#77 - Liveblogging a breakdown

I talk a lot about being happy, about my attempts to focus on the positive. But I’ve tried so hard this last week to keep it together that I think it really broke me.

I was alone for Christmas. It was the kind of thing that felt so sad, no one touched it with a ten-foot pole. The reality of my life seems to have become so depressing to even engage with that I was left to fend for myself, with no opportunities to ask for the help that I was crying out for.

It helped that I was sick. It helped that when you remove everything about a day that makes it a cause for celebration, it doesn’t really feel like you’re missing out on anything.

But I think I’m missing out on life.

I think a lot of the people that I have considered myself closest to in the world are at their wit’s end with me and no one will tell me what I’m doing wrong. I would change it, I would be better, I am more than happy to mold myself to other people’s pleasure because I so lack the ability to trust that I could provide my own.

It’s hard to know that you’re different. No one ever wants to actually confirm it for you, but they know too. We can all see it, and the constant manipulation required to avoid the truth gets exhausting for all involved.

I’m really just trying to be loved. I just want to be needed or wanted by someone, anyone, but especially those that I put return efforts into. I want to believe that they know I would go to the ends of the earth for them, even if I also can’t bring myself to really believe that they would go to the end of the block for me.

I wasn’t loved correctly, my love meter is broken. No one ever showed me that I can and am good enough to just be loved when I was young. How can I believe that it’s true when all of the evidence suggests otherwise? The moments I have that hint towards an alternative narrative like blips on the radar, moments that I cannot extrapolate from because there’s just too little data.

It’s tough to not be able to show these moments to people. To walk them through the pain of self-imposed exile because I’m trying so hard to weed out if my reactions are acceptably intense or clearly the result of anxious attachment that was foisted upon me as a child. It sucks. It’s so isolating and lonely to try and heal. Even when I’ve done a good job, I have to give myself some form of satisfaction. I’ve emptied my bucket of love and no one else seems to be there to help me fill it back up. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong, so it just instead feels like there must be something wrong with me.

I’m hard to love, I demand too much, and my needs exceed the reasonable amount that others seem to find themselves in. I’m earnest, so earnest and vulnerable and open, but it’s offputting. Other people don’t want someone around who is more vulnerable than they’re willing to imagine themselves being -  it’s like a reminder of their own shortcomings. I can’t help the feelings of inadequacy that my presence clearly evokes. Even just the little things that I have no control over - like how people react to my body. It’s not my fault they’re more fatphobic than they’ve been willing to admit to themselves, but I bear the burden of not being asked back because it’s easier to just live in the absence of active shame than break through the other side and actually grow as a human.

How could we ever expect to change others when it’s such a difficult task to change ourselves?

I know that love can be transformative but I am scant to find people who are even ready and willing to be able to accept love and care. A rejection of belonging and all that comes with it for the sake of the illusionary safety they’ve cocooned themselves in.

I don’t think I’ve done anything overtly offensive, or wrong. I’ve just wanted to be included, I’ve wanted to be shown love without having to show it first.

It’s hard to believe the world when the evidence screams otherwise. I do, genuinely, so badly, only want to see the good in others. But it’s just not possible for me to believe that most people are good when the evidence I have says that most people don’t even know what good looks like. And if they do, they’re terrified of it. Everyone is so scared of themselves, of what it would mean to be themselves, of the possible social cost of believing in anything. Most people are too afraid to live. And they’re in pain from the constant suppression, from the pain of not knowing themselves or understanding their root desires.

It feels like almost everything I read these days online should just read “help help, I’m in pain, won’t someone notice the bleeding? Won’t someone witness my suffering and in that acknowledgment help remove the burden of having to do it alone?”

So, this is my very quiet cry for help that I don’t know how to otherwise voice and my resolution to not feel this way in a year. I want to feel cared about in ways I can’t even imagine at the moment. I want to find people who find me worthy of care. I’m tired of reading silences in hopes that I can twist the lack of aggression into a demonstration of care.

If they cared, they would have called. Texted. Said something, anything. The depressing reality of being ignored is that at some point you just have to come to terms with the fact that when others care, they do make the time and take the time. There might not be anything to do about the sadness except be willing to sit in it with someone.

I’m melancholy on new years day. In some ways, I know that I’m externalizing the blame because my social phobias have kept me locked in this place and space in a way that I’m finally acknowledging I need professional help to escape.

I just don’t want to be so alone anymore, and I don’t want to pretend to be strong anymore. I’m tired. I kept the balls in the air for all of 2022 and this morning they dropped. It’s over. I’m lost and lonely and unaware of how to ask for help because I’m usually the one who would plan the search and rescue party and part of me really doesn’t want to/can’t find out if others even could or would do it for me. I’m paralyzed by the truth and reality that would force me to acknowledge.

I don’t know what it is I need to do, but I think being honest with myself was a good first step.