There Is Something Deeply And Intrinsically Wrong With Me

Well, it’s been a while since I wrote a blog post. I’d like to think that maybe I’ve not had anything worth writing about, but it’s really that I’ve not been doing very well at all, as I’m sure you probably gathered from the title.

I have spent a large portion of my life, basically as long as I can remember, as a human doormat. I find existence to be overwhelming. I often struggle to get out of my own head, let alone interact with the world around me. As a result, I am an easy target, as I don’t fight back.

After a lifetime of people pleasing and turning the other cheek, so to speak, I don’t have any fight left in me. My default is essentially a flight response where I get silent and withdraw into myself. The best that I can do in any given scenario is to excuse myself quietly from the situation and go find space where I can be alone.

It’s pretty clear from therapy that this is a trauma response. As someone with low self esteem and self worth, I find people mean comments to be supportive of the hateful self talk in my head, even if they are joking or don’t mean it. I’ve never been very good at differentiating because regardless of their intentions, I hear it and I tell myself it and mean it.

It has become clear to me that this response is a problem, as I lack the ability to actually communicate with people and discuss my needs in real time. There are a variety of reasons why. Sometimes, I don’t feel comfortable sharing either with that person or in that situation. Sometimes, I truly don’t know what’s wrong. One of the reasons that I have diagnosed illnesses is because I experience depression symptoms and anxiety symptoms randomly. My emotions and logical brain have become detached and it takes a lot of work to try to cross the bridge between the two and figure out what’s going on.

This is very taxing, yet people don’t see this because it all goes on inside my head. Every day is like this, as I am actively trying to improve, which requires waking up each day and doing the work. The problem is that I don’t always feel up to doing the work. It’s incredibly difficult to overcome a trauma response or a panic attack. It’s often all I can do to ride it out, and it’s never at a time that’s convenient.

I don’t like this aspect of myself. It makes relationships with other people incredibly difficult, especially as they become more vibrant and incur depth. I’ve had people mistreat me in a variety of ways over the course of this lifetime, and it’s caused me to have severe trust issues. I expect people to treat me like shit. Fuck, at this point, I feel I deserve it. It keeps happening over and over again, and everything happens for a reason. Maybe I was born to be the world’s whipping post. Maybe my role in this life is to be available for people to take their feelings out on. I’m aware of how deeply fucked up this thinking is, even while typing it.

The problem is that I’m too factual. I feel the way I feel as a result of the evidence I’ve been provided by the world in the time during which I’ve lived in it. I’ve been cheated on, lied to, led along, used as a rebound, manipulated, and abandoned. The list of relationships, platonic and romantic, that I’ve had in this life that have disappeared and let me down is long. I miss a lot of those people every day. I can’t just turn off caring. That’s not how I’m wired. If I loved you in any capacity, I will always love you, and I am always rooting for you.

So, because these things keep happening to me, I’ve now arrived at a place where I expect them. I expect to be treated poorly in an effort to brace myself for when I inevitably feel fucking awful about it, because when I didn’t used to brace myself, my depression became overwhelming, to the point that I couldn’t function. At least this way, when things go terribly, I can point to myself in the mirror and say “hey, you were right.”

I have a hard time opening up to people. I don’t like letting others in. Even the people that get let in don’t know anywhere close to everything. It’s scary to say some of the thoughts I have out loud. I just got to a point with my therapist where I’ve been able to speak some of them out loud in therapy and it’s a painstaking process just to get the words out. Something about saying things out loud makes them real instead of just nonsense inside my head.

I also don’t have many friends. Sure, I have lots of people who I would consider friends, but have you ever tried being friends with a depressed person? I don’t check in with people. I don’t text first. I don’t initiate plans. I don’t have social media beyond DepressiveHacks, which I specifically don’t advertise to people. If you try to initiate plans, there’s a good chance I’m going to either say no or bail because I feel like shit. I often have people mistake my inaction or silence for a lack of caring or prioritizing, which is fair because I’m trying to prioritize not feeling like subhuman garbage, but it happens enough and folks don’t want to stick around. I would be the first to acknowledge that being my friend is not a walk in the park.

Alright, so where does that leave us? Well, I had someone tell me at the end of last year that this part of the work I’m doing in therapy is the worst. I know and can recognize the things that are wrong, but I can’t fix them overnight. Changing yourself takes time. I’ve been trying to work on it for years, and progress is slow but steady. This particular flight response is going to be very difficult to overcome, seeing as it’s ingrained into my nervous system. Looking at the mountain of work that will be needed to change this feel overwhelming, especially when I’m already so exhausted from all the work I’ve done over the past three years. It just feels like a never ending uphill battle, and nobody can push me forward except myself.

I wish that the people online who rush to snap judgments about me would read a blog post like this. I wish that I could show this to my friends so they’d understand better without making them concerned over my well-being. There are a lot of things that I wish, but most of all, I wish that my mentally illness wasn’t capable of hurting other people. I upset my best friend because I don’t know how to communicate and they thought that they did something to trigger my response. Hurt people hurt people. I’m tired of being a hurt person. I’m tired of feeling broken. The same walls that I use to protect myself isolate people I love and keep them out. I don’t know how to talk to them and explain the years worth of pain, which is not their fault. They deal with things that are the result of many other people before them. I feel trapped as a victim of my past, and it impacts my future every day.

One of my many idiosyncrasies is that I’m quite particular about physical contact. I don’t really understand why, but it started about five or so years ago during my last long-term relationship and it has never stopped. I think it’s really tied into trust for me, and the trust issues make it so I don’t want people anywhere near my physical presence. I share this because right now, I feel like I could really use a hug, and I don’t have the ability to receive a hug from anyone who I would feel comfortable hugging because they’re either upset with me or not a part of my life any longer. Trust me when I say that it takes a lot for me to get to a point where I want a hug.

I feel like I need to cry, but I can’t get myself to cry.

Fuck.