man what a pickle i am in. and no matter who i can talk to, no one can get beyond the absurdity of it all. i truly feel like i'm reaching the climax of a supernatural horror movie.
what can i do? learn to love with little or no boundaries attached? cling onto ideas that ultimately don't fit who i want to be? live constantly in fear?
it would be wrong to say that my family has never “been there” for me. they’ve mostly been supportive in many difficult times in my life. what i'm learning is that the level and capacity of the support i need is well beyond what they can or are willing to provide. but it's also no one else's responsibility to take care of me but myself, so i don’t expect much on that end. i just don’t get good reactions when i’m not doing well mentally. in some ways i’m also feeling this away about my close friends. it’s not that people don’t care or want to help, often times the methods of support are just incompatible with my own needs.
i’ll often have periods of days and weeks where it just feels like a dissociative haze, and then i realize that it’s been weeks since i’ve had contact with another human besides my partner. then i reach out to others: my dad, my sisters, my best friends, old co-workers, etc. but after a short while, i just want to revert back to my previous state. when i tell people i need space and that i’m having issues with communication, it’s often responded with kindness and understanding, but the sheer amount of time and space i need seems to be a problem for others. i’ve never done well in relationships when i don’t see the person frequently, and especially with everything this past year, it kind of makes maintaining relationships much more difficult for me. i’ve had intense phone anxiety for most of my life, so any time i get on a call/video chat with anyone, i’m counting the seconds before i can hang up, then let out a huge sigh. it happens every single time. i often get lost in texts and emails and have always had trouble communicating in written word and get anxious about having to reply. a lot of times i don’t want to reply. but i do anyway. writing this entire entry takes an immense amount of energy from me. i feel like i can only be my true self when i’m around others physically, and that when using technology to aid in communication, all of that gets lost. it brings the worst parts of me out: the anxiety, the fear, the deep sadness, and the anger.
no one wants to do anything but distract from how shitty everything is: “junk” food, drugs/alcohol, sex/porn, video games, netflix, sports, etc. and that’s the only way i’ve been able to bond with those i love. it’s tiresome. it’s predictable. i’ve spent a good portion of the last decade of my life socializing and “networking” because that what i was supposed to do. my social life has become a function to numb myself and try extremely hard to have a good time to numb every feeling i’ve been enduring or avoiding.
but i want to create and collaborate. i want to make things. i want to make things with people i care about. i want to teach others and i want others to teach me. i want to be a part of something bigger than myself, not worried about how my “posts” are doing or what someone else will possibly think about me.
i've lived in cities all my life, so i need to take in all the nature i can get. having my own little deck/outdoor space has definitely helped a lot. i spend all my smoke breaks watching the birds and the squirrels do their thing. sometimes they even get close. when i lived in brooklyn, there weren't any good parks near me and i lived on a really busy street, so i felt like i was suffocating. jersey city isn't exactly that much different, but enough to actually feel like i escaped something. i’m now only a mile or two away from where i grew up and lived most of my life, so it also feels familiar, even though the neighborhood i’m in now isn’t one i knew well before moving here. the ultimate goal is to get out of the urban environment altogether, but that’s going to take a while i think. i don’t believe that moving away from cities is going to solve all my problems, but i do think the busyness and chaos of city life has caught up to me after 30 years.
every few months i’ll log on here and tell myself i should just use this as a journal since it’s basically dead. then i forget about it for another few months.
idek who follows this account or who even is active anymore. anyway, hi. i’m gonna try to throw some my thoughts and shit posts on here, because too many people i know follow me on my other social media accts, and it all sucks.
drafted from like 2 weeks ago, posting to give it some closure. if you see this, you may ignore it. thank you.
cw: depression/mental health ; pandemic
haven’t been on here in a minute. i needed to jot some stuff down, then i read an old post i made, cried, and now i feel like i don’t really have anywhere else to go.
