Close

lost and wandering

› Forums › Difficult Feelings and Emotions › lost and wandering

Viewing 3 reply threads
  • Author
    Posts
    • July 12, 2013 at 3:34 pm #16415
      blackrainbows
      Member

      In the last two and a half years I have done a lot of hurting. Depression. Self Harm. Suicidal Thinking. Self Hating. **. I feel great hatred and anger towards myself. I just want to self destruct. Put an end to what often seems like my pointless and wasteful existence.

      I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and reflecting on these things in an attempt to find the direction I want to go in and then head towards it. For a long time I struggled with the idea of living vs. dying, but now I think I’m pretty set on living and heading in a more positive direction. At least that is the commitment I made to myself and I’m fairly determined to stick with it. I guess the problem is that I also feel determined to hurt myself by Self-Harming**. 

      I have searched and searched, trying to understand how happy, smiling, carefree, optimistic me came to be depressed and self-destructive. Recently, I have begun to acknowledge how certain experiences may have played a role. 

      It’s kinda ridiculous that even now I can’t talk about it. I can barely admit that it happened. I’ve actually denied it so much to myself that I’m not entirely sure it did happen. 

      For years and years this is what I told myself. 

      You can’t hurt me. I am like a brick wall. Unbreakable. Thick skinned. I don’t care what anyone thinks about me because I am so “confident” that I am amazing as I am. I build for myself on the surface a sense of heightened self esteem.

      If you don’t see how great I am now, you will in the future because I’m going to be so freaking good at so many things that my awesomeness will be undeniable.  I don’t need you to like me. All I need is myself. One day you will all see me and be amazed. You will respect me and you will regret how poorly you treated me when you should have been trying to be my friend. Because honestly, if you saw me for who I am why wouldn’t you want to be my friend? I am so kind, so hilarious, easy-going and happy when you’re happy. So why don’t you like me? Why do you treat me like I’m a less than? Like I’m worthless? 

      Maybe I just understand people wrong. Maybe what I am is not what people want. Maybe that’s it. Maybe you are blinded and simply do not see me. I try so hard though. I am outgoing, friendly, kind and yet it seems like you hate me. It seems like my presence is unwanted. How can that be? 

      What is so wrong with me? I’m smart, good-looking enough, athletic-I embody the societal ideal of success. I compare myself to you and I don’t see what makes you so much better. Do I wear the wrong clothes? Listen to the wrong music? Am I not “cool” enough for you? Do I say the wrong things? What did I do wrong? 

      Being liked and accepted seemed like an impossible task for me. I always felt like an outsider. Never felt included. 

      You excluded me, made me feel left out, put me down, insulted me, called me names, made me feel like there was something wrong with me, that I was a less than, and just not good enough. This didn’t happen once or twice, for a few months, or even for a year. It defined my entire social experience of elementary school. It felt like my role, to be unpopular, unwanted, disliked. 

      It happened for so long that it seemed completely normal, and that there was nothing wrong with it at all. I denied to myself that you treated me this way, ignored however it was that you made me feel. It was never acknowledged that you did this to me. I prided myself on my resilience, my ability to let whatever you said and did to me pass right over me and feel no hurt. 

      But you did hurt me. You failed to treat me as a person with value and worth. You did not respect me, and I did not deserve it. I say those words, “I did not deserve it,” and I know it to be true. Painfully true.

      Now look at me. I still know inside that I am amazing, but it’s not enough. I have such great hatred for myself. I want to destroy me. 2 and a half years ago all the walls I had built around me so many years ago weren’t enough. I began to crumble from the inside out. My plan failed. I couldn’t be good enough for you, and I wasn’t good enough for myself anymore either. Depression, self harm, suicide, self-hate, **. These are the things which take up so much of me now. 

      The bullying (as I force myself to call it) is in the past though now. Why do I have any right to admit to it now? To bring it up? Well I have searched and searched and the fact is that there are a lot of similarities in the way you used to treat me and the way I treat myself now. As much as I hate saying that, it is true, I think. 

      For now I am in a safe place. A place where there is no room for self-destruction. Soon enough I will have to leave this place I am at though. I sought counselling once, and I think I will seek it again, actually, I know I will seek it again. I am doing things to try to help myself, it’s just really hard, because I feel so determined to be very hateful and unkind towards me.

      ** edited by the Support Team for triggering content

    • July 15, 2013 at 4:55 am #18827
      Youthspace
      Moderator

      Hello there blackrainbows.

      Your story is poignant and carries a bitter but empowered tone. You’ve clearly seen some incredible darkness and made a very conscious choice to see yourself survive it and come out stronger than those who were cruel to you. Your words are powerful, and you’re right that you are amazing – amazing for fighting the long fight you’ve been fighting, and for making such a deliberate choice to take care of yourself, despite so many dark feelings and thoughts.

      That must have taken tremendous courage. I’m betting that a lot of the time, the urge to just give up and give in to the exhaustion and pain are strong enough that you doubt your ability to keep on going in the direction that you have chosen. It must be a struggle all the time when your mind keeps telling you that you are as worthless as people treated you for so long… You talk a lot about self-harm, and I’m wondering if you ever harm to a point where your life is at risk?

      Your strength and passion are moving, and so is the deep sadness that you express. I can hear a lot of frustration that you’re still carrying the burden of how others treated you. You are right when you say that you did not deserve it, but I can hear that even with that shield, it’s hard to hold back the demons of self-harm, self-hatred, and suicide. It’s almost as though you are mourning the loss of the self-love and happiness that you might have felt if it hadn’t been forced away.

