It’s been awhile again since I have last blogged. I don’t know why I never make a habit of this when I love to write so much and I know it’s a strength of mine as well. It helps me process things and it goes right in line with my introverted self and needs.

I’m totally off of Wellbutrin now. I have been off of it completely for about two months now I think. A few months before that, I had gone about a month without it then too. I went to see my psychiatrist yesterday and let her know I was totally off of it now. She knew that I was considering tapering off of it and that I had gone off of it before. It’s so nice that she didn’t guilt me at any point about doing this. So many times they panic and think it means you’re not doing well psychologically. Maybe the difference is that I chose to go onto the medication in the first place, and I sought out the help without it being forcibly done for me. My oldest brother and my father did not have the same experience. There’s quite a difference between Bipolar type 1 and Bipolar type 2 (which is what I’m pretty sure I have even though I’ve only been diagnosed with Mood Disorder Not Otherwise Specified).

I felt really liberated having that quick talk with my psychiatrist and with her seeming to believe in me being able to stay off of it. After going through what I have gone through in the past with my psych issues and worrying that I might permanently need to be on Wellbutrin, I felt so free leaving that office. Only time will tell how I will be months from now, but all I know is that I never expected that I could come off of Wellbutrin so easily and barely notice the difference. The psychological reality that I was in before I started Wellbutrin was absolute rock bottom and I honestly never thought I would be anything other than suicidally depressed after that last episode. I had never been so low for so long and I also never thought I could be happy or at least stable again without being dependent on Wellbutrin.

This whole thing has me thinking a lot about the impact that your environment has on you. It’s HUGE. My circumstances were totally different when I went on Wellbutrin. I was still living at home with my mom and felt totally and utterly hopeless about my future. So many things have changed in my life since then. I have been living with my boyfriend Zak for a little more than 3 years. We have been together almost 5 years now. He’s helped me so much in reclaiming my sense of self. He’s a staunch individualist and I have always respected him a lot for that. He’s taught me how to develop and maintain healthy boundaries and how to work on not feeling guilty about doing so.

I also have kept a solid job for almost 3 years now. I transferred to another program in October 2014 but I’m still at that job now. Before this I couldn’t hold down a job either. This company, as corrupt as I have realized it to be, at least recognizes the strengths that someone like me has and it allows you to be an individual still. I do appreciate that and I fit right in working with individuals that are complicated and strange themselves.

I’m still a very emotional person but I reign it in a lot more now. I seem to have finally learned how to channel it enough to not let my issues spew all over whoever I’m around. I have learned when to hold my tongue and how to act in certain situations. It still tires me if I ever have to perform but for the most part I can be myself where I work and that helps a lot.

I got a bit off track here. I started talking about environment. Environment is huge. Now that I no longer live with the dysfunctional people in my family and I no longer am sucked right into their issues or their boundary issues (because I rarely seem or talk to them), I’m doing so much better. I’m am Empath and so growing up in the family I did and being around them far longer than I should have been really took a toll on me. I still have some trouble balancing family with my life except now it’s the opposite of how it used to be. Now I don’t make much time for them and I chose my own needs over theirs (which is exactly what I needed to do before but honestly couldn’t physically do it while still living with them).

Living with Zak has been really nice for the most part. He’s been healthy for me to live with, in that we are both introverts and both respect each other’s needs for time and space to do our own things. He’s easy to be around, he’s level headed, he’s pretty psychologically stable, and he’s really calm most of the time. That is so the opposite of what I grew up around. I feel like I finally got to recover from my past by living with him. He’s allowed and helped me to grow more into myself and my own interests, whereas my family always kept me so absorbed in their own drama that I eventually ended up not knowing who I was anymore.

I still have high standards for myself that I’m not meeting. But I’m not quite as hard on myself as I used to be despite that fact. I want to make more of a habit out of writing, reading, and making art. I love all three and I know I am good at them. It’s just hard being an introvert because my job is something I’m constantly having to recover from. Most of the time when I come back from work I just watch TV shows I like, smoke weed, and eat food. I tend to not feel like I have the energy to do my hobbies instead, or something. I’m on a mini vacation from work right now, which is probably why I actually started writing a post. I could write so much more but I’m going to leave it at this. As always, I want to strive towards self-actualization. I just need to find a good balance between being patient with myself and pushing myself to put time into my hobbies.

http://borderlinepersonality.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/07/the-quiet-borde.html

I have never been diagnosed with this, I’ve only been officially diagnosed with Mood Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, but I feel like this type of Borderline is one that almost always goes undiagnosed. Of course it does, because there are no outward, in your face behaviors to be physically seen as it is all turned inwards. 

