days and weeks where it just feels like a dissociative haze, and then i realize that it’s been weeks since i’ve had contact with another human besides my partner. then i reach out to others: my dad, my sisters, my best friends, old co-workers, etc. but after a short while, i just want to revert back to my previous state. when i tell people i need space and that i’m having issues with communication, it’s often responded with kindness and understanding, but the sheer amount of time and space i need seems to be a problem for others. i’ve never done well in relationships when i don’t see the person frequently, and especially with everything this past year, it kind of makes maintaining relationships much more difficult for me. i’ve had intense phone anxiety for most of my life, so any time i get on a call/video chat with anyone, i’m counting the seconds before i can hang up, then let out a huge sigh. it happens every single time. i often get lost in texts and emails and have always had trouble communicating in written word and get anxious about having to reply. a lot of times i don’t want to reply. but i do anyway. writing this entire entry takes an immense amount of energy from me. i feel like i can only be my true self when i’m around others physically, and that when using technology to aid in communication, all of that gets lost. it brings the worst parts of me out: the anxiety, the fear, the deep sadness, and the anger.

no one wants to do anything but distract from how shitty everything is: “junk” food, drugs/alcohol, sex/porn, video games, netflix, sports, etc. and that’s the only way i’ve been able to bond with those i love. it’s tiresome. it’s predictable. i’ve spent a good portion of the last decade of my life socializing and “networking” because that what i was supposed to do. my social life has become a function to numb myself and try extremely hard to have a good time to numb every feeling i’ve been enduring or avoiding.

drafted from like 2 weeks ago, posting to give it some closure. if you see this, you may ignore it. thank you.

I don’t want to be preemptive.

This last year has been absolutely mental. I feel motivated and these last two weeks I’ve worked the hardest I have in maybe a decade. And it’s actually showing some tiny, yet significant results for me. It’s scary and overwhelming. It feels like I know less about what I’m doing thsn when I was unemployed for two years. The depression is still deep within me and no perfect cocktail of medication + therapy once a week is ever gonna get rid of it. It’s just who I am and who I’ve always been. The goal now is just try to power through it. Try to be the best person I can be and not let little mistakes or setbacks completely envelop me like they pretty much always have.

I can’t be weak anymore.

A few months post-breakup, I was in a decent place. Even though I was still miserable and not working, I felt somewhat liberated. It seemed like I actually had options for once, that I wasn’t just doing everything for everyone else. The momentum was there, and then suddenly my mom is in the hospital and a month later, she’s gone. After that happened, I thought that momentum was gone. I felt completely depleted.

I never really spoke about my mother around my friends, because she was a very complicated person. She endured many truly traumatic and horrifying events at an early age, came to this country at 20, and had a really difficult time adapting to this country. Her mental health started getting really bad when I was around 10 and she never went back to being the same. Day by day in the 18 years since, I saw her mental and physical health deteriorate and her will to live and function disappear. I had basically lost my mother there to some extent and at that point it was my turn to start taking care of her. Living with her and having to take care of her throughout high school, into college when I wasn’t dorming, and several years into my real adulthood was completely overwhelming. My father worked, and still works, like an animal and he had almost no time to tend to her needs.