Summertime Sadness

Hello friends.

May has been and will continue to be an extremely busy month for me. I am using this little blog post to check in.

I have been feeling moderately overwhelmed lately. I think some of it is due to my travel schedule, but I also have been really pushing myself to get out of my comfort zone. This has been really difficult, and I think I have reached a point where I need a break. Luckily, I should be getting one the next couple of weeks.

I think it’s really difficult for me to properly articulate how difficult things are for me that are seemingly very simple. The uphill battles I fight in my mind to get to a point where I can even function, let alone do something beyond my own current capacity is a lonely one.

I love that I have people who care and want to see me reach my full potential. As someone who doesn’t inherently feel like they deserve to accomplish anything in this life (self hatred is a bitch sometimes; I’m working on it), it truly means so much that there are other people who care about me and love me enough to want to see me succeed.

I wish that I could better express these things to people in my life offline. I wish I knew how to better articulate what is going on in my head. My therapist has me working on trying to make my journey less lonely by sharing more often with people outside of DepressiveHacks. Turns out the journey feels extra lonely when you don’t talk to people about it because you don’t want to be a burden or cause them concern.

Unlearning things is really difficult. The list of things that I know that I need to unlearn is massive and grows every day. Every time I find something else that I need to unlearn, it feels like a step backwards, as it’s yet another thing on the to-do list. Yet, every day, I progress forward despite this.

I went on a date this month. I signed up to sing karaoke. Both of these things didn’t work out the way that I wanted, but I am trying to reframe this. I struggle mightily with ignoring negative feedback. The date didn’t amount to anything, so why try again? My name was never called for karaoke, so why sign up again? Just as I’m more inclined to do something if I start to see positive results, I am even more inclined to not do something because I see negative results. I’m very practical like this.

Alright, so where do we go from here? I think that I want to get back to writing more of these blog articles. I need to share more about where I’m at with my mental health journey, both with my offline friends and my online ones. It’s been feeling really lonely lately, probably because I’ve been so busy that I haven’t had time to check in, and I’m hoping that more writing like this will make things feel less lonely.

I told my therapist last session that I am really proud of myself for getting out of my comfort zone, even if it isn’t going great. I’m going to try to keep doing this, even if it kills me. Right now, it feels like it might.

I need a hug.