I was thinking about how I have this strong commitment to bettering myself all the time, I'm always thinking about how I can relate to people better, how I can be a better person. While I think that comitting to self-betterment is inherently good and I don't want to stop, I do think it has a negative effect on me where I think that I am putting the onus completely on myself a lot of the time, always seeing my actions and my behaviours as inherently flawed and damaging and toxic relative to the actions of those around me which is kind of shitty and unfair to myself! It's a highly critical mindset to be in all the time! It's really exhausting and has been really wearing on me this year and in the last few months especially for whatever reason! I have been lost in my head a lot! I realized that a lot of the things I do like this - needing affirmation, not really knowing what I'm like or how people see me at all, feeling like shit and worrying and feeling like the worst and most evil person alive constantly stem from some stuff a person said about me and did to me in 2009. I don't speak to the person any more but I think I've spent a great deal of my life seeking approval from the version of them that exists in my head, trying to prove what they said and thought about me is wrong. I've reached out to this person fairly recently to apologize...to them...for the abuse that they dealt me and I didn't realize just how fucked up that is and how much of a metaphor for my existence doing that was. They told me that my apology showed them that I really had grown as a person which just makes my stomach turn. That all happened maybe a year ago and I dwell and dwell on them saying that. Makes me feel sick. I have synesthesia right and I think that I've been mentally stuck on these events for literally years. I have a vivid image in my head that is like a screensaver for this moment in my life and I find myself dwelling in that near-physical space often. Kind of get lost staring at that image. Realizing this and realizing how stuck I am there feels like a kick in the stomach and I don't really know what to do now that I've realized. It's been there since it all happened but hasn't ever really clicked before. I'm pretty open about stuff and the compulsion to be open stems from that time in my life. A lot of stuff seems to stem from then.