I love to write. I need to write more than I realize. I want to work towards writing every day. It’s one of the best ways I can process my emotions and thoughts. I excel more at doing so through writing than I do through speaking, and since I’m an introvert it works better for my needs than it does through speaking. My inner life is so rich that I should definitely be writing the stuff down that goes on inside my head. My inner life is much more active than my outer life so it’s best if I make use of that through writing.

I frequently think about how I want to want to improve myself. I frequently think about how I want to get back to having good, productive daily habits that are in line with my values and strengths. I was reminded of something I learned about years ago when I went to the training I went to last week. The speaker brought up “Flow Experiences” and I was reminded of how they really do increase your happiness levels.

Flow experiences are experiences in which you are fully engaged in what you are doing because you love whatever you’re doing. You end up losing track of time and are completely in the moment. Typically flow experiences result from doing things that you are passionate about or strong in, and so they are truly fulfilling experiences. Multiple Positive Psychology books talk about how the more often you engage in Flow Experiences in your day to day life, the greater your happiness levels will become. This is one way to slightly improve your baseline happiness levels.

My flow experiences include hiking, writing, reading, creating music, making art, and meditating. If I were to do these six things regularly, or atleast a few of them every day, I know I would feel happier. I would be doing the things that I truly love and am good at, and would be living a life that’s more congruent with my values.

One good thing is that for the past several months, whenever I have a day off, going hiking is a priority of mine. I don’t always make it since the daylight is gone by about 4:30 pm lately and I have a second-shift schedule, but I atleast have the internal motivation to atleast strongly want to go hiking on my days off. I also want to get to a point where I go hiking or atleast walking before I go to work too.

I forget what year it was in college but I think it might have been my first or second year when I started to really get into meditating. What motivated me to do so was when I start to get panic attacks a lot, and I also had tripped not long before then so that reminded me of just how spiritual of a person I truly was. Before then I was an atheist. During that trip I was opened up to the spiritual plane and it was the most amazing experience of my entire life. I actually saw energy itself, in everything. I saw the energy fields around the people I was with, I saw how people had different aura colors that were more predominant than other colors. At the time I didn’t really know what energy fields or auras were but I got really into them after that.

Everything in the room I was in, which was filled with creative/abstract/psychedelic art, was alive. All of the pictures were animated. The room itself was filled with this translucent yet multi colored goo type stuff that filled the room starting from the ceiling and was formulated in large cylindrical coil shapes. I understood this as matter itself, which I then learned that matter itself was composed of energy, which is primarily spiritual. This experience felt more real to me than any other “sober” experience I had ever had before. My ego was torn away and I was exposed to the spiritual realm, which was directly in conflict with the reality that the ego had formulated and controlled for all of my life before this.

I did experience “ego death” before the highly positive/spiritual part of the trip began. The ego death was the scariest experience of my life. It was like a panic attack times 10, and when I looked in the mirror I felt completely dissociated. I was sure I was going to die, so my panic got worse and I puked a ton. I didn’t know it then but what truly died at that time was my ego, and it’s scary as fuck when it happens because it questions your entire perspective and understanding of reality. The ego convinces you that are in complete control, that you are the center of everything, and that nothing is real except for concrete/factual based information. Ego death reverses all of that programming and so your mind and emotions are given a complete shock. The ego re-gained control later on, but this trip changed my perspective on life for good.

A bit later I went to get Reiki done. Reiki is a spiritual practice in which imbalanced chakras are balanced, blockages are opened up, and repressed emotions are brought to the surface. Your spirit is interacted with in a way that can be felt strongly, even physically. During this Reiki session my Reiki practioner told me that I was an Indigo child. At the time I didn’t know what that meant but I looked it up later and it made *so* much sense. The way that I had experienced my entire life was finally clarified and so instead of feeling like an outsider/alien, I felt like I was here for a reason, for spiritual and healing based purposes, and so I felt special. Again this was a complete turn around from how I felt for all of my life until I was given this information and this experience. After this session I started to meditate daily or every other day for a few months. I felt amazing and my external circumstances didn’t control my emotional state anymore. I felt at one with everything and that was exactly what I needed.

