A brutally honest piece.
It’s story time. Time for me to actually introduce myself to the world. All this time, I’ve been hiding; making myself small, for no reason, as if my pain makes me unworthy of being seen. And I don’t want to have to live in society and yet be estranged from it: all my life, that’s what it’s been like. It’s sickening. It makes you dread the day ahead.
You see, somehow, most of my waking hours ever since I was a kid have been filled with a mix of doing and retreating. Let me explain:
If I wasn’t going at something academic intensely as if my worth depended on it, I was all by myself in order to feel the safest I could feel.
Because for me, people = threat.
… People would either say something critical, stare at me mockingly, nurture ill thoughts about me, and most of all, people would end up not wanting me; people would leave me be, just as if I wasn’t worth being attended to. In short, people = non-acceptance. I gradually figured out that I wasn’t allowed to belong. Though today I try to tell myself that it isn’t my fault at all. I am not a problem. The utter lack of closeness with a sufficient amount of other people just happened because it had to.
Yet still, I can’t believe that all these years, I’ve been unconsciously holding myself back from saying what I truly wanted to say about how I’ve been affected. That I’ve been internalizing messages that I never should have, and feeling so bad about myself, when I shouldn’t have. ‘I shouldn’t have’ — because not only were those messages and those feelings nonsense, but they affected my daily decisions on how to act and ultimately, I regret not having been bold enough. Not having been bold with people I wanted to love, and especially, not having been bold with people who deserved a telling-off from me.
In essence, I retreated: though I had a lot to say, I kept it all inside. I wrote it down sometimes, sure, but it never got processed adequately, in a way that was enough to get me out of the self-defeating rut I was in for about 20 years. All retreating gave me was loneliness and a sense of non-belonging…I spent my time at university in the U.S. very much all alone, feeling rejected and ugly (a perception, not feeling, to be precise), which I suspect, was also around the time when my BDD symptoms began intensifying (the onset of most mental health problems is late adolescence).
I wish I could say my relations to people have turned 360 degrees; that people just love me and take to me, that my social anxiety has disappeared, that somebody wants me. Nope, I remain, at the core, friendless, unseen, undesired, and loveless (even though I try to love others, it seems other people are content loving themselves and other people). You know, stuff heartbreak’s made of.
Maybe, I’m just a misfit (it’s not like other misfits I‘ve met would even want to love me back, hah)…
All I can do now is rediscover myself all over again, build myself up by challenging the systems and voices that told me to ‘do’ and ‘retreat’ because of my apparent ugliness, odd difference, and meekness. All I can do now is to choose not to abandon myself, to choose to see myself as a whole entire person, and to have neutral thoughts about who I am and what’s in store for me. Psychological abandonment no more, I am now available to myself.
