My lot in life and other whingings

I’m sitting at work watching Felicity on Netflix. It’s a blast from the past and a bit of nostalgia, but also a bit of procrastination. For writing. For working. For my life. 

I’ve had a great year and a bad one rolled into one, all packaged up in multi-layered wrapping paper. With a big, fucking bow. You see, it all looks nice and bright and festive on the outside. A big smile plastered all over it. On the inside, it’s dark, dank and it’s where my secrets live. My secret fears, my insecurities and the things that I pack away, stuff away from the light of day hoping it would all go away.

It doesn’t. It festers and weeps and gets into crevices that even a broom, a pick axe can’t get loose. I’m lost in my psyche, in my past, in all of my perceived failures, and because I don’t see the light of day – my true self – I’m stuck with pleasing others and creating a front of what I think everyone else thinks I should do or be.

It’s not a new thing. I’ve done it all my life and I got really good at it. Or so I thought.  But it manifested in procrastination. In sleeping. In shirking responsibilities. In not applying for some jobs because I didn’t think I could do the job. Of not being hired anyways. Why bother when I’d only fail in the end. Because I’m not good enough, not deserving enough. It was status quo. 

It can no longer be status quo. While this past year was boundary pushing, it pushed too hard for my own comfort and I pushed back. By doing nothing. By keeping the status quo in the forefront and not working on the things I needed to. The scary things in the corner of my box.

It’s been two full weeks since the bomb, and now I’m dealing with the fallout. The fallout is huge.  Life-changing and scary as shit. So scary that it’s tempting to put my head back in the sand and pretend everything is fine. I can’t because it’s not.

I’m not fine. I’m swimming against the tide with no way to know where to find the water’s surface. It’s like drowning but without the water. I used to say that I rarely cried. Not a day has gone by that I haven’t shed tears. Over Scott. Over me. Over my faults and what they’ve brought into my life. Over my basement leak. Over my parents who still think they’re not the interfering kind and my inability to set real, impenetrable boundaries without cutting complete contact with them.

I’m trying to go for counseling. The crazy doctor. Actual psychoanalysis to help me cope. My immediate concern is selling my house, finding a new one and keeping my financial head afloat while I try to figure out my actual one. I’m scared, I’m confused and swimming upstream despite the odds. It’s time I love myself again, not because I’m supposed to but because I’m worth it. I have to figure out how to measure that worth and hold onto it despite what my inner demons continue to tell me.

I wish me much luck.

Anger at its best

I’m really angry. So angry that little things are getting to me. It’s been a long month since Scott left. Up and left. Abandoned. I feel abandoned by my parents, even though I told them I needed space. I know they’re trying but I’m just so angry at the last 40 years that I haven’t dealt with. That is not their fault. It’s mine. Their fault lies in continuing to treat me like a child, even at the age of 40.

I went to see Dr. Hall today. She gave me permission to be selfish and not talk to them until I’m able to set up a game plan to deal with them. She said it’s not something I can do by myself, because obviously my ways of coping with them don’t work. I’m too involved. I’m too mired in it all. I’m too tired to deal.

I’ve contemplated suicide a number of times over the years and have also reached out just in time. I hope this is the case again. I’m really trying. To make my own decisions, but even then I question whether I’m just going through the motions and if I’m making the right decision – decisions about everything.

The biggest decision I’ve made in the last month is to sell my house and start fresh. I don’t want to give up the house. I’ve known it for the past 10 years, and it’s known me. But it’s been a constant worry, over bills, over what to do to improve the house. Scott made it easy by taking over. His goals became mine. I didn’t have to think because he was there making decisions that I couldn’t. I question every thought I have. 

I don’t know when I started to feel inferior to Scott. Perhaps it was because I was unable to move, unable to make decisions because I was so worried about making the wrong one that I lost sight of what I wanted. I still don’t know what I want. Ideally, it should be all mapped out. I’m planning as I go, and still worried that my decisions today will have an adverse effect on moments in the future. Lack of any decision also has an adverse effect because I’m stagnant. Mired in my own thoughts, in my feelings of inadequacy.

Scott tried to push me, to make decisions, to tell him where I wanted my future to go. I wanted to be with him. To have joint goals. I lost myself in the process, and I’m not really sure I knew myself in the first place.

I’m always one to please: my parents, bosses, co-workers, others. Decisions were made by asking everyone’s opinions but mine, because I was told over and over again that my opinion didn’t count. That I was wrong. In every aspect – my laugh, my look, my personality. I became everyone else’s personality. Every personality but my own because I, at the age of 40-something, still didn’t know what my personality entailed. What makes me tick. I know I root for the underdog because that’s who I am. I root for the downtrodden because that’s how I’ve felt for so long. When you’re told “be careful, you’re going to fail, you can’t survive without others because you don’t know best” it’s hard to see who you really are, the person you want to be – because you’re so used to others telling you who you should be, how you should act.