This was a long time coming...
Feel free to ignore this boring, long-winded entry. It is really just me releasing a lot of feelings I have not written about lately.
As much as I have tried denying it, I am spiraling into a deep depression. Oh, how utterly cliché. I thought these feelings were long gone, looking back to my high school years. But there is a sense of familiarity surrounding me, one I have been trying to suppress. Every time I have started typing journal entries, I have refrained from putting these words down. I backspace. I type something less negative. Not only did I not want to believe my current state--because putting them down on paper always makes them more real for a writer (if you can still call much such)--but I did not want anyone else to know either. I am ashamed to be back here.
Most recently, I have lost my best friend of six years. Not only was it the most important friendship in my life, but it was the only close friendship I had left. I did not have much of a say in the matter. Apparently the friendship was slowly coming to an end over the past few months, unbeknownst to me. Apparently I am 'no fun to be around.' Too jaded and unworthy. I am out of words. I have tried. I have rationalized and suggested. No response. There are things that happened that lead me to believe it will not blow over this time. Friends are allowed to disagree. Why do so many people think you must sever all ties once an argument happens? No friendship is smooth sailing. You debate, you see it headed nowhere, so you just agree to disagree and move on. That should be the way of it. You need to focus on all the good and treasure that with all your might because it rarely comes around. You rarely ever connect so intimately with one person. What I think happened, though, is transference. I do not think the end of the friendship had anything to do with me but rather, it was sparked by something else unrelated and I just happened to get the short end of the stick. I feel sick over this. It consumes me even though I am so hurt by what she did, without any explanation. I should be obscenely angry and just think 'Good riddens, I obviously meant nothing to her,' but that is so far from reality. How someone can throw away such a long and intimate friendship over nothing, I have no idea. There were no warning signs, there was no time for preparation. I am confused but I am still offered no explanation. I have somehow managed to make someone else believe cutting me out of their life is the best thing. How? Unspeakable things were said to me, hurtful things that I do not know if I can forgive. But while I mull over that, there is still silence. And I hate silence when there should be words. I hate time because She never tells.
My family is, in one word, a disaster. Everyone is fighting, various people are not speaking to other people, gossiping is taking place behind everyone's backs. We have become the epitome of the dysfunctional family, something unfathomable even just five years ago. We are all very close. We used to have monthly family dinners. We used to celebrate every birthday, all of us together. Then my two aunts declared war on each other, loosely connected to childhood battles and a lack of forgiveness. I somehow got involved and was given the silent treatment by the both of them. Then it was just one not speaking to me, then it was the other. This troubles me greatly, having the only female figures in my life only sometimes speaking to me and others giving me the cold shoulder or just ignoring me all together. My poor grandmother, still recovering from breast cancer, has to see her two daughters fighting like this. Neither one will go to a family dinner if they know the other will be there. Then, after some negative incidents at the cottage this summer, one aunt decided to give my father the silent treatment. She never showed up to dinners if my father was there. And, as always, my alcoholic uncle is either causing pain or chaos. We were not on speaking terms over the summer thanks to a drunken night during which he tore me and my life to shreds, swearing and screaming at me in the car all the way home from a dinner. He was getting so crude and so out of line that even my father threatened to throw him out of the car. Unfortunately, that was nothing new for me. Despite the fact that my father is usually the one around him most, I always bore the brunt of my uncle's alcoholism and always receive the most abuse.
Basically, the whole family has not been together, in the same room, for almost a year. I feel horrible for my grandmother, and I cannot seem to just let everyone else battle it out while I sit by the sidelines. They are my family. It is my business. It is affecting me. No one knows what to do. My one aunt has gotten so bad that my grandmother has told her to just not come over anymore. She is overly negative, sensitive and uptight. She never has anything good to say about anyone or anything. I feel this is because she is completely unhappy with her life, but that is no excuse to abandon or insult your family. Everyone in the family needs therapy. That is what my grandmother said to me. I agree. We are all walking on egg shells now, and I hate this feeling. At any given time, someone is upset with someone else. Sure, this is how all families are, but it is tearing mine apart because it is more than just anger. There is deep-seeded resentment, and there are repetitive problems with the same people. Everyone has just had it, and right now, everyone has just given up. I ache thinking about how to fix it all.