we’re all going through shit now. the internal and external are all at odds with one another. we’re weighing a multitude of decisions without having a real answer for any of them, and not being able to go outside in the process.
this must be what luxury prisons are like.
i’m social distancing while unemployed in a small 3-bedroom apt in nyc, sharing a bedroom with my partner, and living with someone who works in a grocery store in manhattan.
i don’t have the privilege nor the means to just escape to the burbs or the woods.
there’s also the fear of running out of money to pay for bills and food, while trying not to get sick and looking a job that won’t endanger my life during a pandemic.
i’ve let the hysteria get to me and get anxious thinking about being in public here in the city, especially in grocery stores. i even shaved my beard because of all of this.
so, i don’t have much space in my apartment, i share a bedroom with my partner (who has been my hero throughout all of this), and am scared to go outside. this definitely feels like a prison, even though i’m around people i care about, have most of my basic needs met at the moment, and have the time to immerse myself in my hobbies.
the virus becomes a red herring, an extreme version of a macguffin in real life. while we can be scared of what the virus can do to us, it’s where do we go from here that’s been anxiety-inducing.
it seems like most people’s methods of coping have been taken away with everything that has been going on. f
i don’t know how to control myself or the way my thoughts manifest into actions. mental healthcare is just a bandaid for a much larger wound that is never acknowledged. going to therapy will never change the facts that define my situation. learning and unpacking trauma only leads to more resentment. psychiatry provides the antidote, so that we can shut up and keep contributing. what do you do with those who don’t want anything? who lack ambition? who don’t feel like a human around other humans?
My job is so dumb, but so amazing at the same time. They’ve given me 2 raises in 6 months and I’m making way more money than I ever have before (still poor, but I’m very grateful). But there’s seemingly no room to grow or evolve from where I currently stand, and I fear that due to my lack of experience/pedigree, my next job won’t pay me nearly as much. Since my last raise about a month ago, it seems as if I’m doing half the work I was doing before and it’s driving me crazy. If you told me I’d be getting paid this much to basically do nothing, as well as having a really relaxed working environment, it would seem ideal. I’m learning that for me, it’s not. Maybe if they overwork me at my next job, I’ll miss this, but I just feel so lost and worthless at my current position.
This last year has been absolutely mental. I feel motivated and these last two weeks I’ve worked the hardest I have in maybe a decade. And it’s actually showing some tiny, yet significant results for me. It’s scary and overwhelming. It feels like I know less about what I’m doing thsn when I was unemployed for two years. The depression is still deep within me and no perfect cocktail of medication + therapy once a week is ever gonna get rid of it. It’s just who I am and who I’ve always been. The goal now is just try to power through it. Try to be the best person I can be and not let little mistakes or setbacks completely envelop me like they pretty much always have.
I can’t be weak anymore.
A few months post-breakup, I was in a decent place. Even though I was still miserable and not working, I felt somewhat liberated. It seemed like I actually had options for once, that I wasn’t just doing everything for everyone else. The momentum was there, and then suddenly my mom is in the hospital and a month later, she’s gone. After that happened, I thought that momentum was gone. I felt completely depleted.
I never really spoke about my mother around my friends, because she was a very complicated person. She endured many truly traumatic and horrifying events at an early age, came to this country at 20, and had a really difficult time adapting to this country. Her mental health started getting really bad when I was around 10 and she never went back to being the same. Day by day in the 18 years since, I saw her mental and physical health deteriorate and her will to live and function disappear. I had basically lost my mother there to some extent and at that point it was my turn to start taking care of her. Living with her and having to take care of her throughout high school, into college when I wasn’t dorming, and several years into my real adulthood was completely overwhelming. My father worked, and still works, like an animal and he had almost no time to tend to her needs.
My mom’s story is a tragic one, one filled with a lot of love and a lot of pain and I have always seen a lot of her within me. Now I can actually feel her, but instead of the mental torture, it’s her loving and giving nature as well her resilience that’s starting to carry me. And for her sake I can’t let go of that.
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