      I am in awe of the compassion and understanding that you have for yourself when you say things like “Well I have searched and searched and the fact is that there are a lot of similarities in the way you used to treat me and the way I treat myself now” — I can really hear how hurt you are to have been shaped in such a profound way by the cruelty that you experienced. And even as you show such a deep introspection, I can still hear how when you examine yourself, you see someone that is only worthy of hate. My heart goes out to you as you fight the echoes of the past, because it sounds as though the confusion and desolation are intense. <3

      As you walk down the path you chose, blackrainbows, we are here to help however we can…by providing a safe place to spill your feelings here, or over the chat service (6-11pm PST). We’re here to listen to the pain and the hope.

      -The Support Team

    • August 3, 2013 at 11:54 pm #18836
      blackrainbows
      Member

      I’ve gone away for the summer and had to leave the self destructive things I do to myself behind. What if I go back to the “real” world and I let this take me over again. It will be so much easier now that I will be living on my own instead of with my family. There will be no one there to notice *I’m engaging in my eating disorder. The things that made me want to stop before which mostly had to do with the fear of being “found out” will no longer be present. It will just be me. *

      The goal of everyday * becomes self-harm which seems to happen at every available opportunity. *

      Disordered eating was never even part of it to begin with. It was something I never imagined myself doing ever. Period. Everything has happened gradually and then very suddenly. 2 and a half years ago I started wondering about depression. Someone told me that someone else though another person I knew was depressed. The word “depressed” connoted something serious and my thoughts jumped to my only real reference point for depression which was the Depression Hurts commercials. I wanted to know more, so I turned to the internet and began my journey into learning a lot about various mental health issues. Now that I knew what depression was, I saw a few of the symptoms in myself but not enough and to an extent where I had any real reason to be concerned. It wandered from my mind until a month later when very suddenly one day I was fine and the next day I wasn’t. All of a sudden I was overwhelmed, exhausted, emotionally overloaded, and fantasizing about suicide. But I still didn’t think I was depressed. I met most of the criteria on that day, but I remembered reading that symptoms must be present for at least 2 weeks to be considered depression, and I was pretty confident that there was no way I would still feel the same way in 2 weeks from that day. Now I just laugh at that thought because it has not just been 2 weeks, but 2 and a half years. The days, weeks, and months began to pass by and it became apparent to me that I was definitely depressed. So I started trying to figure out why. 2 years ago my conclusion was that I was just too much of a perfectionist with too many unrealistically high expectations of myself and that if I set myself some reasonable goals to work towards and learned not to beat myself up for being anything but highly excellent at everything I do I would start to feel okay again. Time continued to pass and soon it had been a year since that day when I suddenly wasn’t fine anymore. I began to feel rage and hatred towards myself to a degree that I had never felt before. Why did I still feel so low all the time? Why can’t I just get over it and move on with my life? I don’t deserve to feel depressed, my life is great. I am worthless if this is how I’m going to allow myself to feel. Why? Why? Why?! Thoughts of self harm began to creep into my mind. *. For a few months I thought about self harm as a way to be angry at myself and to attempt to release the enormous amount of inexplicable emotional pain I seemed to have inside me. Then suddenly one day I was feeling desperate and impulsive and I did it. I self harmed. I began to do it more and more often. It gave me some sort of satisfaction to be so deliberately hateful towards myself. After awhile it became a daily ritual. It became to much so I decided I had to stop. 10 months later I still haven’t really stopped for good. As I reflect on the last year, I see days that are filled with really intense emotions. Lots of anger, rage, hate, sadness and tears. Sleepless nights. But exhaustion was almost comforting because if I was exhausted then my emotions were less intense. Just like I thought about depression and self harm, I began to think about eating disorders. I thought about it from a very outside perspective and how sad it was and how painful it must be to have to deal with something like that. Then all of a sudden (again) there came a day where I decided I *was going to hurt myself. And it went on for 3 months until I had to stop.

      Now I am in a position where things are up in the air. I have this really strong desire to return to my patterns of *self-harm. And I don’t know if I will be able to resist. It scares me because I really don’t know what I am capable of doing to myself and I wish I could just forget about it all and stop. But that’s not an option.

      *Edited by the Support Team for triggering content

    • August 5, 2013 at 1:30 am #18837
      Youthspace
      Moderator

      Hi Blackrainbows,

      You may notice that we’ve edited your post to remove specific details of self-harm and disordered eating. We do this to ensure the forum is safe for all members without fear of being triggered but please know that our staff read and respond to your entire original post.

      I can hear how much fear you have around the future once you return from being away — as though the last remaining roadblocks are being pulled away and there is nothing to stop you from driving full speed ahead into those hurtful behaviours. I get the sense that you wonder what that would look like and how far and fast you could go without crashing. It seems like, when you’re self-harming, that your thoughts are consumed by the process. I wonder if there is anything that brings relief from the obsession once you’ve begun?

      Thank you for sharing so openly your story of how depression entered your life — it seems as though it crept in quietly at first and, before you knew what was happening, it had made a home for itself inside of your head. I can hear how much you searched for answers and found that knowledge of the problem didn’t offer much of a solution. It seems like the harder you fought to crawl out of the hole you were sinking into the more dirt piled on top of you and forced you into darker places.

      I get the sense that during this time you’ve had an opportunity to step back from the self-harm and eating disorder and see your story as though from the outside. . I wonder if there is anyone in your life that knows how you’re feeling or if there is someone you might feel comfortable sharing this with? I can hear in your post that a part of you wants to avoid returning to these patterns and I want you to know that we are here to support you. I hope you’ll continue to share with us here and through our chat service (6-11pm PST nightly). We are here to listen <3

      The Support Team

  • Author
    Posts
Viewing 3 reply threads
  • The forum ‘Difficult Feelings and Emotions’ is closed to new topics and replies.
Go top