My relationship is one of the biggest problems. Too much fighting, too much negativity. Get out, you say? No. It is one of those situations where things are a lot more complicated than just getting out. When two people have been through so much, it is never a matter of just getting out. When two people have worked so hard and have dedicated so much to each other, there is no easy way. We continue to work on things, but we continue to have problems. We both want to be together, but we are at a loss for what is going to solve at least some of the issues we have. Distance is a very big problem. We live too far and we only see each other once a week. If it goes any longer, the fighting gets worse. Now that he is working and in school part time, and now that I am back in school full time, our time on the phone is less and less. I have no idea what to do. I do not even have any more words to describe the confusion and heartache over it all. He is not there for me like he should be. I do not feel I can confide in him. I hate feeling this way. When I am feeling down, talking to him should make me feel better, not worse. I have no idea what I deserve anymore. I have no idea if I am asking too much or too little.
School, obviously, is always a problem for me. Between my SAD and the obscene amount of homework, I have very little time for myself or anything else. I feel like all I do is read, read, read. I am getting lazy. I do not want to be in school anymore. I worked hard in elementary, I worked hard in middle school, I worked hard in high school. I worked so hard even when working that hard was not required or respected, and now I am burned out. I have had enough. I feel I have earned my degrees, and I just want out. School used to be fun and interesting for me, but now it feels more like a prison. I dread going. I am exhausted coming home and can barely stay awake to do tomorrow's readings. I cannot drop any classes. I need to just do everything I can to finish up and graduate. I feel like I will have a nervous breakdown if I do not just get out of there.
Which brings me to my father... the ongoing negative in my life. Despite the fact that I still live here, I am pretty much independent from him. And yet, this issue bothers me more than most of the others in my life. Since he started dating his current girlfriend, I have barely seen him. He is never home. He stays away for days or weeks at a time. He rarely tells me where he is going, when he will be back, or leaves a number where I can reach him. When I do see him, it is nothing but fighting and nagging. I keep this house clean, I vacuum, I wash the dishes, I change the kitty litter, I water his hundreds of plants... but I miss some crumbs on the counter and he flies off the handle at me. I feel like I live here alone, and it is too much work. I would want a smaller place if I were living alone. I do not have the time. He is becoming more and more ignorant of both me and the whole family. When he has a woman in his life, that is all he has. He is neglecting his friends. They leave annoyed messages on the machine talking about other messages they left three weeks ago without a response. He keeps changing family dinner dates in order to go to her place instead, and stupidly, my family says okay to it all. He cut short one of my uncle's birthdays just so he had more time to spend with her; he turned it into a birthday brunch instead of our normal birthday dinners. He left early on Mother's Day, even though my grandmother was upset that one of her daughters went to her husband's mother's instead, to go to her place right after dinner. If we are watching a movie in the living room and she calls, he will pause the movie without asking and proceed to talk on the phone for hours. He says I have no right to the phone anymore; we cannot share it or create phone times, but rather, he gets first dibs and I just have to deal with it, even if that means not talking to Sean. He is quite willing to go out of his way for her, no matter what for, but not even do small favours for anyone else. He promises to do something and then says he forgot, so too bad. He uses up all of the food I have made for my lunches when she comes over for lunch; I get home, it is gone, and he just says, "Yeah, we ate it." He barges into the bathroom in the morning without knocking, telling me to get out because he has to get ready for work, as if me being ready for school is unimportant. Oh, sure, little things. Little things add up.