I always turn inwards. My father taught me that to cry or express emotion other than anger was to be weak, and was wrong to do. He’d actually insult me, even after knowing why I was breaking down crying, and say things like “Get over it”, “Stop being a baby”, etc. He’d essentially tell me to stop expressing my negative emotions. Yet, he was allowed to run rampant with them and spread his venomous psychological issues all over anyone he was close to. 

I very rarely cry. When I feel like I am going to, I repress it until it goes away if I am around anyone. If I’m by myself, I might let myself cry for a long time, behind doors where I won’t draw any attention or sympathy from anyone. When I get that upset, I have conflicting feelings about what I need at that time. There is a pretty tradition pattern to the way it tends to happen. Typically, I’ll get in some sort of heavy or controversial discussion with someone I’m close to, which ends up playing out just like the arguments would that I grew up around all the time. First, the argument goes on for a long time. It starts out objective, I challenge the person’s thoughts/feelings if I don’t agree with or understand them, they take offense and get defensive, they attack me and say that my reasoning is based in my negative experiences with my father when I was growing up. Ok, I keep saying they, but 9 times out of 10 this is how it goes when these conversations happen between my boyfriend and I. 

Once he brings up that he thinks I’m saying what I’m saying because of how my dad treated me in the past, this is when the downward spiral begins with my emotions. I try to explain myself over and over again, it once again goes misunderstood, then I am told that I’m making him into the “bad guy” when I point out that he is bringing up a very sensitive topic when we weren’t even talking about that in the first place. I told him it was not appropriate to bring up my most sensitive issue, since I had not offered it up for discussion in the first place. People don’t get to bring that shit up whenever they feel like, unless they are being totally insensitive and are unconsciously or consciously trying to “get revenge” for whatever it is I said to them that offended them, even if I wasn’t even talking about them personally in the first place.

So anyways, this happened last night. And unfortunately, it happens every single time him and I have a heavy discussion about something controversial. We are both stubborn, we both have strong opinions, we both have baggage from our upbringings that clouds these discussions, we are both very sensitive, we are both pretty guarded, and thus it devolves from there on. I began to get very emotional at the end of it, and since he also has this method of bringing up my baggage, then saying he is done with the argument, it gets worse. After I start breaking down and actually expressing how upset I am emotionally outwardly (something I very rarely do), he tries to break the ice and interact with me normally again, and I reject that. Then, he walks away while telling me that he will see or talk to me later. I know it’s because he doesn’t know what else to do to fix things, but it hurts ten times more for someone to leave you right when you need them the most, and right after they just finished opening up some very old, very deep wounds.

Even once I can no longer keep myself from crying, and crying hard, for a long time, I’m *still* repressing the extent of it. I’m *still* trying to cry silently and I’m still trying to hide that I’m even crying in the first place. Even when I can’t keep my emotions under wraps anymore, I am still concealing it. I was taught that emotions were wrong and a sign of weakness, and I was consistently told that I was being illogical, or not using logic, etc. I also overheard my father saying this to my mother and my brothers on so many occasions I couldn’t even count them.

Later on, my boyfriend came back over to me again to try to console me. This time, he did it right. He came up behind me, and spoke quietly into my ear. He said, “I just wan’t to tell you that I love you and that I’m sorry if what I said hurt or offended you.” I was still really upset but I accepted his consoling from that point on, because it was now being presented to me in the form that I needed. He said many more sweet things to me, and I laid down and cuddled with him until I was out of tears. It was nice. I still felt guilty about even being the center of attention and about needing this kind of consoling for this amount of time. That’s another thing I was raised to feel–that I am not worthy of this kind of attention and that I shouldn’t seek or accept it. I shouldn’t even *need* it because I’m supposed to be strong minded no matter what. My father raised my brothers and I much like a drill sargeant would. We were forced and expected to be physically fit, like as much as a soldier would be. We were criticized, insulted, screamed at, hovered over, consistently made to feel never good enough. He did this intellectually and emotionally as well. We were forced and expected to be intellectuals, to be constantly analyzing everything, to be viewing and dissecting things in a purely intellectual way. We were expected to be emotionally in control all of the time. Anything else resulted in being called a baby, a sissy, a wuss, etc.