I want to start meditating every day again. I want to start writing every day. I want to start making art every day, like I did after my trip for awhile. I want to hike as much as possible, in as many new places as I can possibly find. I want to re-remember that these are the things that I am here for, these are the things that truly matter, and these things are what make life worth living. Of course having deep connections/relationships with others and spreading as much love and understanding as possible are equally important, but the aforementioned passions are all internal/individually based things that fulfill me the most without depending on any other people to do so.

My own computer has decided to start being a twat, and it cannot reach the login screen, it keeps going in this stupid loop where it can’t finish the final stage of these updates (which my computer told me I needed to do, and there were 8 of them). After it gets to that stupid screen where it says it’s on the third stage…the screen just goes black and then my computer restarts itself all over again. It’s really irritating. Especially because this wouldn’t be happening if I didn’t do the updates, which I thought were supposed to be things that *helped* the functioning of my computer. Also, it seems that every time I actually fully shut down my computer, somehow that makes my computer worse the next time I go to use it, which makes no fucking sense. Usually I just let it hibernate when I’m not using it, but somehow giving it a total break makes it have more trouble working again. I suppose that’s a bit like humans, actually. People normally get sick as soon as they fully stop running around being really busy. As soon as they take a break from that, that’s when they get knocked down by viruses and whatnot. But what the fuck computers are supposed to function better than humans ha.

I’m on my mom’s computer, and it’s so slow. Don’t get me wrong I mean I am really happy/glad that she has one because I’ve come to realize how dependant I am on my computer. Everyday I check the weather for the whole day online after I wake up so I can figure out what to wear when I go to take my dogs out. New England weather is so fucking erratic that this is relatively necessary, but then again it’s also one of the things I’m OCD about. I like to be fully prepared for whatever weather change their might be, and this was much more important when I was in college still because I couldn’t just come home easily and change if the weather changed. Now I just do it out of habit I suppose. I also go on my Facebook a ton which is a total waste of time but being unemployed and having finished college, while still living in an incredibly towny-town at my Mom’s place, where we are the only ones that live here and she’s working a lot, I tend to be home alone most of the time. So my computer and fucking around on the internet are small things that keep my sanity. If I were a more motivated person I would probably read for hours a day and make art and do things that are actually productive. But being as I’m not except on random days, I tend to waste away my days on my computer. I check this site a lot too and read the blogs that I follow, and I’ve been writing here more often. So I suppose that’s a more productive thing as it’s still all reading and writing.

This computer shit wouldn’t be a big deal if I had thousands of dollars in the bank as i could just buy a new one, but as of now I have about $40, split between two banks, and no income. So that’s not an option, and I’m certainly not going to ask to borrow a ton of money from my mom for a computer, as she works really hard as is to pay for everything and she just worked overtime the past two days in a row, and is now at work again. Asking her for that would be selfish and it would weigh on my conscience as well, because basically that’d mean she’d probably be working even more overtime to help pay for that, while I’d be here sitting at home as usual fucking around on my computer. So I can’t do that. My brother is a computer expert and I emailed him about the issue in detail and I’m waiting for a reply. But again since this is an emergency to me but not to anyone else, I don’t want to continue the selfish behavior of expecting other people to drop what they’re doing to fix a problem of mine.

Basically this has made me fully realize how much time I waste on my computer, and how it affects my brain. When I went outside to walk my dogs, it was nearly silent in my head and I felt very calm. Normally it’s very loud in my head and my thoughts are swirling all over the place. Normally I’m really anxious in one way or the other, and I suppose my computer usage might play a role in this. I’ve always had more mental than physical energy, and my addiction to my computer only fuels my mental energy while continuing to not use any physical energy in order to get more physical energy.

