Do I Reach Out to My Toxic Friend?

A few months ago I wrote a few posts on here and the Bipolar Writer Blog about someone who was my closest friend in university but had become a negative person in my life for years. She made me feel bad about myself, told me I needed to uproot my life because she knows what is best for me and was incapable of being supportive.

(If you so desire you can read those posts here.)

Lately I have been missing this friend. Her and I could make each other laugh until we fell on the floor in tears. We could talk for hours about everything until the sun came up or I passed out (whichever came first). I loved spending time with her and her family, they are wonderful people who love to have fun.

Nobody has filled that void since I cut ties with her. I have a very tough time making friends as an adult. So there’s been no new friend to take her place as someone I can laugh with, call any time, go shopping with and watch movies with.

I don’t know what I should do. I miss her, I miss the friendship that we had but those amazing days of our friendship were years ago.

Yes I am longing for something that no longer exists, it’s over, but I can’t help but look at my phone and consider sending her a text. I would probably either get no response or just a couple words then silence. I didn’t even send her a text for her birthday last month even though she sent one to me. I meant to but I forgot.

We had gruesome ending to our friendship because I couldn’t fully forgive her for very mean things she said to me last year. That conversation where she brought me to tears I couldn’t shake. It was a cloud over my head, I couldn’t get past it.

I was never able to move on from it.

Any advice here would be great, I love reading your comments!

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All My Molehills Are Mountains

There is some saying somewhere about not making mountains out of molehills. I think that’s supposed to mean that we shouldn’t turn small things into big ones.

It’s this desire to be perfect that makes me so hard on myself about every little thing that I do. In my previous post about perfectionism I talk about how I want to be perfect in my character and the general things that I do each day. I don’t want to misspeak, make errors or make somebody upset with me.

The main goal is to never disappoint or upset anybody. Especially the people I care about the most, my family, boyfriend and friends.

Early this morning I heard my cat get sick (yuck) but I really didn’t want to get up to clean it. My mom ended up being the one to clean it since she’s the first up most mornings. I felt so guilty all morning that I didn’t just get up to clean it so she didn’t have one more thing on her plate today.

As a good person I should have got up! I should have been a compassionate daughter who got up to clean the throw up so she didn’t have to. It was totally selfish of me.

I was raised in the Christian faith where I had it drilled into my head that everyone else was more important than me. That doing selfish things wasn’t what Jesus would have done. That Jesus would have cleaned up the puke for Mary instead of going back to sleep.

I was taught to always be nice to people, to make others happy even if you’re not. That helping others made God happy which is what my life was supposed to revolve around.

I lost my faith in late 2012 and tried for many years to believe in Christianity again. I couldn’t do it. Now I identify as a skeptic. I’m open to the possibility that there is a greater being making the world work but I’m also open to there not being anybody out there at all.

This post is giving me a lot of insight into my own psyche. I think the perfection comes from the unattainable standards that Christianity set for me. Even in church and college (I went to a Christian university), people told me that we would never measure up to those standards but that we should try to anyway.

I think my anxiety clings on to the idea that I should serve myself last so that I can put God and others before me.  My anxiety says that any time I upset someone or act selfishly that I am a failure because it goes against how I was trained to think.

If there’s any other formerly religious people (of any religion, there’s a lot of similar teachings in a lot of them) reading this, what are your thoughts? What was your experiencing as you had to rewire your thought process after dismissing religion?

I plan to make a separate blog post detailing about losing my faith and the journey that I went through to try and find it again.

Stars in a Pitch Black Sky

I’ve always struggled with seeing the positive in my own life situations. If somebody else is telling me about an issue, I can usually grasp on to some sort of positive aspect to help that person feel better. But when it comes to me, I only see a dark sky with distant shining stars.

A few years ago I wrote a poem about how my depression is like a dark night sky filled with faint stars sprinkled throughout. It was to represent how I see the overwhelming bad in my life and see the positive things as so minuscule that they’re nearly insignificant.

I have been reflecting on 2018, trying to find some positives. It’s like the whole needle in a hay stack saying, I’m digging through all these negative thoughts trying to find a positive one.