The job that I do does bring up old baggage and that makes it hard psychologically for me, but at the same time it’s the first job that I’ve had in which my personality and experiences were needed, and appreciated. I think that sometimes I overlook the toll that it has taken on me, I guess because I’m still in the same mindset of “toughing it out”. Toughing everything out, rarely taking breaks, rarely asking for help, rarely discussing my concerns with the people that need to hear them. I will likely always be this way.

I have definitely learned to be very independent in most cases, because I’ve had to be and because that kind of thing has kept me the most balanced and the most genuine. Genuinely, I am tough, I am patient and *very* tolerant. However, I am also very sensitive, very empathetic, and very emotionally and intuitively driven. These two sides of me seem to be in somewhat of a battle with one another. I think in general I balance them out well, but I think it also confuses the fuck out of most people. They think you have to be just one way or the other. As much as my father neglected me emotionally and was very tough on me, I still grew up to be a very empathetic person and I still grew up to be very guided by my emotions. I still find them very important, and I surely did not grow up to be cold or insensitive like I easily could have were I to only be a product of my upbringing. 

I’m not sure where I got this trait from since neither of my parents demonstrated this (maybe that’s why, actually), but I have grown up to be overly considerate of other people’s needs, and to be beyond considerate of disrespecting or hurting anyone in any way. Actually I just figured out why. I became this way because this is exactly what was expected out of me. I also did it out of extreme care for my parents and my family. There was so much dysfunction and so much misunderstanding. There was so much unhappiness and stress in my family. I wanted to be there for everyone and I wanted to protect everyone. It was hard as fuck to do that for everyone because on top of that, my parents always used me a pawn to fight with each other even more by fighting to be the “favorite” parent. They both tried to get me to be “on their side”. So, I grew up unassertive and extremely self-effacing. 

I had a mandatory staff meeting today at work. This trait in myself stood out so much, likely only *to* myself, but whatever. I contributed almost nothing, because the management staff were fighting to be in control and fighting to have the dominant voice or say in things. I could feel the tension, and the topic was also something that I’m not very involved with in a way, because it had to do with a resident that is coming back to live in our residential home. She is the most difficult resident we’ve had, and this resident chose me to dislike much more than other staff, so I avoided her as much as possible. She was very mean to me, very critical, rude, insulting, etc. She even flat out refused to accept my help for things at times. The way she treated me felt just like how my father always made me feel growing up, so that’s a huge reason I avoided her as well. It was just too painful, and the other residents love me and appreciate me. The other residents actually ask for my help specifically and express that they really like me and want to be around me. 

I guess I felt awkward at the meeting because it was supposed to be one between the head of the department and the staff, it was supposed to be him “addressing” the program/us, but it was mostly just him and other management arguing for most of the meeting. The actual staff very rarely got a chance to contribute info, as the bossy/aggressive/domineering management staff were taking up all of that space. I don’t think I really like the head of the department, because he doesn’t have a real clue how these residents are, who they are, or how things have really been at the program. I’d like to see him stay at the house for even a few days, especially after the worst resident comes back, so he can get a fucking clue before he starts having so much to say about how we should be acting. I found it really presumptuous, the way he was talking to us. I get why the other management people were arguing with him, because he was being ignorant and totally defending the resident, even though he has no real fucking clue how she has treated all of us. I just wish he would’ve shut up more and asked more questions and listened more to *us*. He should’ve spent the time observing and figuring out how to approach the problem, rather than proposing what should be done without even knowing the initial conditions. It just felt like a waste of time. Whatever. These are just more issues I’m having with people that are too aggressive, too bossy, too domineering, and essentially straight up hogs of attention and all conversation space. They don’t leave any room for quieter types to contribute because they’re too busy trying to control everything in their extroverted ways.

