#therapy posts

Did you know that I'm falling apart

Did you know nobody in my real life has made me feel as loved as you did when you asked me if I needed anything

(my mother and brothers stopped caring for me long ago, my fathers love is too toxic to be called that and my sisters is way too codependent)

It hit me as I entered this FUCKING HOUSE how much it all is. How much I hate it here. How trapped I feel here.

Did you know I will always remember how nice it was that you threw me a birthday party? How long it's been since someone gave a shit to do that for me?

Every friend (save one) I've ever had has fucking abandoned me. All of them have ruined me so badly, hurt me in a way Ill never recover from.

And I feel so bad I thought you were among them until a few months ago, and how much I held back because I didn't wanna get hurt.

I'm a pile of broken stained glass that pretends to be a strong window, and I'm just realizing how bad I am and how much I want the lie to be real

But the shards of my life and stability keep getting broken down more, keep getting ground into the pavement, and I don't know how to repair it all. How to free myself from the birdcage of guilt, rusty and painted over

I can't ask.

She is not weak.

It's not my place to label her journey.

and

I can't keep it locked in forever.

My last therapist didn’t help me much, but I took away one thing from her, and I’ve been tracking my overall moods day-to-day and I think I’m cycling again.  And I know it’s stupid to conclude anything without the help of a licensed professional but that really worries me, because it started with sleep problems the first time, then my long stretch of depression came next, then my bursts of anger, my headaches, and then my regularly-cycling moods.  The next stage after that was depression on a level I didn’t think I could come back from, and I had to go to my parents before I destroyed myself.

I’m really worried being at home now, because I’m afraid that’s helping to foster the problems I had a few years ago.  it’s inconceivable to me that my mother, who knows I’ve struggled for years with self-worth and self-harm and crippling feelings of inadequacy, and social anxieties to the point that I would break down sobbing in the middle of class, can talk to me the way she does.  It’s like she doesn’t remember the entire span of high school and how it almost killed me.  I understand she has her own separate network of problems etc etc but for god’s sake, she wonders why I don’t talk to her. 

I try to find solace in other people and distract myself from home, but I keep fucking up all the potential relationships in my life and somehow it surprises me every time.  It’s not that I’m “shy” - I can’t fucking talk to people.  It’s difficult for me to meet people, and it’s especially difficult for me to stay in touch with people I’ve already known for years.  I cancel plans with my best friends, people I want to see, because I feel safer in my own house, in my own room, by myself.  When I go, I don’t regret going, and I always have a great time.  But I still seize up when someone asks me to go somewhere, no matter how much I want to go, and I end up ruining the relationship when they find someone better who won’t cancel and who can hold up a conversation.  I don’t have many people to begin with.  I don’t know where I stand with my family.

My mother knows about the sleeping problems I’m having now.  We discussed it in passing, and she said that she had them too.  And that it sucks.  That was about the extent of it.  There was also a “Casey you need to stop sleeping when you get home from work because you need to get back on a regular schedule”.  And I couldn’t agree more, I would love to not stay up until 4 in the morning and sleep through the whole of the day.  But I can’t break that habit, and the point is no matter how often I sleep and no matter how intermittently I don’t ever feel rested.  I wake up just as tired as before and just as miserable.  Sleeping regularly isn’t helping, and sleeping in intervals doesn’t help either.  I keep myself awake trying to convince myself that the things that bother me don’t (and shouldn’t) bother me, but it doesn’t work.  Some things are bothering me much more than they should be right now and it’s making me bitter.

I don’t know that she takes the depression I’m having now seriously.  She definitely knows about how I broke down crying in the middle of Wal-Mart over Christmas break, and how I almost wrecked the car driving before that because I couldn’t stay awake.  She knows about how I called her sobbing a few months ago because I was failing classes, and how I didn’t feel like I belonged at college and how I felt incredibly and overwhelmingly inadequate.  I think she assumes that because I’m not as low as I was a few years ago - ie, I’m still moderately social at home and I’m not physically hurting myself - that it’s not something worth medicating. She gave me some homeopathic mood-boosting bullshit to try at Christmas break, and I’ve seen zero change.  She doesn’t believe in medication because she’s been medicated herself for so long, and I know the side effects of my meds weren’t exactly beneficial, but at the same time I really believe I couldn’t have improved without them.  She says I need to focus on methods beyond medication to feel better, but I don’t think she understands how difficult that is.  I don’t know how she can see me go through things like that and think that just because they don’t happen every day they’re not serious problems.

I’ve only had one therapist, but the one I had seemed to miss the point of everything I tried to talk about with her.  If I told her I wasn’t doing my homework because of my procrastination habit, she would suggest “well just make a schedule” instead of “don’t focus so much on perfectionism because you were showered with praise for the entire first half of your life and now you can’t bear to finish a project that falls below anyone’s standards so you opt to just not do it”.  If I was clashing with my mother, we looked at “this is part of what every teenager goes through” rather than “your parents’ marriage is dissolving before your eyes and your mother is projecting her own shortcomings onto you”.  I began lying to her, telling her  everything was fine and nodding my head as she talked about how much I was improving.  I never learned how to cope with my problems.  No one ever told me why cutting myself was bad, just that it was something I shouldn’t do because it was hurting me.  When I had a problem, I internalized it and suppressed it.  I haven’t cut for six months, but I’ve had to start that snapping-elastic-on-your-wrist thing instead.  It gives the same kind of pain sensation, but it doesn’t leave the scars.  That’s both a good and a bad thing.

My depression was something secretive, something clandestine in my house that we didn’t talk about.  Nobody ever said “depression” or “therapy” or “Prozac”; just “are you okay” and “appointment” and “pills”.  I was taught indirectly not to talk about it because it was something that we hoped would just go away if we kept quiet about it.  That’s why I don’t talk about anything now - because I was taught not to be public with my problems.  I internalize, and I write it out, and I go back and reread it and reread it and reread it until I can’t anymore.  I dwell on things, and I pretend things are better than they are until I can’t anymore.  In a sense that’s why tumblr is such a good thing for me, and why writing is helpful, because at least I’m not keeping these things inside anymore.  I feel safer trying to keep a kind of diary and work myself through my problems rather than imposing them on someone else.