I close my eyes and see shit like: my car being totaled in August, my current struggles with asthma, fights with my boyfriend, crying in my bed while watching Zootopia because I was so depressed, the numbers on the scale and all of the anxious/depressing thoughts that stick to my brain cells.

I wish I could see the good, I really do. Last week my therapist helped me see that I have made progress this year, check the post out here. I’m trying to see what she sees in me.

As I’m writing this there’s only 45 minutes left of Christmas, my favorite holiday, so I will be positive in this moment for Christmas. Today I felt happy to spend time with my family and show them how much I care for them.

Ok positivity over, back to our scheduled programming.

Do you struggle with finding positivity in your life? How do you find positivity within yourself? Leave me a comment! I would love to read it 🙂

Happy Christmas to my wonderful readers!!

Things I Do Because I’m Depressed

Whenever I make a mistake and I know that I’ve hurt somebody’s feelings, I immediately fall into depression. It catches me as if I was falling from the top of a building. It’s always there to catch me and wrap me in a blanket then whispers horrible thoughts in my ear.

When I’m in this state there are some things I automatically do as a way to protect myself. It’s a lot of shit that I’ve been doing since I was little.

1. Hide: This is my natural instinct when something is wrong. Ideally, I hide in my room with my door closed and cover my head in blankets. My goal is to usually escape from whatever is going on either in reality or in my mind. I hide away until I can face the shit happening.
2. Stop eating: When I’m very depressed or anxious I feel like I can’t eat. It feels like my stomach shrinks to the size of a grape, that if I eat anything more than a cracker I will feel sick. When I was really struggling two years ago, I would go sometimes for an entire day without eating anything.
3. Sleep: If worries are buzzing in my brain, I can’t focus on nearly anything. Today I have a lot of those so I’m finding it difficult to concentrate on my work. But when I’m hiding at home, I often just go to sleep. I sleep to get away from the anxious thoughts, sometimes it is the only time I can find true relief.
4. Cry: I am a cry baby. I cry about everything which I find annoying to myself. When I’m really overwhelmed or sad, I just sit down and cry. It can be silent tears or ugly sobbing depending on what is going on.

I know a few of these are not healthy coping mechanisms but I have (for now) kicked my most unhealthy one which is self-harm. At many moments in my life those urges to cut were so frequent that I was hurting myself almost on a daily basis. I am proud of myself that I have been able to work things out in a different way and curb those urges.

If you are struggling right now with your mental illness, I hope that you can make it through. And if you’re struggling with suicidal thoughts, I have a few posts about potential ways to silence those thoughts.

Stay strong everyone!

Tonights Meltdown

I’m having one of those evenings where I can’t stop my anxiety and depression from bullying me into a corner. They shout horrible things at me, the words that come from my own mind are like a punch in the gut.

Tonight my depression is reminding me that all of my mistakes make me a terrible person. That my errors are why people hate me.

Anxiety backs depression up by saying that everyone in my life is packing their bags and distancing themselves from me. That my mistakes and flaws make me unworthy of their presence.

They tell me my boyfriend is going to dump me because I am not enough. That I will never be enough. He wants somebody perfect, somebody who doesn’t fuck up the way I do.

When everything becomes too overwhelming I want to hide. That is my natural instinct, I’ve done it since I was a child. I want to hide from the people I have disappointed so they can’t look at me with eyes filled with pain that I caused.

I hope that if you’re struggling you can make it through. More than likely the sun will rise again in the morning.

My Fears: I’m Not Good Enough

Like my fear that everyone pretends to like me, I’ve had the worry that I’ll never be good enough. I think that is the overarching phrase of my entire existence.

As a child I never thought I was good enough to be a part of anything special or succeed in academics, sports or music.

I remember being in 5th grade, I was selected to be a part of the Four Mile Singers (the school was called Four Mile, hence the name) which was a special singing ensemble for 5th graders.

I went up to my music teacher and told him that I didn’t deserve to be in Four Mile Singers because it was for special people. I told him that I was not special therefore I shouldn’t be in it.