And she, his girlfriend, is completely blind. She has heard him snap at me on the phone and has probably noticed his ill temper, but she is blind and worships the ground he walks on. I feel sorry for her. "He seems like the type to hit women." I agree, and he has thrown things at me and he has wacked me in the back of the head with rolled up magazines. I want to call her up and tell her she is dating a monster, but I suppose she may eventually find out for herself. Things with my father have just gotten so much worse over the past year, even though I thought they were already at their worst in high school. So now not only do I never see him, but when I do, it is non-stop negativity. I cannot deal with this anymore. I would move out in 24 hours if I had the money. I really would. It must be getting pretty bad, too, because a few of my family members are becoming less ignorant about the issue and finally acknowledging that he treats me like complete and utter shit.
The ongoing issues with my SAD and self-esteem. I will not even bother rambling on about my SAD since I just wrote a long entry about it. As for my self-esteem, well, it has definitely declined over the past couple of years. There are things I am not even brave enough to share that have caused its decline. But all of the issues above, in addition, have caused wear and tear on my ability to love myself. I wish I could put myself in a protected bubble so it would not get worse than it already is, but alas, that is impossible. It is especially impossible for me who sees everyone else's problems as my own problems. I help everyone but myself, and I do not know why. Every time I go to work on myself, I take one look at the stack of problems and just push them aside. There are too many things to deal with, and I have no idea where to start. There are things I have tried that have not worked, so I get discouraged. My support network is non-existent, and this is yet another reason motivation is too hard to come by. Self-love may come from within, but it is still fostered by your friends and family. I need people who will, at least, be there for me when I need to rant or release some of these emotions. Looking at how long this entry is already, you can tell there has been a lot bottled up. I need more people in my life. There is no question about that.
Sadly, the one thing that used to keep me sane throughout all of this is something I am no longer capable of: writing. Not journal entries but creatively. Prose, poetry, stories. My writing, for two years, has been non-existent. I am completely lost because of it, and I have no idea what I want to do with the rest of my life now because it was always writing. Writing was always my passion, the only thing I ever wanted to do. It was in my past, my present, my future. It was everything. It was my saving grace, my single 'talent,' my therapy. Lost, lost, lost. It is like someone has taken away my flashlight and I am left to find my way in complete darkness. I miss it. I think about it every day. I ache to have it back. I feel so useless without it. It almost acted as a protection from everything too. I could retreat to my room, take out a pen and feel safe again. Now I feel overly exposed, and not fully whole at all. It was so much a part of who I was that I honestly feel like pieces of me are missing or empty. It is a horrible, horrible feeling to have. What scares me most is thinking it may never come back to me. I can say over and over again that it will, but once again... time leaves me guessing and unsure.
In my life... when it rains, it pours. That is quite clear looking at the past ten years. How I am going to get through it all, I do not know. But right now, I feel so broken. I have things coming at me from all directions and I cannot control them all. There are things I have absolutely no control over, things that will continue to poke and probe me. I am obviously in a rut. I have no idea how to get out of it. Every time I feel some willpower to find solutions, something else happens and makes me question why I am even here to begin with. Over the past few months, especially, such hurtful things have been said to me, things that are making me question my personality, my character, my goodness. These things are inhumane but are they true? I no longer feel capable of thinking I am a good person. Too many people are leaving. Crying comes too easily now. I feel weakened. I am not a weak person but I feel like I am being worn down to a small twig. My branches are weighing down too heavily for me to hold up. At night, I lay awake for hours before falling asleep. I barely get any sleep at all these days. My mind races and the emotional exhaustion is what usually puts me to sleep. All of the negativity in my life keeps my mind off of school, so I take longer and longer to do what needs to be done. I just feel very trapped. I feel very unloved. Very, very unloved. (However, I do acknowledge those of you here who have always reminded me that I am never alone. You know how you are... J & M especially ♥.)
I am physically and emotionally exhausted.
It is never a good thing when I start listening to Jann Arden this often.