When I look back on the person I was in my twenties, I want to give that person a hug. That person was so emotionally fragile that a single negative word could crush that person into a (not-so-fine) dust. To be fair to that person, the home life was very rough. I don’t like thinking about it because it still hurts. I think about how lost and utterly miserable I was. I felt like an alien, like I didn’t belong in this world–and what’s more, the world would be better without me. Oh, here’s my post from yesterday.
When I was in my early twenties, I had a break from reality. I was very lucky to make my way back without any mental health support, but I never came all the way back. Someone once said that you when you broke something, yes, you could put it back together, but it would never be as good as new again. They were using the metaphor as a way to explain how difficult it was to deal with mental health issues, and I had never felt more seen.
Yes, I have spent decades trying to fix the cracks and breaks in me. I’ve gotten good at plastering over them, but I have yet to truly fix them. And while I am much easier on myself than I was back then, I still have lingering thoughts of self-hatred that flair up now and again. While I can talk myself down most of the times, once in a while, it just runs all the way through me. And if it reaches that point, I have a hard time getting out of that dark place.
All my life, I’ve been fighting (or not) the feeling of ‘why bother?’. Why should I try when life is, in the end, worthless? Eh. That’s not the right word for it. It’s nothing like pointless or meaningless. I guess it’s more that the world is so grim, I do not know what to with it. Every time I check the news, this president is doing something else that is so terribly bad. Just awful. It was bad during his last terms, and yet, he managed to make things even worst.
Wait. Why the hell am I going down that path?
Oh, I know why. Because I have a hard time thinking that anything matters. Or more specifically that I don’t matter. And again, I don’t mean that in a negative way (this time). I really don’t matter as a person. Believe me that this is a better mentality than thinking I was the absolute worst as a person (that I made the world a worser place just by existing). I still cringe at things I say and do on the daily, but I can get over it more easily.
I give much thanks to Taiji (and now Bagua) for helping me become mentally stronger. I once told my teacher that while I wasrn’t expecting to get into a fight nor did I want to, I did want to be able to use Taiji to help with relationships on an emotional level.
Since I’m terrible with boundaries, that was what I was mostly hoping for–that Taiji would help me set them. Has it? Yeah. I’m still prone to being a people-pleaser and am pretty easy to push, but when it matters, I can stiffen my spine and not give in.
It’s ironic because my mother’s M.O. is to nag until she gets what she wants. When she gets an idea in her head, she will keep talking about it until you give in. No matter what you say, she just. will. not. stop. My brother and I agree that it’s easiest to pick up when she first calls, agree to whatever she says about what’s going on in her life (or just gray-rock her) to get her off the phone as quickly as possible.
My brother and I made a tacit agreement a few decades ago that we would not share any information about each other with our mother. The one exception was when I was in the hospital. I joked with my brother after I woke up that he should have just told my parents that I was visiting Ian beacuse I was out in two weeks. I was joking, but I wasn’t joking. Overall, I think I would have recovered better and faster without my parents here. It’s a sad thing to say, but it’s true.
Taiji saved my life. Before that, it helped me set better boundaries with my parents. It also helped me move more easily in crowds and to be a bit more emotionally flexible than I was before. Not a whole lot because that’s my burden to bear, but I’ll take any improvement.
Am I better than I was ten years ago? Yes. Have I worked on my flaws and improved on them? Also yes. Do I still have far to go? Third time yes. Am I pleased with how far I’ve come? No. Do I think I could do better? Don’t know. I’m in a really low time right now. It has to do with my sleep–which is utter horseshit right now. It’s my fault, but that doesn’t make it easier to deal with. I feel like there’s nothing I can do right now to make it better. I know that’s not true, but for whatever reason, my brain just will not allow me to go to bed before six. a.m., I mean. Even if I have to get up at 11:30 a.m. as I did today.
My teacher gave me a tip to make myself sleepy, but I can’t make myself do that, either. I just get frustrated beacuse I stubbornly refuse to do it–and then it’s a vicious cycle. I can manage to get to bed by 5 once every other week or so, but that’s about it.
I am really thinking about going the other way–meaning going to bed an hour later every night until I lap the time. meaning, going to bed at, say, 6 a.m. today, 7 a.m. tomorrow, 8 a.m. the next day, and so on. I have thought about it for a long time, but I have never done it. I did stay up for around sixty hours before because my therapist suggested staying up for seventy-two hours to jumpstart the brain.
I don’t know. I’m pretty desperate right now. We’ll see what I’m going to do in the near future. I realize I did not talk about what I said I was going to talk about, but that’s not unusual for me.