dear me

dear me,

i hate you sometimes. it is not easy to pinpoint one reason. i hate your negative thoughts, i hate your maladaptive coping methods, your ability to over analyze things and your desire to sabotage me when i am trying to change you.

i hate how when i want to be normal and productive, you simultaneously want me to fail. you have a low self wort/self image and take stupid risks due to your apathy. and you constantly try to convince me i am not good enough. you make me feel like the person in this hyperbole and half blog/comic. except that nothing good has come from all of this.

i want to go out with people and socialize. instead you fixate on mundane things and make me feel self conscious. like how i tried to make a joke. no one got it and you seized upon that and analyze every detail of what went wrong. to shut you up, i drink (or use drugs if i have any around). it eventually shuts you up, but generally leads to other issues. running around wasted or whacked out on g actually does make people not want to hang out with you.

this leads me to us and sleep. i like sleep, i like waking up refreshed. but you like nightmares. you like angry dreams. you like waking me up in the middle of the night with my heart racing, momentarily confused about where i am/what happened. using substances to shut you up exasperates these issues.

you can be exhausting to deal with. your constant desire to hurt yourself gets you know where. you start off wanting to hurt yourself out of anger towards yourself. then you get frustrated that you are acting like an emo tween. and then in some bizarro logic, you decide that it is actually a good idea to cause injury to yourself. all of these thoughts are playing in the background while i try to go about my day to day life. it is very tiring trying to turn you out.

your incredibly active while i try to sleep, dredging up old memories and mixing them all your fears to create horrid nightmares.

 

Good luck with the sleep! I can't wait to read the final draft (mine took a couple revisions as well).

 

it is still not to the point where i feel like posting it publicly. i feel like i sound insane talking to myself like i am a different person. i also haven't really posted things like this on BL in a long time.

 

No worries; nothing wrong with keeping it private.

The whole point of the exercise is to anthropomorphize something we don't like about ourselves. So far it's been full-on mental illness, but there's nothing wrong with being more general. It's your blog, post what you want to!

:D

Oh, and about your post itself: I know where you're coming from, especially regarding the social paranoia. That's been a big part of my life for quite a while, although in my case it's more due to anxiety than self-loathing (although there is more than a bit of the latter around as well).

 

I also can relate to your difficulty in being in situations like that and how the only options really seem to be drink or something else enough till you either stop caring or can limit your brains ability to overanalyze things. I have found nothing really that is able to fix this though long term. This is more one of those things that only lots of lots of time seems to make better.

Just keep going out and keeping things in check slowly (it helps when you have gained some familiarity with the people and so things become less akward) and it will get less bad over time. It may not ever go away though unless you fix the underlying issues, but those are extremely more difficult to address. You do seem to know ways to blow away your thoughts, and in certain social settings those methods will work and are not looked down on. If you find it is too much, there is nothing wrong with leaving early. Do not try and pressure yourself to stay out longer because you think that is what is expected as that will only make things worse as the night progresses.

The sleep isssue is much more difficult to address. That will come with fixing the underlying issues but again that is very complicated, hard, possibly impossible (there very well may some intractable personality traits that are not ever really going to get fixed). If you do end up waking up a lot at night and cant clear your thoughts, just try and get online or talk to some friends or something to clear your mind and get back to a normal state. That may lead to some long, sleepless nights where you stay up talking to people for a long time, but it is better than restless sleep where it is just you and your mind.

 

dave, i will eventually finish writing the letter and edit out the parts i don't want public. i don't really mind talking about stuff relating to being depressed. i don't like talking about my coping methods. especially a part i want to add that very few people know about it.

vgoraz, thanks for responding you are much more understanding and accepting of my odd issues than unglued. in general, the people i know in seattle are pretty used to seeing me in various states and just accept it. i think it helps that i've known you for a rather long time, same for the other person i consider a good friend there. i am very comfortable around you both and it helps with the negative thoughts. i am very comfortable with unglued too, but he is more outgoing and sometimes i feel lost in the midst. i think i generally feel less self conscious when i am around other quiet/shy/reserved people.

 

i am not going to post this publicly. i think i might write a more positive letter to myself and post that publicly instead.

 

this letter reminds me so much of myself. is dbt still an option for you? if so, i'd highly recommend it...it was very intense and a lot of work, but it helped soooooo much with some of these same issues.

 

i have been rather busy with stuff since moving that i haven't even thought about therapy. i should prolly look into it. thanks for reminding me. altho at this point i am so used to living with the negative me that i see it as an annoyance more than a major problem.

i hope you are doing well