I’ve been thinking a lot about Carmen’s irresponsibility leading up to friends and family and the subsequent shutdown and micro management.
I recently (in the last couple of years) have been thinking a lot about my choices, friends, relationships, career, etc. I’m an introvert who can be extroverted. Most people assume I’m an extrovert. My job required me to be extroverted and I realize now that I used that socializing and the power to be extroverted beyond my capacity as a way to not deal with things that have been building up for years and childhood traumas that I told myself were whatever.
Carmen I think may have been the same. It sometimes feels so great to let yourself believe you’re just having fun, that maybe this person you’re with will calm down the raging fire inside of you. And you do feel good temporarily, crazy in love even as you push down the warning signs.
But you end up intensifying it instead. For me it was extreme socializing, I don’t like to drink alone so I drank with people almost 5-6 nights out of the week, some of whom I thought were my close friends, amazing people I thought, who I invited into my life and home. But once I reached the peak of my spiraling that I’ve been avoiding by being out and partying or constantly keeping busy with company, I realized just how not okay I was. How I actually didn’t have shared values with these people I was so close to.
I get what Carmen meant when he said he felt like being on fire, and I also understand that Claire may have provided him a false sense of peace, so for a while he did think that. I was in a similar situation with a guy that I initially didn’t want to have anything serious with to us spending a miserable couple of years together. I was chasing what I thought he initially made me feel and I think he was miserably comfortable. I locked the fuck down on everything and felt super alienated and out of touch. Started losing interest in my job.
The funny thing everyone in my circle told me that it was a good thing to be with this guy initially, they told me I should date cause that’ll be good for me and because I loved and valued them, I went for it, even though something in me was telling me I shouldn’t. I’m not blaming anyone just get why Carmen listen to everyone, why he chanced it.
Your mind has a way of giving you subtle warnings like him only being able to calm down by thinking of Sydney. But you ignore them because you also have the monster of self doubt and sabotage working as a third party to everything. Control is sometimes the only way you feel like you might not die.
It’s after you let go and “die” that you can breathe again. Breaking patterns. Things felt different once I let myself actually spiral and start the healing process. It made it easy to walk away from people, and a career that never really served me. Just cause I was good at it didn’t mean I wanted to do it anymore.
So now into my healing process, I’m obsessing over some fucking fictional characters from a show about trauma and ambition and family. I’m enjoying being an introvert spending my summer with my dog and the trees and breeze, and slowly relearning to love the things I used to love like tumblr and being weird af, before I let people break me down into what I thought they wanted me to be.
Crazy to think I’m Carmen in so many ways. Lol.
romaincrisis
amandla
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
tangentwithtanner
dailybridgerton
gracieabrams
