Partial Introspection on Past Errors and Future Corrections

I use the saying “you can’t choose your family” like it’s a broken record… but I keep playing it anyways because it’s true… I never got to choose my parents or my brother or my aunts or uncles… I was just born into this mess of a life.  The sympathy that I get from people when they hear minor details about my family is unwanted… I don’t want you to feel bad for me.  There’s nothing to feel bad about.  This stuff?  It’s already happened… an apology isn’t going to fix it… sympathy isn’t going to fix it… it just is what it is.  I live with it every day and I’m finally starting to be fine with it… so you should be, too.  At this moment in time I’m twenty-six years old and I’ve finally gotten to choose my family.  My friends are my family… so stop feeling bad.

This has been my first semester in Graduate School: a whirlwind of self-discovery and personal missteps and life lessons I thought I’d already learned.  Somewhere in there I lost my way.  I stepped away from everything that I had built up and decided to try to be a new me… it was a mistake I shouldn’t have made.  Instead of playing everything “close to the vest” I opened up too much to people… so much that I may never recover the privacy fence I usually employ.  I stressed myself out to the point that my brain split off and hyper-focused on something I wish it never had… but it’s too late to turn that clock back… the damage has already been done… any attempt at repairs would be a waste… it’d be futile.

My patience was tested… and it bit me in the ass.  I repeatedly gave second chances to someone I now know was undeserving… who was continually and horrifically homophobic (towards me/about others) on many occasions.  The final straw was when it was implied that I can be cured… as if I have an affliction.  This idea that there is something wrong with me is something I’ve been dealing with it feels like all my life… but it’s because of people like him… and my mother… and my other family members… that I feel this way.  They’ve engrained it in my head that I’m flawed… I’m broken… I’m worthless… They’ve engrained self-hate into my way of thinking.  I hear their voices echoing these words in my head over and over and I just hate myself… I hate myself so much I can’t stand it.  But there’s nothing wrong with me… there never has been… and I need to start accepting that instead of doubting it.

I’ve been trying to remember that moment when everything changed… When I went from being the kid that I was to what I am now… I’m specifically referring to my germ phobia and anxiety and OCD but there are other things too… and all of these things were just there one day in full force and I’m not sure when it is exactly that happened.  I’m not even really sure if I can move on from it or if I’m just going to have to learn to live with it in the same way I live with the fact that my family is shitty… I'm just not sure what to do.

The Dialogue of my Anxiety

I feel like a paper doll… I keep waiting for a strong wind to just come along and… blow me away.  Free me from this world… this life.

You don’t get it.  You’re freaking out once a month because you can’t control your life and it isn’t the same as… what I go through every day…

I constantly have this feeling of drowning in quicksand.  I’m totally helpless.  Surrounded.  Being pulled down below the surface.  I try to claw my way to the top… but the more I try… the further I seem to sink.

It’s a terrifying and completely hopeless feeling that you just can’t understand unless you’ve been there… Unless you’ve had this feeling of free falling without a parachute… hurtling towards that inevitable moment of impact…

I worry about things that haven’t even happened yet.  And I worry so much that my basic ability to function is compromised.  There are times when I can’t… be around people.  I can’t think.  Sleep.  Eat.  It’s such an overwhelming feeling… like I can’t escape.

And these things that I worry about… Maybe they’ll never happen.  But I worry about them still.  They root themselves in my brain and just… they take over.

I hate the looks I get from people.  The judgment in their eyes.  And don’t tell me they don’t… stare.  I know what staring looks like.  What it feels like… I’ve been stared at all my life…

People look right through you and right at you at the same time… and they stare… and they judge.  As if they know me.  As if they have a clue.

And then there’s this physical pain… like someone has stacked a dozen cinder blocks onto my chest.  And every time I try to breathe my lungs just won’t expand… Every attempt for air feels like glass shards are tearing through my system… splitting my insides apart… refusing to let me go…

That’s what it’s like… every day for me… from the time I wake up until I fall back asleep…

And no, I can’t just stop having anxiety.  So, please, stop asking me to… Because, believe me, I would if I could… I’d just flick a magic switch and turn everything off… Go back to normal… Whatever that is.