(I wrote this yesterday and promptly forgot to post it. Please know that today was a better day, however.)
I am having a particularly shitty day.
I’m not here to talk about said day though, because we all have shitty days. We all have days we wish possessed a restart button. We all have days we’ve wanted desperately to be over. We all have been there, and it’s a (shitty) fact of life. A shitty day does not make me unique or special, it makes me human.
In hopes of being able to see myself past this day, I am here to write. Not about shitty days, but about an entirely different subject. One that if I put more focus on, could help me better understand how I operate, and could potentially eschew today’s grumblings about shitty days to another day.
Maybe?
I’ve started therapy again for the second time this year. It’s… been a lot.
There are two predominant reasons as to why I was driven back.
Firstly, my self-confidence is staggeringly low these days. I’ve lost a lot of weight since the beginning of March and I’m now at a size I haven’t seen since high school. Looking at my face in the mirror these days is a continual surprise, and I catch angles of my new figure in photos and am shocked. Despite that, my self-image and self-worth remain unchanged, stubbornly and frighteningly so. What I thought would be a reciprocal relationship of losing weight/loving myself – it has not panned out. My painfully deprecating sense of humour, pitiful self-worth, and floundering sense of self, all of it is still very much with me, 80+ pounds lost be damned. I don’t like it. I don’t like that I can’t be complimented without telling someone why they are wrong for doing so. I don’t like that my immediate gut reaction to men who are interested in me (and lately there has been one in particular who’s caught my eye) is to convince them as to why they are wrong for doing so. My self-confidence seems intent on sabotaging my very self, and I have to stop it. If I don’t, it threatens to push people away. It threatens to be my undoing.
Frankly, I refuse. Fuck you, self. I’m better than that, and I need to start believing that.
Secondly, and said succinctly, I don’t know how to be alone. Said more specifically, being alone in the evenings is something I possess a staggeringly terrible capacity to tolerate. In the day time, work takes over my mental faculties. I can easily manage my emotions and needs. But once my kids go to bed in the evening and I am left to my own devices from 7:30-10:45PM, it’s a different story. It’s as if I forget that I have hobbies of my own, and I feel lost without someone to chat with and take up all of that “space”. I grab onto whomever (lately, that someone I mentioned earlier) will fill the void of that time chunk, seeking attention and conversation. Which is not bad, per say, but I don’t know how to fill that space on my own. If I don’t have someone there, it all falls apart. I try to distract myself with video games, books, and TV shows, but it’s only a temporary solution. Merely a Band-Aid for my deep-seated need for continuous companionship in my evenings, and if I lack it, I fall. Hard. Therein come waves of feelings of “less than” which start to bleed into my already shitty self-confidence, further perpetuating a cycle of sadness that I do not want.
That I do not want.
I want to be able to be alone (if need be). I want to not find it scarily open and empty anymore if I don’t have someone there to talk to in the evenings and take up the space.
I want to know how to take up that space on my own.
And if I could love/like/not dislike myself just a bit more in such motions?
I’d like that, too.
A lot.