My mom has been driving me nutty again. It’s like I can get along with her for a period of maybe a few days, but then she launches in to her same irritating ways of being, and makes me wanna duct tape her mouth shut. She’s like a human mosquito. Nagging the fuck out of me, starting at the first time she sees me, about shit that doesn’t matter, sucking my life force every time. It is very rarely that I can interact with her without her sucking life force out of me.

I want the fuck out of here. And Zak has told me I could come live with him soon since his roommate is moving out, and that it would be ok if I didn’t have money right away to contribute. I believe him in saying that but I also see the possibility that it could take longer for me to make money and that could put strain on the relationship. I just feel like the longer I stay here at my mom’s, in the same fucking room, for the 23rd year now, the longer I am going to stay in this rut and the more my anger will build up. It seems to have no limits, other than to eventually lead to me actually fly into a rage, but honestly it takes a lot to get me to physically acting out the anger I’m feeling.

I’m listening to Nine Inch Nails and I can’t explain how much I relate to the music and lyrics that Trent makes. It’s definitely super angsty music, something I originally related to a lot as a moody 14 year old or whatever age I was. I’m not that different than that self now, although now I don’t have as many environmental irritants/fights, and I’m on a psych med now that actually works. Although my mom is certainly an environmental irritant but it’s not the same as listening to/being a part of chaotic, chronic arguments within the family.

Regardless the fact that it was like like that so chronically for so many years on end, has lead to me being an angry person. I’m not the kind of angry person that will publicly start or engage in a loud argument with someone and I’m not the kind of angry person that has no patience and flips out over trivial shit like how many minutes I have to wait at a store for something. I have valid reasons for being irritated and it certainly has become an element of my personality, one trait that has been with me consistently for a long time. My mother and father have fed it very well, but so have many other things. Being controlled, being invalidated, being trapped, being prevented from developing my own individuality and autonomy, etc.

Anger isn’t the best thing but in a way it’s better than constant depression/sadness because anger is easier to channel outwards, it’s easier to express/dissipate. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be channeled into another person, but if another person is crossing a boundary or pushing your buttons and it’s really pissing you off, if you let them know in an edgy way that it isn’t ok, it kind of helps. Atleast then you are letting out the negative feeling and even if it grows for that period of time, if you face it it will fade away. But depression is something that tends to grow stronger and stronger because it is anger directed inward. When it comes to the fight or flight response, I think I fight just as much as I flight. I would rather hurt myself than hurt other people, but sometimes other people need to get the fucking message that they can’t continually walk all over you without some sort of backlash. They will have to feel the response to that kind of behavior. So it hurts both people, but sometimes it’s kind of necessary.

I guess I just feel like certain people know exactly how to trigger me. I’m not sure they are conscious of my triggers or that they are touching on them, and it may even be that they *created* the triggers to begin with. Those people generally being my mom and my dad, but also my brother. I guess it’s worse when it’s family triggering you, because then that’s just like chafing an area that has been chafed until it was raw millions of times over, only to be chafed yet again. When it comes to outside people, it doesn’t have the same effect. They aren’t able to get that same degree of emotional reaction from me.

So basically my mom triggers me really often. And I try to be patient and to learn how to deal with her more effectively, but it’s especially hard when she sets off multiple triggers at once and proceeds to do so even after she can see I’m really pissed off. Then she acts like I’m being unreasonable for responding the ways that I do, then she does confusing ass shit like asks me if I want to go out to dinner with her. Right after irritating the fuck out of me and causing me to storm around and slam doors and shit, right after getting an edgy tone out of me and short answers, she asks me if I want to go out to eat with her. Why. the fuck. would. she think. I’d want that.

So this is what happened a bit ago and when she asked if I wanted to I said no, not really. Then she says “Why not?” and I said Because I don’t want to and I just ate not that long ago. I don’t understand why she proceeds to ask me “why” when I give an answer that I feel is obvious and clear. What does it matter “why” I don’t want to? The only point of asking that is to get information to then use against me to continue trying to force me to do something I don’t want to do.

