sometimes I think it would just be better to not care
I don't really know what has sparked my mood this week, but it has not been good. I've been down and just...blah. I wish I could be more articulate, but blah pretty much sums it up. Well, sort of.
I guess about the past six months or so, I have been coming out of a state of apathy about my life. I somehow had put myself in a place where I just didn't care about all the things that I usually wish were different about my life. I guess saying that I didn't care isn't exactly right...denial might be a better term. I was in denial. I was wearing denial like a shield so that I wouldn't have to put myself out there and so that I wouldn't get hurt, because I was tired of hurting and of feeling hopeless. So I just gave up. I gained forty pounds (on top of already being overweight), my apartment was a virtual bat cave. I didn't try to do anything. I really just wanted to be left alone. I pretended I was okay and I was so good at it I even fooled myself. For a little while anyway.
So, last May I took the first leap into caring again. I joined weight watchers and to date have lost 48 pounds. Then this Christmas I did what my counselor has been trying to get me to do for months and wrote my dad a letter about my feelings towards him in an effort to try to rebuild our relationship (still working up the nerve to do this with my mom -- we're closer and it makes it a lot harder). These are big deals for me, but the past couple of weeks I feel like I've been backsliding. I haven't been doing as well with the eating and I'm sure it's not helpng my mood. However, that's only part of it.
Now I really do care again. And I want to see walls outside my apartment again. I want people around me and that desire makes me feel lonely. I'm not good at meeting people. I'm akward and never know how to relate to people. I've never had very many friends and the ones I still have I so rarely get to see, but beyond friends I just really want someone I can go to who will tell me it will be okay and who will encourage me and support me. I want someone to share my life with. Now, I know as much as I want this, I am also not very good at letting people in. I'm used to having to depend on myself and I'm not very good at letting go of that mindset, but at the same time, sometimes everything is just too much.
I'm tired of my only constant support being someone who makes me feel like I just have to accept the status quo of my life and that I shouldn't be surprised that it sucks. That that's just how it is. There's no encouragment to make it better, just "Yeah, I know," as if they're just happy to have someone in the same prediciment.
I think I could eventually come to accept being alone if I never find that person, but the thing that really depresses me is that not only can I not have a healthy relationship, but I also can't seem to have a career that I love and enjoy and one where I feel like I'm contributing something (because my English degree is apparently useless career wise). I feel like if I don't have something to show for my life in one capacity or another then what's the point. Then I'm just a waste of space drone and that's not what I want. I want a life. I want to have something to contribute to conversations that my co-workers have about their weekends, spouses or boyfriends, school, friends.
I really want to go to Grad school and get my masters in social work and do clinical one-one counseling, but all I hear when I bring it up is how am I going to afford it. The truth is I can't. I can build more loans, but then how I am I going to pay those after it's all done? Those thoughts just get lodged in my head and I can't shake them.
My counselor has been trying to convice me to go to this Unitarian church down the street from my apartment, since I may be able to meet people there with similar world views and interests. I talked to one of her co-workers who is a member and it does sound like it might interest me, but it's hard for me to motivate myself to go to new places, meet new people. I've told myself that I'll go this Sunday. Maybe putting it out there will make me swallow my anxiety and actually go.
Hopefully by then this mood that's been building all week will have passed or at least subsided.