I really fucking wish I could sleep one of these days
I don't sleep much with the tonsillectomy. I wake up every 15 min or so coughing or needing to spit out stuff, or my pain meds have worn off and the pain itself wakes me up... and every time I wake up, I have to wait a good 30 minutes for the pain stuff to kick in again, for the bleeding to stop, or for my cough to stop (i can't cough, I have the most uncontrollable urges to cough but every time I do, I rip my throat open).
So adding it all up, having had about two months to sit around and think about my life while being sick with strep during and after graduation, sick with tonsillitis three days after I finally got over the strep, and then recovering from the tonsillectomy, or as I'm calling it now "having my throat neutered", I have WAYYYY too much time and FAR too few distractions to hide behind so i'm sort of forced to realize how depressed I am.. or was, i guess... I'm getting things on track.
I look back on old stuff, and get perspective from my closest friends, and figure everything out and goddamn... I had disappeared for a good three years. It's sort of freaking me out to actually realize for the first time in a long time that I have my own life... that I am capable of stuff, that how i feel about myself matters, that I never give myself any credit, and had eventually reduced myself to nothing because I was so apathetic to my own needs, my own wants, and didn't care at all about me, or making sure I felt good about myself, or that I was happy with myself. I found all sorts of other things to obsess over and be a perfectionist about around me to distract me and make me feel like I had some form of control, but my own life was totally out of my hands, and I didn't exist. I forgot that I was a person as well. And I guess that when you are so apathetic about yourself, and cared so little what you wanted or to do anything to make you feel good about yourself, you become apathetic about everything eventually, and eventually, you get so sick of hating yourself and become so insecure and so distant from who you really are from using external things to define your worth that you eventually just find it easier to shut everything off than to not care... but when you do that, eventually, even if you love someone with all of your heart, even if that was all real, the minute you officially stop loving yourself you can't possibly love anything, and lose everything around you... which were the only things by which you defined yourself at all... and when that goes away, you are fucked... because that basically makes you not exist... and reduces you to nothing at all.
And I guess I had a big fucking slap-in-the-face wake up call. And really, as much as being sick has sucked, having this much goddamn time to think about it all and figure it out, to figure out what I want, to back-track three to four years into the past and find out where you went wrong, find out the reasons why you care so little, why you have no confidence in yourself , and why you had nothing of your own to where you can't stand on your own at all... It's sort of like my "having no feet" thing I talked about... but more like having no legs.. if you have shit around you all the time... like... things to lean on, people to carry you, tables they can set your legless stump of a whatever on... you won't really notice the problem... but if all of that goes away... you're fucked... and you should have really worked on figuring out how to get by on your own and trusted that you could this entire time, and even if you could get by on your own, if people came along who were there to help you, who made it easier, who made you happy and were willing to do anything to help you, you at least had the dignity underneath of it all to know that you were also okay as an individual, and you were self sufficient. Even if you don't like yourself, if you still acknowledge yourself to a degree, and have a little glimmer of hope in there, the special ones somehow get through to you.. but once that glimmer of hope in yourself dies out and you give up, and apathy sets in... you can't believe that anyone could possibly feel anything real because you can't feel anything at all anymore.
I spent a good three days pulling out EVERYTHING i EVER did at Island View- all the papers, journals... all of the things i put in a box and didn't think I could ever look at again merely months after I got out of there because it was too hard.... and I read all of it. Everything. And i realized how much the Jessica of 2003 when I got there was like the Jessica of late 2008-2009... concerning the way i viewed myself at least. And I sort of realized how quickly i fell off the bandwagon once I got out of there- I was a hell of a lot better off in some regards, but the whole trauma of the situation itself made me just want to shove EVERYTHING out of memory once I left... and I shouldn't have done that. If you take away the fact that it was scary as hell, I was left in the middle of nowhere, not bieng allowed home by my mother, all of the external circumstances that made it such a scary thing, and just look at ME, and just look at how much stronger I became, and how much more assertive, confident, self reliant I became, some of which simply out of the fact that I knew I had to stand up to the bullshit I was being put through there... If i look at that person- that's one thing I wish I hadn't buried with the rest of it.
So, as much as my life has collapsed... and as much as I want to just undo it all, and go back to my little bullshit fake comfort zone to hide from what I was really feeling for so long... If I didn't have this wake up call, I would have basically sat on the apathy train until it crashed and I couldn't be fixed. What gets me now, and It's a different kind of depression now, it's not self-loathing, it's not apathy.. it's sadness and guilt... I would do anything to go back and have recognized this before it hurt others in the process. I didn't care enough about myself to do anything to make me feel better about me, but had I known that me feeling this way about myself would have hurt others, that I would have become something that I never thought I would become, That i would even be capable of sabotaging my life in the way I did... and worse than ruining my own life, hurting someone else, someone who I loved, and who loved me, and hurt the people around us... I guess I wish people understood where I was back then, but it was so unlike myself that I barely understand it and really, I don't expect anyone to ever understand. I wish I had myself figured out back then the way I have myself figured out now, and that I hadn't completely sabotaged my own life when I reached a breaking point. I wish that I had helped myself before my own problems destroyed everyone I loved along the way, and I wish I could take everything back, yet know that it's far too late. All I know for sure is that I deserve all of this, and that those in my life who I've hurt deserve far better. It kills me every day to think about how badly I hurt people, and since it's in the past I can't change that, but I can change myself from this, and I'm doing just that. It's one thing I can do that gives me a little glimmer of hope in myself again that maybe one day, I'll be okay again... and any little bit of progress for me is a huge step.