The walk I took with my dogs was less happy as it was really cloudly out and kind of cold, but I went in this cool area in the woods that how more of a desert type feel to it. It’s all sand and rocks, with plants that look like ones that’d be in a dry/hot climate. It’s really cool, it’s almost like a portal to an earlier stage of the Earth, because the rocks there are also really interesting and different. All I could thin was “Moon rocks”. They looked like peices of the moon or other planets, and I collected a bunch of them. I spent awhile just looking through them and being in awe, and then even though I was enjoying myself, I had the thought that I am just a big kid. I’m fascinated by nature and rocks, things that most people don’t even notice or care about, and everytime I see something a little different it’s as if it’s the first time I’m seeing these things. I just felt childish, not necessary in a totally bad way as that means I’m more aware of my connection to the Earth and I’m more appreciative of it than the average person. It was more that it was like I didn’t know what to do with my days if I didn’t have a computer, then I went looking at rocks and collecting them, then I thought about how badly I need a job and income but how much I have trouble and how much I hate the process of finding one. It just made me realize how much time I spend alone too, on a regular basis, and how most people are out working or atleast in civilization for several hours a day, while I’m almost exclusively on my own, and hardly in civilization. I feel a disconnect from society. Whenever I do go somewhere in civilization to do something simple like pick up my meds, I feel dissociated/out of place. I space out and try not to make eye contact with anyone, and I feel like people can tell that I’m different or out of place and feel self conscious about that. That’s why I’ve started to avoid looking at other people directly when I’m in places like that now. Normally I used to look at like *everyone’* face, and a lot of them wouldn’t even see me but I’d basically get absorbed in watching other people.

I’ve just always felt like I didn’t really belong anywhere, yet I belonged everywhere at the same time. Like I could be a member of several different groups but I couldn’t be a member of just one group. I like way too many different things and different people to just choose one, and I never feel like I can just pick a few out of several things. I like a lot of things equally, and a lot. I often felt like people always wanted me to choose their group if I was part of it but not a complete member. When I was taking art classes at umass, I was an art minor and a psych major, and I always felt like the art major students didn’t want me there. It’s like they were insulted that I liked both subjects a lot, they were insulted that I chose to make Psych my major. I also was essentially the only person in every one of my classes other than like two other people that made abstract art. People didn’t like that either. They’d insult my art by saying it was basic or like doodles or that I could “do so much more”. They’d get annoyed that I couldn’t give them a concrete answer as to what it was that I made, and even a few of my teachers wouldn’t accept that I couldn’t explicitly verbalize the process behind my art. I don’t get why the process would need to be explained…I mean art is the exact opposite of language and usually artists are not as good at language because they think primarily in images. I just always felt like somebody somewhere was always trying to push me one way or the other. Essentially no one just accepted that I had so many different interests and I didn’t find anyone that liked as many various thing as I do until my last year at college. Everyone else seemed to just be really into like one or two things. I’m just not exclusive like that with my mind and interests. The world just has way too many awesome things in it for me to just choose a few and ignore the others. I want it all. And I don’t mean I want to possess it all I just want to be connected to a lot of it and I want to be invested in a lot of it.

I guess I feel like a bunch of different circumstances in my life have lead to me feeling like I was different than the average person, leaving me feeling alienated from a lot but more connected than others to more concrete things like nature and animals. The only people I’ve felt really connected to or a lot like are other people that are odd like me, other people that also don’t fit in and they do stand out, other people that the average person might label as a “freak”. I’ve always felt very connected to nature and animals though, and to music too. Even since I was a little kid. Maybe part of the difference is the level of acceptance and openness. Nature and animals alike are very open and accepting. There aren’t requirements for being connected to them, and anyone can have the same interaction with them. Animals don’t pick and choose between people, they love most all people, unless you are a bad person in which case they can sense that and they don’t like you.

I feel both adult and childish in a number of ways, and the the thing is outside of the fact that I don’t have a job, money, or my own place to live, I still feel mentally/intellectually mature. The thing is, in society you aren’t seen as mature *unless* you can show others how you can financially take care of yourself. It’s almost like the mental/intellectual aspect doesn’t even matter. I know so many adults that can support themselves but are very deficient in mental/intellectual/people skill based things.

I do want to get a job and make money so I can buy new things I’ve been wanting/needing for awhile and so I can comfortably move in with my boyfriend, and I do want to be able to start my own completely. I do want to see more people, to interact with more people, and to have more of a purpose. I do want to have a routine again, I want to make structure of my life and I want to be able to see a future.  I want change and I want to change. I want to be more active and balance out my over-active mental energy with physical energy. I want to feel more hope and joy in life. I want to be able to save money to travel. I want to feel excitement to face the day in one way or the other, rather than feeling like I’m wasting my days away. It’s just that these things take time, lots of time, energy, and money. They take persistent energy, they take discipline, and they take confidence.

