The Unknowns

I have never been good at the whole letting my guard down and letting people in. To be honest, my track record with it has been shit and I realized that if you keep a distance nobody can hurt you. Do you want to know how that works out? Not well. I become like this island, where the only thing keeping me company is that ever so familiar swirling darkness. Pain is almost like a friend of mine, or was, I don’t even know any more. All I know, is that pain (depression,anxiety and what have you) is consistent. Yes, it hurts like hell, but when you get accustomed to it always being there, there’s never a let down of it walking out of your life.

Relationships in my life have always been inconsistent. I guess those are the key words for this post: consistent and inconsistent. That guard I talked about is a result of said inconsistent relationships. Not in the romantic sense, but in the more personal sense with friends who I considered myself close with. I love the quote from One Tree Hill that says “people always leave”; I found it to be true and even when I realized it, the pain caused by their absence from my life never alleviated. It was always those who I managed to let my guard down with that ended up leaving, and each time it got harder and harder to not shift the blame inwardly. None of the people this is referring to have come back into my life yet… except for one.

What brings all of this out tonight is my ex-boyfriend. He, like the rest of those I tried letting in, left. It hurt like hell, especially after last time. We were broken up for a few months when I decided I needed to talk to him, because I missed him. That conversation turned into us making plans to catch up. I cancelled my plans I could have had that night, and I was so excited to see him again, but here’s the kicker. He stopped talking to me that whole week. So I asked for an explanation, and he rescheduled, only to once again stop communication with me. I was crushed, I felt not good enough and not wanted. This one I turned inwardly on myself. There had to be something wrong with me for him to lead me on like that.

So imagine my surprise when I received a message from him this week. Of course I couldn’t be mad at him, I didn’t/don’t have the emotional energy to be upset. We have been talking daily since then, and this time he asked if we could meet up some night this week. To be honest, I want to go so badly, but with this time I am not expecting anything. I don’t expect for this night to actually come to pass. Maybe I like being emotionally manipulated, maybe I don’t do well on my own, or maybe subconsciously I am looking for an excuse to spiral downwards. Whatever it is, I don’t know what this is going to be become.

That guard I let down with him is back up. I can’t get myself to reopen my heart to him, because I lost that trust I had for him when he blew me off (yet he continues telling me he misses seeing me). I don’t know if he’s playing me again, and that scares me to death, especially if we do actually meet up and I go right back to those feelings I had for him before.

Not knowing how something is going to turn out was never my thing. I’m a planner and scheduler, so this whole situation is new to me, yet I continue to talk to him all day because the feelings I have for him are coming back.

I’m probably going to regret this in a week or so, but who knows.

Anger & Anticipatory Grief

As a lot of you all know, if you’ve been following this blog, I’ve lived with the excruciating pain of something known as anticipatory grief for almost a year and a half. I won’t relive all of the details for you, but if you want to know what exactly I’m talking about when it comes to what happened to my Grandma you can find the posts on my page.

After my Grandma died I felt lost. Yes we all knew it was coming but even with that it’s still hard as hell when it happens. For the past week or two I’ve been thinking a lot about the people I’ve lost over the past year and I’ve come to realize that I was living a life fueled by anger.

All of the things I thought I believed were tested during that time of my life and instead of feeling those emotions I hid a lot behind anger. To sound all clinical and stuff, I was projecting my own disbelief in things like God or a higher power onto those in my life, using friends I held dear to my heart as a scapegoat.

The weird thing about anger and living through a grief process where you’re grieving an eventual loss before it’s happened is that in those moments when you’re hanging onto your last shred of sanity, you don’t realize that almost everything you say or do is an emotional reaction to something nobody can see or help you with. I’m sure if you were to ask those who saw me regularly during this time they would probably tell you I was not the easiest person to get along with. I was pushing a lot of people away who meant a lot to me because being alone was easier than letting people in when there was nothing they could have said or done to give me what I really needed: my Grandma to be ok and back to normal. I blamed God, those who believed in God and were praying and my anger grew and grew.

Now that I’m in a place where I can think more clearly, and the pain I feel now on a daily basis is that of missing my Grandma and still wanting her back, I see the damage my anger caused. To put it in the words of what a Dr. told me a while back. I was angry, I was firing bullets and those who were in my life got hit with the shrapnel. I was always good at anger because as I said previously, feeling anything else besides that when I am going through it makes me uncomfortable and is something I refused to allow myself to sit in and feel. But now that I’m learning how to feel and process my emotions I’m learning that living a life of anger when I was experiencing that anticipatory grief was doing more damage than good.

If I could say anything to those I pushed away over the past 2 years it would be this:

I’m sorry for the things I said or did out of my emotional reactions. Almost none of the things I said were coming from things I actually meant. Did I mean to hurt you? It sounds harsh but yes, I did. It’s almost as if I needed someone else to be in pain with me. For those of you who believe in God, I was projecting my anger that I have towards God onto you because you were tangible and represent everything that was in question at that time. I do believe in God and I am so sorry that I allowed my anger and grief ridden state of mind to dictate the things I said to you all and wrote on here. I was immature, in so much pain and angry but I know it’s no excuse for what happened. I know some of you forgave me, and on the off chance anyone else reads these words I hope maybe one day down the line we can sort things out as well.

Nagging Little Voices

I am plagued by voices.

Not the ones you hear about on televisions

Not the ones glamorized in movies.

They don’t propel you to fame.

They don’t land you book deals or make people interested in you.

They keep me trapped inside my room

Gnawing at my ears and clawing their way up my spine.

“You’re not good enough”

“You’ll never get where you want to be in life”

At first, I was strong.

I knew they were just illusions of my mind.

The pessimistic and self-deprecating side of my personality.

Yet now….

Now I’m starting to believe them again.

“Just stop trying.. you’re not going to make it anyways”

These aren’t the voices that attract others my way.

These voices isolate me from my best friends.

They make the touch of my boyfriends hands sting like daggers

They tell me he is just going to be like everyone else.

“It’s only a matter of time before he leaves you. Nobody stays”.

When did I become so weak against them?

When did I let my guard down just enough for them to climb their way over?

How did I not see that they were always lurking outside of the barrier I placed up?

These parts of life are not glamorous

These are the things we keep at the bottom of our discussion pits.

Things too shameful to tell therapists, friends and family members.

The things that keep us bound to our beds like slaves being brought to America in chains.

And you still like to glamorize the sick?