One of the things I’ve been meaning to get around to lately is cleaning up the posts that I currently have published on my blog. A lot of them contain countless literary and grammatical errors among other issues, but as I was going through and correctly my previous mistakes, I noticed something. I have already grown so much since I started this blog. I still feel a lot of the same things I’ve talked about in my older posts, but I’ve learned to deal with them in a more healthy way. In one post in particular, I went on a tangent about how I feel as though I lack creativity and intelligence, which is in no way true, though I could work on raising both skills. I’m not quite sure if skills is the correct word to use in that situation, but I’m not sure what word to put in its place. Regardless, if you live your life, putting down every single thing you do every day, then you are going to despise yourself. You have to show love and patience to yourself; the person that you should love the most is yourself. I think for a lot of people this concept of putting yourself before others has been ruined, because people have insisted that this way of thinking is selfish. I don’t believe that it’s selfish whatsoever though. You are the most important person in your life, that’s a fact. If you continue to put others in front of yourself, forgetting to even consider your needs and wants then you are riding backseat in your own life. No one can experience your life but you and hating yourself for everything that you do will rob you of every wonderful experience that you could have.
Lately, I’ve found myself falling back into my cycle of self-depreciation. It’s incredibly difficult living with mental illness, especially ones that are not worn on your sleeve. I’ve suffered from depression for the greater part of my life and it has impacted every aspect of my existence. At times, it feels as though I have multiple people thinking for me. There’s the thoughts of mine that are very positive and spiritual, and then there are those that are so volatile I don’t feel comfortable detailing them here. I’d like to believe that the thoughts of mine that have hope for the world are my actual thoughts, making the depressing ones just a symptom of mental illness, but I’ve lived alongside these thoughts as long as I can remember. If asked my opinion, I would say that depressing voice is just another side of myself I try to keep hidden, and I think once I’m able to properly separate the two and realize that those thoughts of self sabotage and hatred are not my own. Something that I’m extremely proud of though, is that as I’m becoming more self aware of my thoughts, I am finding myself spiraling less. That disgusting feeling of your mind floating away from your body as anger tingles through every inch of your body. That is a feeling I would do anything to never experience again, and when I can, I try to take steps as far away from that feeling as possible. Unfortunately though, simply wanting to not feel that way is not enough to keep the feeling from creeping up on me once and a while.
It disappoints me a lot that my view of myself has changed so drastically over the years. I used to think very highly of myself around the time I was a freshman in high school and younger. Though looking back, I’m sure a lot of that had to do with being a child. I heard someone say something along the lines of nostalgia destroys memories. Reminiscing on the past can be healthy, as sometimes we do need a reminder of where we came from, but focusing on it to the point where you cannot even see in front of you will ruin every good memory you’ve ever had, and could ever create. I wish I could say this is something that I haven’t done in months or years, but I did what I’m about to mention just today. I have an issue with noticing one or two things that might possibly be wrong with my current situation, whether they be big or small, they will destroy my reality. I cannot properly put it into words how violently I react to these trivial things. The worst part about it is that it does nothing but bring me down and make me more depressed. I don’t see these things that have gone wrong and see an opportunity for change; I simply see failure. These small failures then remind me of all the other failures I’ve experienced in my life. Trying to ground myself by reminding myself of where I am, who I am, what I am doing, etc. has never helped me in the past, at least with this specific problem. I believe this way of thinking started in the last couple years of middle school and has grown to be a disgusting beast throughout my entire life, I believe that’s why it’s so devastating right now. I have perfectly curated this self-destructive, self-loathing, disgusting depressive mindset of mine. With today being so difficult, I find myself feeling as though I’m back at square one. Interestingly enough though, as I compare how I am currently to the person who wrote those extremely depressing blog posts from months ago, I can barely see the similarities.
I saw a video the other day that had this poem embedded in a portion of it and it really touched me. I can’t recite it to you verbatim, but I can tell you that it was something like the following:
“And one day you will realize that all your saved songs are sad songs, and all your poems are sad poems. Sometimes to reach true happiness you have to take a step back and reinvent yourself.”
That really touched me when I saw it for the first time; even now as I’m writing it from memory I see why it has stuck in my mind. I wholeheartedly believe that poem to be the truth. If you surround yourself with depressing things, then you’re going to be depressed. A problem a lot of people with depression have is getting comfortable in that depression. A good number of people, including myself, find that is much easier to be depressed than to work to be happy. I’ve tried to set aside more time for making myself feel better, but it’s still extremely difficult when I have never made myself a priority up until very recently. To be completely honest, I’m not sure there’s been a time ever when I have sat down and thought about what I’m feeling, which I believe might be the next obstacle I need to conquer. I know why I’m hurting but simply being aware of that, does nothing for me. Even with all of the various situations and people that have hurt me over the years, I have never taken a moment to breathe and process all of those things. Facing the past is terrifying, which is probably why I have not entertained the idea of doing so. Perhaps one day, when I am more understanding of myself, I can begin to look behind myself while walking forwards, instead of completely facing behind and unmoving. In order to properly move on, one must understand what has made them who they are. Once someone understands that, they can take their first step towards their new and beautiful future.