I did up my dosage from 300 to 450 MG yesterday, and today too. Yesterday it was either the placebo effect or the dosage really did make a difference. I had so much more energy. I took my dogs on a longer walk at a more brisk pace, I did a bunch of chores, I even went for a run! I got a bit over zealous on the running part as I started off running the pace I used to keep when I was an actual runner and was in good shape, and ended up having to stop a few times out of having no breath and having huge side stiches ha. But atleast I tried. Atleast I actually did some cardio. I did it in the rain too, I didn’t care that it was raining. It felt good to do things out of my own motivation, out of my own desire to change. I want to continue that way. I need to keep believing in myself and reminding myself that I feel so much better when I do things on a regular basis like exercise, make art, make music, work a job, read, write, and do chores. I can become better and I want to become better. Than myself, not than anybody else.

So this morning I went to my new Psychiatrist (well he’s actually one I was seeing in the past but then switched to one at umass). Now that I’ve graduated I can’t continue with UMass Mental Health Services. I realized I definitely miss my therapist and I need a new one for sure. I haven’t had therapy in probably a few months and I can tell I’m not doing as well as I was when I saw mine every couple of weeks.

So yeah this Psychiatrist is a SUPER Irish dude, I mean his name is Killian O’Connell, you can’t really get more Irish than that. He’s got the accent and everything. Wicked cool. I love Irish people haha and I always feel like I’m more than just a quarter Irish. So anywho I made this appointment because I needed a new script as the last one ran out and I can’t go back to my previous med doctor. He agreed to write me the script and he asked me a bunch of questions since the last time I saw him was two years ago when I was severely depressed.

I like the guy I mean he boosted my mood a lot just by being his jolly hopeful Irish self and I felt like he’s really accepting of me for some reason. I guess I just felt comfortable and that had to do with his warmth. So I asked him a bunch of questions too about my med and other stuff, especially because he was suggesting I increase my dosage from 300 mg to 450 mg. I have read things before about Wellbutrin becoming more of a risk when you go above a certain dosage, which I thought I remembered was anything above 300, but I guess not. Apparently after 450 mg that’s when the seizure threshold lowers. He asked me about my current energy levels and how I sleep and things like that. I said my energy levels are ok, and my sleep is ok, but when he asked if I had trouble getting up in the mornings, I went on to tell him how I’m a night owl and I stay up really late and sleep really late. He also asked if I “take caffeine” haha. I said on and off. And then he asked if I noticed any interaction between caffeine and my med. I said yeah I definitely feel a boost from it.

I wasn’t immediately going to be like “OH SURE I’LL TAKE 150 MORE MG of what I’m already taking, and increase that much in just one day!” I happen to know a fair amount about psychology and psychiatry and I’m also a skeptic/someone who questions things instead of just taking it at face value. So I asked him a bunch about the possibilities of that dosage increase and he later went on to tell me he could tell I was anxious and that’s another reason I should increase my dosage. I said how can you tell I’m anxious and he said well you asked me a lot of questions and you were pretty concerned about that 1% seizure risk (? or something). This is actually kind of hysterical to me that he said that. He can tell that I’m anxious just because I asked a lot of questions. I don’t get how that makes me anxious lol. It just makes me someone that is cautious and thinks things through a lot before just jumping into them. Especially when it comes to something serious like pharmaceutical drugs.

Basically Psychiatrists are just swanky drug dealers with PHD’s. It’s pretty funny how differently they are viewed from regular drug dealers simply because what they are doing is legal, though it really is no different than what a drug dealer does. Psychiatrists are such med pushers, they will prescribe you any and all drugs they think could possibly help you, and they don’t take very long to make that decision. You could easily totally fake a condition or disorder and in a heart beat they’d prescribe you with some super strong drug. They fucking love drugs lol.

Another thing that was funny was that he told me that if I went up to 450 I’d be having a lot more fun. !! hahah that could mean so many things. To me that comes off as “If you increase your med which is between a stimulant and an anti-psychotic, you will be HIGH off of it”. Basically I felt like he was saying I’d be inducing a hypomanic state, though I don’t think he realized what he was communicating to me hah.

So he was pretty convincing and his whole delivery I guess worked on me because not only did I essentially agree to the dosage increase but I also walked out of there in a mood that was atleast 5 times as good as the one I went in there with. I feel like I got amped off of his energy and I think also what he said gave me some insight into why my med doesn’t affect me as much as it used to. I think I got pretty used to it and I can tolerate a higher dosage so I actually required a higher dosage to maintain the same effects. When I first started taking it, for the first like 3 months or so, I felt hypomanic. And this happened DIRECTLY after I had been in the most severe depressive episode of my life. The med worked so fucking fast and all of the sudden my thinking was really sharp again, my head was clear, my energy levels skyrocketed, I felt elated, and I could finally sleep again, the severe insomnia finally faded into the background.