What’s even more annoying is that someone with her personality and someone as neurotic as her, is not even seen as dysfunctional at all. While someone like me, is seen as dysfunctional in a few ways. And why is that? Because being just neurotic is perfectly acceptable in our society, in fact since it correlates with things like OCD and perfectionism, it tends to help people make it in our society. But with someone like me, who is on the borderline between between Neurotic and Psychotic, I’m not accepted or seen as functional in this society. Because I have trouble getting and maintaining jobs, because I am highly emotional, because I speak my mind a lot about things other people are afraid to say, because I refuse to conform to the priorities and interests of the common person, I am viewed very differently than my my mom.

It’s absolutely fucked that if you appear outwardly perfect/functional, then that’s good enough for people to think you are on the whole ok. That there is no way you could be fucked up or have flaws, as if being able to hold a job and make regular income is adequate in proving your worth as a human being. All it means is that you don’t have trouble on a regular basis doing normal people things, and that you are good at molding yourself to be the way a workplace wants you to be. It means that you can control yourself pretty well in that way, and it also generally means you are good at faking things, unless of course you are the kind of person that doesn’t need to fake anything because the way you are does not disagree or conflict with society.

My point is that people need to stop discriminating against and judging people who aren’t busy bodies or working 24/7 and making money and having cars and houses and shit like that. I don’t know who decided that meant these people are superior human beings, and everyone else is inferior. It’s fucked. Why aren’t we focusing on real values like the kind of person someone is? How good of a person are they? What good traits do they have as a person, what degree of compassion and empathy do they have, how open and understanding are they? This is the shit that matters! Not how well you can be a puppet.

Ok so I flipped out pretty hard earlier on today. What happened is that the past like five days or more my mom has managed to wake me up in one way or the other early in the morning, after I only got a few hours of sleep. She’s getting a major house renovation thing done and the dudes have been working on it many days in a row starting early in the morning. And luckily for me the drilling and nailing and generally loud fucking noises have been happening *right* below my bedroom. I have had a fucked up sleep schedule for a long time now and I have for most of my life. Tends to happen when you’re crazy and hypersensitive to everything. I used to be a really deep sleeper when I was younger (but then it was because I was so fucking depressed that I could sleep for 12-14 hrs straight, and would have non-stop vivid dreams). This was before I was on any medications too, and before even worse crazy shit had happened in my life. It was really bad then but as life progressed it only got more complicated and more varieties of traumatic shit were happening, and life was getting more demanding as I was finishing high school and starting college.

So anyways I’m certainly not explaining myself in order, but go figure. I’m never in order…

So what happened this morning is that yet a-fuckin-gain I was woken up by my mom making tons of noise at like 10 am…which OK I know that’s not really early but it is when you couldn’t fall asleep until 7 am…and then only slept lightly for those 3 hours. What pisses me the fuck off is that she does this EVERY time she’s home. She is incapable and unwilling to be quiet once she’s awake. I don’t even know what the hell she’s doing most of the time she’s just such a busy body that she manages to make like every sound under the sun, and she frequently talks loudly on the phone in the mornings. The house is really small with paper thin walls so the only way I wouldn’t hear her would be if she cared enough to go in the basement or if she fucking went outside. But again she’s too focused on herself to even think about doing something like that.

And I know she thinks that I and all people SHOULD be awake in the morning hours so she doesn’t care if she wakes me up. She has no understanding of what it’s like to be a night owl and to how it is to deal with insomnia for long periods of time. She’s such an anxious mess and such an early bird that she passes out starting at probably between 9-10 PM (Of course because she drinks herself to a near coma every night), and she stays there asleep (on the couch, with the TV blasting), for hours on end, until she eventually gets up and goes to sleep in her bed till 5 AM. And she is IMMEDIATELY wide awake.

So this morning when I was woken up yet again by her when I was looking forward to sleeping a whole night through because she was supposed to *stay* at work, I lost my shit. I stopped trying to pass out anyways, because then the house work drilling shit started too and I jumped out of bed and start throwing shit all over my room and slamming everything around. As easy as it is for me to get angry, it takes a fucking lot for me to get to this degree of basically uncontrollable rage. It takes a long time of me just putting up with shit and being out of control and being sleep deprived and whatnot before I get to this point. Normally when I’m pissed I just rant to myself or to someone else but I don’t do anything physical. At this point I just wanted to break shit because I am so fed up with her, with living here, with being broke, with not being able to easily correct that because I’m too different to easily keep a “normal person” job, with being in the same fucking house and room for 23 years, with having to be stone cold sober the past like four days, and with being sleep deprived and overstimulated for too long.

