Stuck in Wonderland...

“i’m taking up too much space.”

this is hard to get into your head, because it can feel like no one wants you around. you are not a waste of space and you are not taking up too much space. you are a person, and people know that. we are so focused on ourselves in different ways. for you, you might worry you’re annoying people with your presence. but for them, they don’t think much of it because they know you’re a person who will take up as much space as needed.

“crying is a weakness.”

some kids are raised to think it’s not okay to cry. which is crazy because it’s a normal bodily thing to release emotions. don’t feel bad for crying. do it. cry. let it out. no one has a right to judge your feelings or your tears. we all have those days that are overwhelming and call for a good cry.

“i’ll never be enough.”

you will always be enough for the right people. you will always be enough in general but some people won’t appreciate that and that’s on them. you are you. you are you doing your best. don’t let anyone, and i mean anyone, take that away from you.

“my friends treat me like a therapist and i need boundaries.”

it feels great to be trusted enough that your friends confide in you, but it’s okay to be honest with them when they’re asking for too much. you can’t replace a professional who is trained to help with mental illness and shouldn’t be held to that expectation. let them know that you have to take care of yourself too.

“i always drive people away.”

people will come and go no matter how much we want them to stay. sometimes they’re not the right people for you, especially if they make you feel like it’s always your fault. if being yourself drives them away, you dodged a bullet. but it’s okay if it takes you time to come to terms with that. it’s easy to blame yourself for people not staying, but try to slowly learn not to.

“i don’t know how to live with myself.”

learning to live happily with yourself takes so much time and patience. start with a little time. get to know yourself apart from other people. understand it will be frustrating. do things for yourself you normally wouldn’t think you deserve. the time will come when you realize it’s not so bad.

“i need help but feel like a burden for asking.”

everyone needs help sometimes. that does not make you a burden. it does not make you weak. the people who love you are more than willing to help especially if it means you don’t drown in the things you have to handle. reach out. don’t fear coming off as annoying. people can be more understanding than we think.

“i’ve been told i have an annoying personality.”

first i want to say you do not need to change yourself to make other people like you. their perception of you is theirs and it doesn’t define you. the opinions you should actually listen to will come from those who know you and love you because they know you.

“if someone doesn’t like me back i feel like it’s my fault or there’s something wrong with me.”

we can’t be everyone’s cup of tea. and we can’t choose who we like. there’s nothing wrong with you, and how they feel about you is out of your control. it’s out of their control. you deserve someone who accepts you as you are. you deserve to know that there are people out there who will fall in love with you as you are. rejection, unfortunately, will happen a lot in life. it’s not your fault. it’s a part of being a person with your own personality.

“i do everything wrong.”

everyone makes mistakes but they don’t define us. it may feel like you’re always messing up, but what it really means if that you’re learning and growing. you do a lot of things right that you don’t think outweigh what you do “wrong”. but you’ll do good things and make mistakes too. the presence of one does not mean the absence of the other.

“i feel useless if i’m not helping my friends.”

I remember my dad picking me up to sit on his shoulders (possibly one of the last times he did that because I was getting too big to hold there for long) so I could be close to it's flipper because he wanted to show me something. He had me hold up my arm parallel to the whale's, and explained that we had the same bones, pointing to it's scapula and humerus and radius and ulna and so on while poking the same bones in my skinny little arm, all they way down to the tips of my fingers and it's own.

And in that moment, I could suddenly see how the whale and I were the same animal, just stretched and shrunk into different proportions by nature. There was an entire exhibit with skeletons of different animals and we went through all of them, picking out the hands and faces of all of them on myself.

I had never felt such a profound connection to the world around me before as I realized on a visceral level that not only was I related to all these creatures, they were very literally my distant cousins, and that in a way, they were me from back then and I was them from now, and we all were others still from the future.

Every living thing on earth is your cousin. The most distantly related humans are your 50th cousins. Chimps are your several thousandth cousins. An octopus is your 25 millionth cousin. Trees are your billionth cousins. You and I are surrounded by family. And that makes me feel profoundly loved.