Of course at this time in my life it was a BEAUTIFUL summer, really great sunny/hot days and I had just met Zak, who I started dating not long after that. And I got a job at Target then. So basically at that time I went from utter despair to total elation. In the course of like 2 weeks. After being severely depressed and an insomniac for about a year before that. It was fucking sweet to be pulled out of that and to be sent all the way up in the other direction. But then I got fired from Target at the end of September so I had only worked there for like 3 months, and things started to go downhill. I was really torn up over being fired because I felt like I had finally found a place I could succeed at or atleast a shitty job that I could atleast maintain, only to find out a few months later that I “wasn’t a good fit for the job”. And I had some bitch who was barely around from management proceed to tell me how I worked and where I fucked up. After that I started going into a mild depression, and if it weren’t for being with Zak at the time, I probably would’ve gone down way deeper.

Anywho I feel kind of hopeful right now because I feel like this med increase might actually get me back to the good spot I was in that summer. I have felt like I’ve been depressed for the most part for like a year now, not the entire time but for a lot of it. I also felt good after the visit because it made some things clear to me. Which may or may not be the truth, but it explains some things that I had been just internalizing/blaming on myself. If my med essentially dissipated, that explains why I went back to a depressive state, atleast in part. Of course other circumstantial shit is part of it too, but I’m glad to know it wasn’t *entirely* my fault. And regardless it always feels better to know *why* something changed or what the reasons are behind a complicated issue, because it clarifies it. And it makes it more possible to be understood/dealt with.

So he wrote me up that script, which of course I can barely read because apparently like all doctors and psychiatrists have the worst chicken scratch ever. I don’t know how pharmacists can read that. I will bring it in soon, I have a few meds left, maybe i’ll bring it to a pharmacy tomorrow because I think I want to try going to 450 mg tomorrow. I forget how that process works, I forget if they have to take the script paper thing first and process it or something and then have you come back later to pick up your first refill. I hope they can just process it there, but I suppose they’d have to get the pills all together and whatnot.

I’m still a little hesitant about upping my dosage that much but Killian made the choice more up to me by prescribing me 150 mg pills, which I would either take 2 at once to maintain my regular dosage, or I’d take 3 to get to 450 mg. So basically he left it up to me. He said he’d ask me if I tried the higher dosage but that’s about it. There wasn’t any additional pressure. And he told me that I would know in 48 hours if the dosage was too high, because I’d feel like I drank a whole pot of coffee ha. So then I could just go back to 300 mg.

He said that caffeine is not normally tolerated along with Wellbutrin but since I can tolerate it, that means my dosage isn’t high enough. He said that at the proper dosage caffeine can’t be tolerated along with the med. So that would be good too, if I could feel as energetic as coffee makes me feel without having to drink it anymore. I don’t know which is worse for your system though- caffeine or Wellbutrin.

He said a few other things that I didn’t necessarily agree with because they are too black and white. He asked about my sleep and when I told him I’m kind of nocturnal he said that Wellbutrin is supposed to make you “like all the rest of us” in terms of the sleep schedule. He said it is supposed to make you wake up in the morning and go to sleep at night. That may be true but he’s kind of ignoring the fact that there are plenty of other influences behind why people have more night-shift type sleep schedules. My reasons are that I 1) Started staying up a few hours later than usual because Zak wasn’t getting out of work until 11:30 at night, and I’d start hanging out with him after that. 2) It is in my genetics to be really awake/creative late at night and really…not in the mornings. I have my Dad’s biorhythms. and 3) I am a creative type/right brained person. I am certainly more right brained and so that means I am primarily emotional, creative, holistic, visual, artistic, etc. And it is really common for creative types to be at their best mentally/artistically in the late night hours. and 4) I am essentially choosing this sleep schedule in a way too, because it’s not that I can’t do a ‘regular people’ sleep schedule, it’s just that I need to be in a routine and to be working or going to school to be able to maintain it. And if you are choosing to stay up even later than you normally would, of course you aren’t going to be able to wake up early in the mornings, and then when you sleep late, you stay up late again the next night. That’s just the way it goes.