I have blocked that memory out for the most part but every once in a while it creeps back up in my brain. It’s quite painful to think about.

I loved playing the piano but I have never thought I was very good. I took lessons from kindergarten through 12th grade.

I would compare myself to the other students who took lessons from the same teacher. I would hear them play and think, “Wow, I wish I could play like them. They have so much talent!”

By the time I got to high school, I rarely performed in recitals on my own. I would become so incredibly anxious that I would fuck it all up. So my teacher would pair me with other students to do duets, duals and quartets. I loved doing those! I felt confident because I had other people around me to support me.

With friends and boyfriends, I have always thought that they secretly hated me. I’ve always thought that they would leave because I was not enough for them. That I couldn’t provide whatever they were searching for so they would leave to find somebody who could fill that void.

As I am growing up I am feeling this a little less. I am confident in my relationship with my boyfriend, I know that he loves me. I have only a few friends in my actual life (outside from social media and texting). The couple that I have will reach out to chat or even take the lengths to spend time with me.

Every day I have to work towards self-acceptance. I need to accept myself for who I am, not look at what I lack. I do not need to live my life to meet the standards of others. 

May 2019 bring some more self-acceptance! I will be doing a New Years goals list this month. Follow me so you can check it out!

My Fears: Everybody Hates Me

Since I wrote a few days ago about my fear of being fired from my job, I figured I would do a series about my different fears sustained by my anxiety. This one is about my fear that everyone secretly hates me.

I have thought that everyone hates me since I was a child. I don’t know where it originally came from but anxiety always told me that. I often thought my friends were friends with me for pity and not because they wanted to hang out with me.

As my mental illness developed as I grew up, I felt that way more and more.

I mainly have felt this way in romantic relationships. With my first boyfriend at the age of 15, I thought he was dating me for pity. I thought he was so cute, cool and 16 that there was no way he actually wanted to date me.

That feeling was solidified after I found out he was cheating on me with another girl. It told me that I am not enough.

Fast forward to 22 and I felt that way again with my ex and now at 25 I still have those feelings about my current boyfriend.

I worry that deep down he hates me. I worry that he is with me because he feels sad for me. I worry that he is always on the verge of breaking up with me especially if there’s an argument.

Whenever there’s a rough patch I think, “Omg, this is the end. He’s going to break up with me.” So far that hasn’t happened, we have been together for 2 years.

It’s this deep insecurity that I have always had inside me. That I am not good enough and not worthy of love. That my mental illness and other weird quirks are a turn off, making people run away from me as quickly as possible.

Anxiety screams so loudly in my mind that it is often difficult to tune out. On repeat it tells me that everybody hates me and is planning to leave me.

My therapist has worked hard to try and tell me that my anxiety is wrong. That there are many people who care about me, she even had me create a list once! She asked me to really think, without anxiety’s influence, about who I know does not hate me.

Maybe I should do that again but I’m not sure if it will curb these thoughts.

Hope you guys are all doing well!

— Megan

 

Body Negativity

In the world there has been a push for body positivity, that every body no matter how big, small, light, dark, short or tall each body is uniquely beautiful. It has taken me years feel ok about what I see in the mirror. Today is not one of those days where I look at my reflection and am happy with who looks back.

Today I ruined my day by getting on the scale.

This morning at 8:30 I thought that I should weigh myself, just to see where I am. I had been feeling really good about myself and was hoping the numbers on the scale would reflect that.

Nope!

I shrieked at what the scale told me. I frantically muttered, “No, no, no, no, this can’t be happening!” I have gained 3 or 4 pounds since I had last weighed myself probably a month or so ago.

Seeing that number crushed the confidence that I had just been praising myself on. My mind went into freak out mode. I quickly downloaded “My Fitness Pal” so that I could begin counting calories and monitoring my exercise levels like I used to.

Weighing myself threw me out of the clouds right back down to the reality that I will forever struggle with my weight. That when I get complacent, I gain weight.

It’s so difficult for me to think positively knowing that I’ve gained weight. I have struggled with this my whole life and it seems that this next battle has just begun.