Generally I am VERY good at appearing stable but I think a lot of people know I’m not. The thing is I just don’t cause scenes so it’s not really obvious. But sometimes I just can’t keep my cool anymore and I can’t just keep being the passive, overly nice person that just deals and deals and deals with bullshit and irritation without freaking out. Sometimes one of the three main sides of my personality comes out and I am very different. I clearly express my rage, I stop giving a shit about keeping cool for other people’s sake, I start moving around a lot faster and I start talking and thinking with A LOT more aggression. You REALLY don’t want to cross me at this point because I will fucking lay you out or atleast scare the shit out of you (mostly mentally, I won’t actually physically attack someone). Some asshole tried to pass me at the last minute when I was driving up The Notch road right after this rage incident (well actually it was still in motion but), and I shot my fucking head around to look right at the person and was saying out loud “Are you fucking kidding me?” and I know they couldn’t hear me but they knew what was going on, and they immediately stopped trying to pass me and slowed way, way, down.

Anyways I chilled out a bit after I went to pick Zak up to help him with a ride to work since he didn’t have one and wouldn’t have time to make it there via walking. He calms me so much and he’s so fucking understanding and patient and just lets me rant when I need to. And he totally validates my emotional state this way even if he doesn’t say much. He doesn’t try to talk me out of it, he doesn’t try to tell me I’m wrong for flipping out, and he isn’t scared by how I act at this time. He’s just unconditionally there for me. I felt good that I was able to help him out with a ride and that I was also able to get the fuck out of the house and away from what was making me so livid, and he gave me some gas money, then we went to get some breakfast at DD because we had some time before he had to go in. We talked a bunch and after I dropped him off I realized I changed my IPOD music from Tool to Reggae music, and I was genuinely happy. Such a huge turn around. God I love him.

Anyways as usual I described everything in too much detail and haven’t gotten to the gist of what I wanted to write about yet. I hope some of you have the patience to read this all the way through ha.

When I got home my mom almost immediately asked me if I had any luck with my job search and then I said no, then she said I should work at Cumby’s then I said How about No then she said Well sometimes you have to work at a place outside of your field and I said Yeah but I’m not going to just go right for the shitty jobs, then she said something stupid that was invalidating as usual and I walked away.

She’s certainly one of those “normal” people that loves to just say “Why don’t you just get a job?” or “If you get a job things will get better”, and a variety of other super condescending and presumptions statements. For her she is best at working an insane ER job nearly every day and making a lot of money. For her working a 7-3:30 PM job is perfect, because she has an ordinary sleep schedule and an ordinary way of thinking and functioning. I get so fucking pissed because she never seems to think about how fucking chaotic and insane my upbringing has been, and she never seems to take that into consideration or to notice that that’s a huge reason why I have trouble functioning on a regular basis and why I can’t hold a regular people type job. She thinks everything can be solved with one quick fix and then life will be all Joly. She’s a simpleton and cannot even realize that if that were the case I WOULD ALREADY HAVE BEEN WORKING FOR A LONG TIME WITHOUT PROBLEMS. I would never have even been fired from the other jobs I had. She seems to think that I’m the idiot and that I don’t even think about what I need to do or where I’m fucking up or how badly I function in comparison to other people when it comes to fitting into this society. She assumes I need her beyond repetitive and simple advice or I would be totally lost. As if I had not a fucking clue what to do without her. Can you say absolutely invalidating behavior??

*Continued in Next Post*

I planned to write a post a couple of days ago but as usual I got distracted by several other things and didn’t end up actually writing like I needed to. So this post may come off as really disorganized, but I doubt many people are reading this anyways so whatever haha.