Hopefully this whole post hasn’t been disorganized as I have a feeling it has been a bit. I’m just feeling more mentally active right now than I would be at this hour (lol meaning like 2 pm). I slept pretty badly last night, couldn’t fall asleep for a long time, then slept lightly, then was woken up several times by noise. But I didn’t feel too bad when I got up via alarm at 10 strangely enough. So I’m kind of proving what I just said before. I’m more alert now at 2 pm than I normally would be because I have been awake since 10 am. But on the usual when I sleep till 2:30 pm, I’m not really mentally alert until like 6 or 7pm . Sometimes later than that.

There was some drama this morning having to do with my mom’s lovely notes but I’m in too decent of a mood to write about that now. I think it would only make me feel all pissed off and down again to write about it at the moment.

So I hope everyone has a good day, even though I don’t think many people read this! Ha

Ok so this is probably going to be a rather rant-based post but what the fuck if I don’t vent here I’m going to vent to somebody else and probably end up draining them too, so here goes nothing. (I don’t really understand that phrase haha, wouldn’t it be here goes something?).

Basically my mother is better than pretty much anyone else (except maybe my father), at sending me into a rage pretty quickly. Here and I got in a ridiculous text war like last week when I had shit tons of school stuff to do. She was asking me to do shit for her/to be around the house at random hours for IN CASE type situations. Like, “will you be here at 4 pm? I might need your help to pick up the MG.” And then other shit was more like asking me to do tasks in fucking 4 different mediums as in for one task she (1) wrote me a note (2) sent me a text (3) called me/left a voicemail (4) asks me in person. What the fuck is that shit?!!! And my god she literally goes through that method EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TIME she has a new task. Which is all the fucking time. Because she’s a busy body who creates tasks and work that are not imperative and acts as if they are urgent at that very moment. She’s so contradictory- she complains about working too much, yet whenever she is home or off she is constantly doing tasks or inventing some to be done (and seriously, they are not things that HAVE to happen). So, she complains about being too busy but then creates probably half of the things that make her busy.

Another thing she does is make a shit ton of assumptions about things in general and about me. She also makes a lot of judgments about pretty much everything. An example- she finds out I have a few days off from classes due to the holiday and schedule changes, she then decides that means I will be doing nothing at all and thus I should now do a bunch of tasks for her, at any time she wants. She also assumes that because i’m her daughter and because I’m the only one that is still at home, that I should now do all of the things that she would’ve spread between all of us before. And again, many of these things don’t even NEED to be done!

Another assumption is that if I don’t immediately agree to these demands, then I’m doing so simply to spite her and because I “hate her”. Never does she consider that maybe it’s because she’s an energy vampire that constantly demands things or finds ways to force things on to me (i.e., making it so that I have to talk to her every time I go downstairs/in the kitchen, trying to hand me something or have me do something for her when I am in the middle of doing something else already, by literally standing right in my space and basically trying to force it).

The judgments she makes are things like “if a person isn’t a busy body and isn’t able to work a lot, take classes at college, and still have a social life, then their life must be easy” or “they must be lazy”. Also, “if a person doesn’t have a job then they are useless”, “if a person works a non-traditional job, then it doesn’t count as a real job.”

I could write a book of the lists of judgments and assumptions she makes, but I think you get the gist of what I’m saying.

She doesn’t believe that she needs to change, ever. She doesn’t believe that she’s ever really wrong, and she constantly claims people don’t appreciate all that she does for them. She is stubborn and impatient and very inflexible but doesn’t lack the ever-present traits of being demanding, manipulative, and invasive. Essentially her ego is so large that she believes others are below her and should be subservient to her, and that if anything goes wrong in an interaction between her and anybody else, it’s always THEM that’s wrong. I mean damn, she is excellent at taking financial responsibility and responsibility in the most traditional meaning of the word, but she takes next to no emotional or relational responsibility.

When I’m home for a few days or even less, I can already feel her draining me. I can already feel myself bordering total rage and just spewing it all over her if she pushes my buttons one more time (and she always does). The most absurd thing about all of this is that most of her behavior stems from IMAGINED PRESSURE. I mean, of course not with financial or job based stuff but outside of the pressure she deals with at work, she puts pressure on herself and on me all of the time. She is unable to relax or to just fucking stop! I swear she is an undiagnosed case of Generalized Anxiety Disorder. And she’s an alcoholic, which may at particular times mellow her out, but overall increases her levels of anxiety and depression.

