Me, Myself and I

Hmmmmm where do I begin..

My story isn’t one that is heard very often, I don’t really know what to tell you. What I do know, is that my voice has often gone unheard throughout history. Time and time again the world tries to silence it because they don’t understand where it comes from, who created it or what purpose it serves. To tell you a bit about when it all started, I’d like to share a few details about my life in order to better set the stage for the story I am about to tell you.

Firstly, I am a 27 year old female who has struggled with anxiety her whole life. I don’t often show it, but I feel it inside. I don’t always let on that it is there, but I am acutely aware of its presence and am influenced by the negative thoughts on a regular basis. It’s not like it is always crippling, but sometimes it can be overwhelmingly so. Sometimes it gets so bad that I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, I can’t do what I need to do to keep myself going. That is where my friends and family come in.

Having close friends and family has always been important to me, but understanding how to maintain close relationships and not let them fizzle out and die is where my challenges lie. I am not always soft, approachable or welcoming. I often put up a barrier to try to protect both myself and others from what I harbour inside of me. I try to pretend that this way of relating to others is sufficient, but I have always known it is not. I have always known that there’s something standing in my way, and it can be very hard to explain. It can be difficult to let friends and family know why I am acting a certain way, because I haven’t always known. On that note, here’s some background info on my family:

My parents are divorced, mostly happily, but sometimes I see the pain that it caused them. I don’t try to think about it, but I sometimes get flash backs or intrusive thoughts about the divorce, and I am sure my sister does too. It made us all a little bit quieter, less open with our emotions, more conservative with our actions. Perhaps for the better, but maybe also for the worse. Divorce is a hard event to comprehend, and I often to try to figure out who I should be blaming for it. Is it my mom? My dad? Me? My sister? We were all in it together, but I also know that there are forces external to the family unit that influence family functioning as well. I know that things like culture, politics, weather and society influence the family unit too. Not just the actions, thoughts and feelings of each individual member.

Moving on from the divorce I felt as though a weight had been lifted but in its place was a large, bottom-less pit of self-doubt, worry and fear. Self-doubt in regards to my ability to succeed in life having my family now torn apart; the social structure that I was raised within my whole life has been split apart for no apparent reason. I was worried because I never knew what would happen next. Though I could somewhat see it coming, I didn’t know how pervasively the divorce would affect all of our lives, how awful the law can be sometimes. I could never have predicted the horrors that I would later witness after my dad left our family home. Seeing him live in a different apartment with the bare minimum for furniture made me not want to visit him. So we didn’t. My sister and I mainly stayed with my mom, to support her but also to protect ourselves from what we didn’t understand. I didn’t want to be hurt anymore than I already had been by what my dad “did”, or what we all thought he did. Finally, I get fearful, of the unknown. I feared not having the support system I once had, having to adjust to starting University when my two biggest supports, my parents, had gone their separate ways. It all felt overwhelming and I didn’t believe I could do it. Somehow I did. I made it through my first year, with little to prove for myself. I got some pretty low grades, I partied lots and made some new friends, but also enemies. I felt volatile, angry and sad. It didn’t feel like it was supposed to, starting a new chapter of my life, it felt as though I was jumping out of a plane with no parachute attached. So I tried to find comfort elsewhere, in the outside world. That didn’t go as well as I had planned.

When I searched for happiness outside of myself, I fell into a deep depression and became dependent on those around me for support. I was listless, emotionally blunted, and tired.. all the time. I was socially removed and isolated, seeing only my boyfriend at the time and often sleeping when we would get together. I wasn’t on any medication back then, but was trying to find the right mixture of substances on my own accord to accommodate for the overwhelming emotion I held inside. Emotion I didn’t know what to do with, that I was ashamed of and didn’t want to tell anyone about.

Searching for happiness outside of oneself is problematic for 2 reasons: 1) because it does not allow for internal control over our actions, and 2) because it prevents us from appreciating the feeling of happiness that our body is naturally capable of producing. It fails to acknowledge that our bodies are capable of happiness regardless of external input, and that we can find true happiness within ourselves instead of trying to mimic it with substances, material consumption or toxic relationships that only provide momentary glimpses of what it is like to truely and honestly be happy. But it’s not easy to let yourself be happy, so for a long time I just didn’t bother trying. I didn’t think I was capable of it, and so I left it up to the heavens to decide my fate. Regardless of where I was engaging in risky behaviours or holding myself back from doing the things I knew where good for me, I was getting in the way of my own growth and development. I was preventing myself from learning anything other than what I already knew, or at least what I thought I knew..

That I was not worthy of love.

I don’t know where this came from, but I do know that it affected my life in many ways. For one, it meant that I was unable to love myself, one of the fundamental factors in living a happy and fulfilled life. However, it also meant that I didn’t fully accept love from others, and was very suspicious of anyone who said they loved me. I didn’t believe it, and no one could tell me they loved me enough to make it be true. I need external affirmation more than any sane person would, and it was driving me crazy. I couldn’t for the life of me make myself believe I was worthy of love, and it took me down one of the darkest paths I will ever be on. I hope.

Self-love and acceptance may be somewhat radical ideas, but really, when you break these concepts down you will see that they are both essentially the same. They both originate from a need to move forward in life; let go of past mistakes and love yourself unconditionally regardless of your upbringing, who you are and what you have done. One of the most beautiful but incredible challenging aspects of being human is that humanity is fraught with error; misjudgements, incorrectness and injustice. As humans, we don’t always do the right thing, and sometimes we even do the wrong thing purposefully. So sometimes, it is difficult to accept that we are all human and all capable of causing others hurt. This is something I didn’t understand for a longgg time that I wish I had known sooner.

If you are interested in hearing more, please stay tuned for my next blog post which will be about finding inner peace and relating to those who have done you wrong. These topics are intrinsically related, and I hope to uncover some of the truths about what it means to have inner peace and how it can help us forgive those who we would rather choose to forget.

Thanks for reading,

Xoxo

Bipolar Chick 🐥