I obviously think a lot about psychologically based stuff especially in regards to myself and to people that I’m close to–I can’t help but not do so-my family life growing up definitely put that whole thing into place. I feel I have gotten over some of the larger trust issues that I had before because of growing up in a chaotic/unstable environment with sweeping changes between super loving and super..well, not. I’m not one to believe in deterministic viewpoints but I won’t deny that how your parents treated you initially and while you were growing up, as well as how your family worked as a whole, has a large impact on the individual you become. Of course then it is up to you to have to work through all of those issues once you are close to an adult and onward, which certainly isn’t easy when patterns have been well put into place for most of your life. It takes significant work/time/energy to work through psychological issues and get them under as much control as you possibly can. Not to sound pessimistic but I think that there are some behaviors/though patterns that are essentially permanent if you had a chronic, traumatic childhood. In that same line of thought I don’t believe that medication can totally heal psychological disorders…I think it simply keeps things in check and lowers the severity of symptoms/episodes. The rest is up to you to manage and I think a lot of therapy is necessary.

What I’m getting at is that I feel I still have some solid psychological issues despite the fact that I’m on an atypical antidepressant and despite the fact that my environment has significantly changed (I still live in the same house but now just with my mom, not with my Dad or others that really kind of fucked me up over time). I’m certainly not close to my mom or happy with living with just her and I definitely did not have an easy time at all adjusting to the severe change. I went from living with a couple incredibly over-involved, no boundaries type people for years to then living with just one person that I had no emotional connection to and who often wasn’t home anyways due to having to work a lot. Mind you this period I’m talking about was only a small portion of the environmental influence I had. From about age 10 till about 20, I lived in an incredibly tense environment and I could not get away from it, along with being stuck in a super isolated town and not really having any long-term friends, certainly not ones that could provide me with the support I needed. But then again I don’t know if anyone would have been able to do so because it was my environment that was the problem. I went through many, many years of severe depression, long periods of insomnia, a couple hypomanic episodes, many more episodes of severe depression, chronic panic attacks and general anxiety, and a whole lot of depersonalization. None of my issues are anywhere near as severe or chronic as they used to be, but a number of important factors still weigh heavy on my psyche, and I am finding myself still battling some things that I’m sure are based in what I went through in the distant and recent past.

I have been with my boyfriend Zak now for about a year and a half, and let me tell you that is the longest relationship I have ever had. It definitely has been a lot more stable than previous ones as well, but I definitely have gone through a lot of emotional turmoil both internally and with him. It took about a year for me to finally stop questioning how he felt about me and to stop having serious trust issues with him (none of which did he do anything to provoke them, he’s been faithful and consistent for much of the time). The only thing that truly provoked my trust issues/insecurity is the fact that he was my romantic partner. Well, he still is but I said was because I’m referring to the beginning of our relationship. I know that I have severe trust issues with romantic relationships and with friendships, and I’m pretty sure that is due to the fact that nothing was emotionally stable about my family life. I could never feel secure in relationships because they were incredibly insecure in themselves. All of the most important relationships I had (with all family members), were the most complicated and traumatic ones. There were also no boundaries and you know what there still aren’t!! The only way it’s not affecting me as much now is seriously because I do not live with or see all of them on a regular basis anymore. But I literally had next to no space/time/energy to focus on me and to develop my own identity because the issues between my parents and between basically every one of us with one another, drained me over and over again. I was put in the middle of so many fucked up relationships, I was used as the middle man for several relationships, and I had been expected from day one to emotionally carry my mother and father. No wonder I majored in Psychology in college..

Anyways I still haven’t got to the point hahah. So I will now.

I noticed the other day that I had a very strong emotional reaction simply to the fact that I had asked my boyfriend to pick me up from my house this time because the weather wasn’t good for me to drive the shitty van in…and he had just woken up from a nap when I asked so he said yeah but said give me 45 minutes. As soon as I read that response I got extremely angry and hurt, and somehow took it as some sort of rejection. I went from a neutral mood to a really bad mood in an instant. I cried a bunch. All because I felt hurt that he acted like it was a huge inconvenience for him to have to pick me up, especially because I have been driving a lot to see him for the past month or more because my Dad left the area and left me the beaten up van to use. Before I had the van Zak was the one doing all of the driving if I didn’t take the bus to see him. I think he has gotten used to me driving there now and so that’s why I was so pissed when the one time I asked him to get me he acted like it was a big deal and all I could think was “Jesus christ I’ve been driving so much to see him and would drive to the moon and back if that’s what it took to see him, and now this one time that I ask for rides he acts like it’s asking a lot. I would never feel that way towards him if things were the other way around.”