So adding it all up, having had about two months to sit around and think about my life while being sick with strep during and after graduation, sick with tonsillitis three days after I finally got over the strep, and then recovering from the tonsillectomy, or as I'm calling it now "having my throat neutered", I have WAYYYY too much time and FAR too few distractions to hide behind so i'm sort of forced to realize how depressed I am.. or was, i guess... I'm getting things on track.
I look back on old stuff, and get perspective from my closest friends, and figure everything out and goddamn... I had disappeared for a good three years. It's sort of freaking me out to actually realize for the first time in a long time that I have my own life... that I am capable of stuff, that how i feel about myself matters, that I never give myself any credit, and had eventually reduced myself to nothing because I was so apathetic to my own needs, my own wants, and didn't care at all about me, or making sure I felt good about myself, or that I was happy with myself. I found all sorts of other things to obsess over and be a perfectionist about around me to distract me and make me feel like I had some form of control, but my own life was totally out of my hands, and I didn't exist. I forgot that I was a person as well. And I guess that when you are so apathetic about yourself, and cared so little what you wanted or to do anything to make you feel good about yourself, you become apathetic about everything eventually, and eventually, you get so sick of hating yourself and become so insecure and so distant from who you really are from using external things to define your worth that you eventually just find it easier to shut everything off than to not care... but when you do that, eventually, even if you love someone with all of your heart, even if that was all real, the minute you officially stop loving yourself you can't possibly love anything, and lose everything around you... which were the only things by which you defined yourself at all... and when that goes away, you are fucked... because that basically makes you not exist... and reduces you to nothing at all.
And I guess I had a big fucking slap-in-the-face wake up call. And really, as much as being sick has sucked, having this much goddamn time to think about it all and figure it out, to figure out what I want, to back-track three to four years into the past and find out where you went wrong, find out the reasons why you care so little, why you have no confidence in yourself , and why you had nothing of your own to where you can't stand on your own at all... It's sort of like my "having no feet" thing I talked about... but more like having no legs.. if you have shit around you all the time... like... things to lean on, people to carry you, tables they can set your legless stump of a whatever on... you won't really notice the problem... but if all of that goes away... you're fucked... and you should have really worked on figuring out how to get by on your own and trusted that you could this entire time, and even if you could get by on your own, if people came along who were there to help you, who made it easier, who made you happy and were willing to do anything to help you, you at least had the dignity underneath of it all to know that you were also okay as an individual, and you were self sufficient. Even if you don't like yourself, if you still acknowledge yourself to a degree, and have a little glimmer of hope in there, the special ones somehow get through to you.. but once that glimmer of hope in yourself dies out and you give up, and apathy sets in... you can't believe that anyone could possibly feel anything real because you can't feel anything at all anymore.
I spent a good three days pulling out EVERYTHING i EVER did at Island View- all the papers, journals... all of the things i put in a box and didn't think I could ever look at again merely months after I got out of there because it was too hard.... and I read all of it. Everything. And i realized how much the Jessica of 2003 when I got there was like the Jessica of late 2008-2009... concerning the way i viewed myself at least. And I sort of realized how quickly i fell off the bandwagon once I got out of there- I was a hell of a lot better off in some regards, but the whole trauma of the situation itself made me just want to shove EVERYTHING out of memory once I left... and I shouldn't have done that. If you take away the fact that it was scary as hell, I was left in the middle of nowhere, not bieng allowed home by my mother, all of the external circumstances that made it such a scary thing, and just look at ME, and just look at how much stronger I became, and how much more assertive, confident, self reliant I became, some of which simply out of the fact that I knew I had to stand up to the bullshit I was being put through there... If i look at that person- that's one thing I wish I hadn't buried with the rest of it.
So, as much as my life has collapsed... and as much as I want to just undo it all, and go back to my little bullshit fake comfort zone to hide from what I was really feeling for so long... If I didn't have this wake up call, I would have basically sat on the apathy train until it crashed and I couldn't be fixed. What gets me now, and It's a different kind of depression now, it's not self-loathing, it's not apathy.. it's sadness and guilt... I would do anything to go back and have recognized this before it hurt others in the process. I didn't care enough about myself to do anything to make me feel better about me, but had I known that me feeling this way about myself would have hurt others, that I would have become something that I never thought I would become, That i would even be capable of sabotaging my life in the way I did... and worse than ruining my own life, hurting someone else, someone who I loved, and who loved me, and hurt the people around us... I guess I wish people understood where I was back then, but it was so unlike myself that I barely understand it and really, I don't expect anyone to ever understand. I wish I had myself figured out back then the way I have myself figured out now, and that I hadn't completely sabotaged my own life when I reached a breaking point. I wish that I had helped myself before my own problems destroyed everyone I loved along the way, and I wish I could take everything back, yet know that it's far too late. All I know for sure is that I deserve all of this, and that those in my life who I've hurt deserve far better. It kills me every day to think about how badly I hurt people, and since it's in the past I can't change that, but I can change myself from this, and I'm doing just that. It's one thing I can do that gives me a little glimmer of hope in myself again that maybe one day, I'll be okay again... and any little bit of progress for me is a huge step.