weep for yourself my man/ you'll never be what is in your heart

I'll be the first to admit that I'm not always the nicest person to myself. Self, you're a bitch to me. So this whole "be nice to yourself" thing is taking some adjustment. I wish I could remember when I started to be so hard on myself, but as far back as I can remember, I've always been this way. I've been a big believer in pushing myself so that I can succeed and be the best, but and when I fail in something, not only do I disappoint others, I disappoint myself. The question is why do I feel like I disappoint others? It's not their problem if I mess up. It's mine. Even if they're relying on me for something, while they may be upset that whatever it was that I was supposed to do didn't work out, it's ultimately me who has to deal with the aftermath. I have a huge fear of failure. When I was a little kid, if I did something I wasn't supposed to, I would let others take the fall if they got caught and I didn't. I know, that's a horrible thing to do, and it's truly something I feel bad about. I just couldn't face the reality of letting myself down. I always justified it by saying that since I saw someone else be punished, I'd never do it again, and most of the time, that worked. I prided myself in being well-behaved. Well-behaved girls make their families proud, and there's that classic Catholic guilt thing kicking in. For years, this system of living under the radar, while being extremely hard on myself internally has worked for me. I've finally reached my breaking point, though. I'm starting to see that if I don't ease up on myself, I will kill myself from stress. My life is stressful enough without throwing myself as a stressor into the mix. I still have issues with feeling guilty about trying to be happy. I feel like that's something that I blogged about a year ago, and it's not better. My problem is that so many other people in my life have huge problems and issues weighing on them, and somehow I feel responsible for making sure that they're all doing okay. The problem is that many of them aren't, and then I again feel failure, and of course stress. Then I beat up on myself for being stressed because I'm supposed to be concentrating on how to be happy. I mean, unhappiness was one of the biggest reasons why I ended my last relationship.  I don't want to be alone forever, but and I'm not going to get into another relationship until I'm happy with myself. (I'm not supposed to be using the word 'but'.)

The point of all of this rambling is that I'm going to do my best to forgive myself. It's okay to not be perfect. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that simply pointing out all of the things that I'm good at outweighs all of the negative effects I feel for being imperfect. My little assignment to make myself happy for 5 minutes a day is starting to seem like a placeholder for actual legitimate happiness. Yeah, it makes me feel good, but when the 5 minutes are over I'm back to my usual self-hating personality. I suppose I could extend the 5 minutes to a longer part of my day, but that's not very realistic. I have a lot of stuff that I have to do that doesn't make me happy. I also have a lot of stuff that doesn't make me feel anything. I'm emotionally neutral on probably 95% of my school assignments. I also have a nagging thought in my head that if I can just fix everything that's wrong with me, I'll be happy because then I'll be perfect. I know that this will never happen, not because I'll never be happy, but because it's not possible to fix everything. Of course, this realization simply makes me more unhappy because I want to be happy so badly, and it seems like achieving happiness is never going to happen. I just want answers! I also kind of think that going on some sort of retreat would be helpful, but nothing religious, and definitely nothing in solitude.

I have real problems when I'm alone. I sob uncontrollably when I have to go back to Kent to pack up more of my apartment... partly because that whole situation feels like yet another failure in my life, and partly because I'm miserable when I'm alone. It's not that I'm afraid to be alone, it's more that I don't like the feeling of abandonment, even if I'm the one doing the abandoning. Honestly, that semester in Kent probably did more harm than good to my mental health. I've never experienced that kind of intense loneliness before. I was fine at UD when I lived on my own that last summer, probably because I had friends around. But Kent was just... awful. When I realized that there would be days on end where I wouldn't leave my apartment because I had no reason to, or that the only words I said out loud all day didn't happen until dinnertime when I called my mom, that's when the loneliness really hit me. Even the visits with my friends in Cleveland didn't help most of the time because I eventually had to go back to Kent, back to my empty apartment where the only company I had were my hamsters. Even though I'm alone sometimes here at home, I'm still much happier (relatively speaking, of course) here than in Kent. When people leave here, I know that they'll be back. When people would leave in Kent, I had no idea when I would see them again. Even if I do get lonely here (which hasn't happened) I have friends close by that I can call. I have family here too. I feel a tremendous pressure to be okay with being alone, really alone, without any friends, because I know in the back of my mind that someday I'll have to be open to moving away. More than once I've had the thought, "I wish I had a husband" just so I know that someday when the day comes that I'll have to leave Columbus, I'll have at least one friend with me.  And again, this whole loneliness thing feels like a failure and then I get stressed and unhappy.

Have I made myself sound crazy yet? I don't intend to, but I do want to get some of my thoughts across, in case anyone's been thinking that I'm acting like a crazy person. There is a reasoning behind my madness, it's just not something I'm super comfortable talking about in person. Believe me, it's taken me a long time to even admit half of this stuff to myself, admitting it to my friends and family may never happen, at least not verbally. The written word is a beautiful thing, and something we need to use more often... coming from a girl who has taken to blogging once a month. Hey, I'm not perfect.

~Christine