Basically he explained to me that it wasn’t that it was a big deal it was just that he wanted to lay down longer because it hadn’t been long since he woke up from his nap, and so that’s why he said he would get me in 45 minutes. That explanation did not make a difference to me, I felt exactly the same because apparently I was already deep in my emotional reaction, which I now know stems from a much deeper source. And it doesn’t have to do with him personally. It has to do with the fact that I have been forced into having little to no control over my life for much of my life, and I also had many many times where my Dad made me wait around for hours before he’d give me a ride somewhere, when it was never a far away destination that I was trying to get to. I desperately needed to get out of the house and away from my family and I of course didn’t have a car or really any friends that cared enough to help me out, and then he’d go and drag shit out for no reason, just made me wait I think partly because he loved the fact that he could have another way to control me.

So apparently that kind of shit was so prevalent in my life growing up that it is still with me. I am still pretty damn paranoid and quick to assume that any change in plans or whatever, signifies a change in feeling and that it’s always that people don’t love or value me as much as I love/value them. I assume if they don’t answer a text message for even a short period of time, that that means they are ignoring me and don’t really want to talk to me or be around me. That they are sick of me. The other day I also had another one of these instant shitty paranoid thoughts. Both a new close female friend of mine and my boyfriend had told me they took a nap on the same day, and I literally thought “It’s because I’ve exhausted them, I’m exhausting to be around”. And then I go on to fully believe this thought and end up feeling like utter shit because then I think why the hell do I keep doing things in relationships that drain people when I try really hard not to. And then I’m convinced that I haven’t changed at all in relationships and that I am just as dependent on lovers/friends as I always have been. I know in the past I had have very close friendships or relationships that involved mostly me being very dependent on them and me constantly needing to talk to them all about my family and personal issues. I essentially didn’t know how to not talk about it. I think because it was all that I could think about. I think my initial fucked up relationships with my family put a large cloud over the relationships and friendships I developed personally. I have been working on not continuing the same patterns and because I’m now on medication and have been for about a year and a half, I do feel I have had significant progress in how I function in my relations with other people.

I just really wish all of the past shit would just go away, so much of it is very old baggage yet so much of it isn’t that old at all. There was just SO much of it and it was so traumatic that I don’t know if I’ll ever be fully normal in relationships. I don’t think I’ll ever have ease in making and maintaining close friendships and relationships. I will always feel insecure about them also because many people have left me because I was way too heavy to be close to.

Now this comes to what the title of this post is about. I have heard about attachment styles in many of my psychology courses in college and I’ve known this for awhile but I’m kind of learning again how I have an anxious/preoccupied attachment style. This makes a fuck load of sense.

Just to elaborate on what an anxious/preoccupied attachment style consists of: a constant obsession with and worries about all relationships, a chronic craving for intimacy, validation, and approval, frequent insecure worries/doubting of sincerity/loyalty in the relationship, extreme emotional highs and lows within the relationship, and a near insatiable expectations  in relationships.

That is exactly right. I have all of that shit. Like I said I don’t feel it anywhere near as severely as I used to atleast not with Zak because he has been the most consistent, honest, loving, and loyal person I have met and had a relationship with. But it is obvious that I still have all of the features of an anxious/preoccupied attachment style, which still shows itself when the most trivial things happen that cause me to think they don’t love me as much or that they are sick of me or any of those useless and distorted thoughts.

I don’t know how to tackle this issue necessarily, other than to just keep trying to trust people, especially ones that have given me good reason to do so. I think I have three solid people right now in my life that I really trust, two of which I trusted a lot quicker and a lot more easily than the third. And surprise surprise those two people are two female friends. One of them I just started to be friends with/hang out with and I already trust her a lot. The reason being is that she is almost identical to me in personality and I have never come across someone so similar to me especially not in friendships. So basically I know that because she is a lot like me she has very similar emotional tendencies as well (we also talked about this stuff in depth), so then I don’t feel I have to worry. Because since I feel I know myself so well and because whenever we do talk or hang out everything flows like a river and so there are no discrepancies in how we connect. Apparently that’s the only way I can trust someone completely and quickly. Anywho this post is extremely long by now so I’m going to end here.