Life, oh Life

"At the behest of well-meaning friends, I have purchased books on how to be happy. I have tried to turn my chronic scowl into a bright smile. I have attempted to become more active, to get away from my dark house and away from my somber books and participate in the world of meaningful action. … I have contemplated getting a dog. I have started eating salads. I have tried to discipline myself in nodding knowingly. … I have undertaken yoga. I have stopped yoga and gone into tai chi. I have thought of going to psychiatrists and getting some drugs. I have quit all of this and then started again and then once more quit. Now I plan to stay quit. The road to hell is paved with happy plans."

 

by Eric Wilson, in Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy.

''it is selfish focusing on yourself.it makes me hate myself even more yet i cant stop. i cant walk down a street and not focus on how i look.i hate myself. i hate my body. i dread mirrors.i cant believe that i am stuck living as myself. i can never escape from my body. i no how trivial an issue that sounds but no matter how much i try it just doesnt feel that way to me.
when you really think youre ugly u dont tell people the last thing u want to do is draw attention to it.you dont start screaming the million reasons u are ugly wen u get a compliment. instead u smile and say you love yourself then go home and eat and eat until you are so full that you can barely walk to the toilet you are about to throw up in. people dont get that wen i say no photo i mean it and that ill go home and cry later if they take it. people think im just being annoying stupid they dont understand how every time it destroys me a little more.some times i feel so angry i dont no wot to do with myself i feel like throwing myself ccross the room.i feel like screaming at people at how fucking ugly and fat i am and4 them not2interupt with irritating compliments but just2listen''

-apple18

never mind her spelling

When I arrived at my dad's, he said I gained weight (which isn't true, lost about a kg in 2 weeks). Like he's been saying that every weekend for the past couple of months. My stepmom said..'welll, a couple of weeks ago you were anorexic, and now this!' (cause around october, I reached my lowweight, and she said I was 'sooo skinny').
 
I don't like it when they do that. It hurts and shuts me up. What am I supposed to say? My mom hinted to me being eating disordered a couple of times, too. I don't know how to defend myself. But when my sister said a while  ago that she was worried about me getting an eating disorder..my mom said 'Ah, that's nonsense, that wouldn't happen to her'. I don't understand why they attack me so much. I don't want to confide in them, and they always wonder why. 
 
And then yesterday my stepmom said she thought I have a complex about physicalness, about being touched. That is soo true..But I don't know how she knows..Weird, not?

Yesterday, towards the end of therapy. My therapist said she had something for me, this list of 'pleasurable activities'. I had to check which ones I liked. So I read them out loud to her, and one of 'em was 'wearing clean clothes'. She said, well that is something we could follow for a while. And I told her I always felt dirty. I explained that however clean I would be, I always feel so ugly that it makes me feel gross.
 
And she was like..'That's weird. Did you ever experience something really bad happening to your body when you were younger?'
 
And
I
said
NO.
 
Well, anyways..I know damn straight we will be talking about that next time. And maybe that would be the time to come clean to her about eating. Because a real big part of the 'feeling dirty' is feeling that I ate, or even just feeling that I have a stomach.
 
Also, she asked if I had ever been in love? Said we'd have to be talking about relationships and feeling attractive and such next time. She said 'you okay with that?'. And I said yes. UHOH. And we also have to talk about my memory loss (I don't remember much of~anything, really..). So that's a whole bunch of very personal, feely topics:|. I cried twice there in about 4 months, and that was about feeling ugly. Right. I can handle all that stuff about 'oh, i think too much, oh, i don't act on emotions properly' and be cool with it, but as soon as it's about my looks, it goes downhill..
 

 

Yea I realize that you can’t actually help me, but I just need someone to listen to me sometimes. Cause at therapy..I can’t discuss as much as I’d like (lack of both time and confidence). Don’t worry, there’s not much I expect from you.

And my mom never really said that I as a person would fail. More that, therapy is a failure, it doesn’t work and you should just take life as it is! One time I came back from therapy and she asked me how it was..And I told her that it was tough but that I opened up. I told her that I felt like life is not worth fighting for when all you get back is living. And she said ‘Well, it’s not that bad to feel like that sometimes..I feel like that a lot..And sometimes you just have to accept that it aint fun’. Em? Can you say denying of the right to have emotions? She is always like, ‘OPEN UP, you never talk!’..Well, I’m gonna keep quiet if every time I try to tell her how I really feel she reacts like that.

And you know, I like therapy, I like and admire my therapist a lot and I don’t expect much of it, but I wouldn’t want to stop, get what I mean? I feel like we don’t get to the point sometimes, but that’s just cause I have so much to tell.

And god yes, I’m hard on myself, sometimes. But most of the times I fail living up to the hardness. I expect a lot, but I never make it true. So in a way you could say, that I’m kinda nice to myself, cause I never do anything, really. I plan and think high goals, but does it matter if I never reach them anyways? And that is also how I give everything away. By thinking about what I want to do, planning it, thinking ‘this time I will do it’, hoping and expecting that it will work. Making plans for the better life I want..But as soon as one thing goes wrong, I give up and surrender myself to my own laziness and give away the control of having power over how you fill your days. Productive and fun, that is the control I’d want to have, but I never take it.

 I feel like I am the challenge, not what happened to me. I don’t see life as difficult, I don’t feel it’s working against me, really (sure, I’d like to be blessed with better bone structure and unlimited credit, but my life is comfortable you know?). It’s me that’s troubling me, it’s the built in chemical structures that make me do and think and fail. And of course some things happened to me that made it more difficult..but it’s mainly ME. Which makes my attitude towards that me even worse, of course (that rhymes:)).

One of my biggest fears is that I’m exaggerating this, that I’m being a drama queen and that my life is not much worse than any other random person’s. That my rents are right when they say ‘partially it’s just your age, of course..’ , that they have the right to joke about me and therapy because I’m making it all more important than it is. And I don’t only fear it cause I don’t want them to be right (of course, IIII want to be right all the time), but I also fear it because..If everyone has this, if I’m nothing ‘special’, that would mean that I’d have to accept this. That there’s no room for progress, this is it, this is what they call life and everyone has to face it. That would suck:|.

 I hope I can succeed. I don’t know though.

 Thanks for listening!

 X