She has passed these GAD type behaviors/thoughts on to me through genetics and environment, and so I really can’t stand having her continuing to do so when I’m actually aware of being the same way and of wanting to not let it control me. She may be aware of the ridiculous levels of anxiety she has like all of the time, but she does nothing to work on it. She never chooses healthy reactions, and simply continues to go about her life being the same exact way no matter how much it hurts her or anybody else.

I feel paranoid a lot of the time, thinking I’m seeing things or people out of the corner of my eyes, thinking I’m seeing the shapes of some sort of ghosts between the trees/leaves when the wind blows on them at night. I feel anxious a lot too, and that it doesn’t take much at all to send me into a very long cycle of anxious and panic based thoughts. I used to suffer from panic attacks like every day a few years ago. Now I occasionally get the beginnings of one, but I don’t allow it to get to the point of sending me running to the bathroom to puke, think i’m dying, and look at myself in the mirror only to feel totally depersonalized. It used to control my life, until I decided I wasn’t going to let it anymore and I started meditating every day and getting really into spiritual thought/practices. It worked, very well.

The problem with my mother is that she is so incredibly over-grounded in the materialistic world that she thinks that everything is a cause for absolutely freaking out. She doesn’t try very hard to think beyond herself or the earthly realm, and she’s so close-minded that she wouldn’t be able to maintain the possibility in thought that everything she is freaking out about is an illusion. She wouldn’t be able to (or wouldn’t want to try very hard to) think about spiritual ideas and she certainly doesn’t believe in anything that she can’t visibly see with her eyes or hold in her hands.

Essentially, her and I are opposite people and not the kind of opposite people that can get along because they complement one another’s traits, but the type of opposite people that clash because they cannot stand the habits and lifestyle choices/preferences of the other person. The thing is, I feel like I understand why she is the way she is, I mean I’ve surely learned a lot about Psychology through real life experience and through many years at college. I know this kind of shit like the back of my hand. So for me it’s not that I don’t understand why she does what she does or what caused her to become this way, and it’s not that I’m trying to make her become like me, it’s just that I can’t understand why she doesn’t give a shit about how much she ruins the quality of my life by not listening to ANYTHING that I’ve so clearly explained to her about how I feel. And on top of that, she simply does not respect what I say either- obviously if she did she’d actually make an effort to adapt the way she acts towards me for longer than like a few days.

I don’t want to have to feel like the only way I can stay sane or not have to deal with this shit all of the time is to just never be home. Believe me, I try to not be home as much as possible and I would’ve/would move out if I all of the sudden had the finances to do so and all of the sudden had a good job that I could maintain. I just can’t believe that it’s come to this point where she simply refuses to adjust to anything and at the same time randomly uses manipulative tactics to try to scare me into doing whatever she wants. What kind of selfish parent thinks it’s ok to do that sort of shit? Every time I actually stand up for myself and every time I disagree with or “disobey” what she says, she says or does something to try to scare me into complying. She uses the fact that I live with her and that I cannot financially support myself as leverage for why I should just do what she says and never once have my own opinion. How fucked up is that?? I don’t feel I drain her of resources very much because the only thing that I use often is a fair amount of electricity. And if I were to move out, we still have two dogs and I take care of them much more than she does and in a much more caring way than she does. If I moved out, she’d then have to find someone to pay to take care of them and then she’d also have to actually start hiring tons of people to do all of her fucking tasks. And she’d be totally alone in this house (which I know she doesn’t want, she is a very emotionally dependent person and needs people around to drain energy from).

So it’s definitely not that she wants me out of the house because she so obviously makes the point that she wants to spend more time with me, says she never sees me, says she misses me when she doesn’t see me for like a few days,  says she’s happy I’m here with her, etc. I just cannot believe that someone who’s around 60 years old is so completely emotionally immature. And I don’t know how she could go so long never thinking much about why she has fucked up relationships and why she doesn’t have any successful ones or why a lot of people can’t stand to be around her for very long. It’s just pathetic. Trying to be a better person is something that is extremely important and I just can’t even understand how someone could spend so much of their life avoiding such a thing.