Some parts of this post relate back to my previous post about my upcoming trip in December because I am still unable to move on from what I discussed in that post. I believe for this situation, it’s somewhat justified but that doesn’t change the fact that dwelling on how negative the future could be is doing much more harm than good. One similarity between the different types of things I find myself getting extremely upset over, is the lack of acceptance for blame. There has been possibly one time when someone in my life had made a mistake that resulted in me getting hurt and that person actually accepted the blame. In the majority of the things that upset me, there is not one person that will actually accept the blame. In about half of those, there isn’t even a person that could be blamed for what happened. Somethings are out of everyone’s control and I’m not sure if that means it’s fate, but whatever may be causing it, makes it more difficult to move on from. Not having someone to blame for the things that I’ve been through tells me that there will never be justice. It tells me that regardless of what I do, I will end up being hurt and I can’t stop thinking of how I have been hurt and could be possibly be hurt. While logically I’m aware that this isn’t true, my brain cannot help but believe it to be. Something I commonly do when faced with stressful situations where no blame can be placed is that I will redirect that blame towards myself. It’s my fault something completely out of hands happened the way that it did; there’s no other explanation! The reason why things like that happen is too hard to bear so we tend to look for any other answer. Sometimes accepting the blame for a pain you never even caused yourself is better than accepting that the universe can just be cruel to us without reason. We want someone to pay for what’s happened to us, so once every other option for pinning the blame has been looked past, we begin to look inward. Hating yourself does nothing but bring you an extremely temporary feeling of relief from your stress, only for it to come back as quickly as it left. The answer, while most would disagree and continue looking for someone to be their personification of their hatred towards the world, is letting go. We cannot change the past and we can never build the future if we don’t understand that.
There’s a quote from Shakespeare that comes to mind as I write this, “Cowards die many times before their death.” That quote can be taken a number of ways but the idea that I’d like to touch on is that death is simply failure. Even looking at it from a medical standpoint, death is no more than failure of the human body. There are many cultures in which death holds a lot of meaning, many of those I’ve studied because they are so immensely interesting. No matter how creative your definition gets though, death will always equal failure. As I become more aware of the many deaths that I have experienced, I want to do better for myself. It is so terrifying to break out of my comfort zone and avoid experiencing more death but that is something that I have been working towards for some time now. Just today, I have died about twice. Both deaths though, were more or less allowed by myself. Sometimes when I find myself spiraling, I just watch how far I can go. This morbid fascination with watching myself decay rots my brain each day I continue to do so. I’m aware of the fact that I lose parts of myself whenever I live with hatred in my heart like I did when I wrote the original few posts on this blog; I just want to make sure I can find those parts of myself again. I never want to die again. I want to be alive and I want to live. I want to live so beautifully that I get to experience all that there is while being true to myself. By breaking out of my shell, and doing small tasks I would’ve never imagined possible years ago, I allow myself room to learn how to avoid death.
Originally, I wanted this post to be more positive but sometimes positivity is not reality. Unfortunately, that is usually the case. Being vulnerable and showing that the road to fulfillment is not linear—in order to heal you need to hurt—is what I believe to be important. I have grown immensely since the start of this blog. I still struggle with a lot of the same things that I struggled with originally, and I can promise you that I won’t stop dealing with them anytime soon, all I can do is learn to deal with them in more healthy ways. I try to give myself more patience, as I’m always trying to force myself to go beyond my limit when it comes to mental stress. I try to show myself more love each day I wake up. I can’t get rid of my brain or change it’s chemistry, all I can is learn to love it and myself unconditionally. Putting myself in boxes created by others and feeling let down when I don’t fit does not motivate me to possibly do better in order to fit, it simply makes me despise myself. That way of thinking does nothing but harm and brain and body and I’m trying my best to one day be able to not even have these thoughts cross my mind, which I’m not sure is medically possibly but one can hope. I’m not sure where my life is headed and I honestly don’t think I ever will. I’ve stated this in a previous post though, I don’t believe not having someone else’s footsteps to walk in means I’m lost. I am building my own path to my own future and I have no idea what lies ahead of me; all I can do is allow myself to experience both happiness and pain and in order to reach a future that I feel content in. I still do not know who I am, but I learn to love the parts of myself that I am introduced to each day.
.˙· 𓆝.° ｡˚𓆛˚｡ °.𓆞.° ｡˚𓆝˚｡ °.𓆛.° ｡˚𓆞 .˙ 