I thought that I was a fairly self-sufficient person. I thought that I was an introvert – recharging my energy by taking time out by myself to sit and deconstruct situations.
I think that I might have been wrong about all of these things. Or maybe personality is just too complicated a thing for these definitions.
I’m not too sure of anything at the moment. I’m sure of the pain, but that comes and goes. Nothing in my life is reliable right now. I feel like I can’t trust anything, or anyone.
I think that the reason I felt like I was self-sufficient was because I didn’t often let people in enough to be able to hurt me. The reason that I retreated was so that I could breathe and step back and remain at a distance that would allow me not to make any connections that would hurt me too much when they were broken.
I’ve always been a giving person. That seems to have magnified and taken over my personality now that I’m older. I give my time, energy, emotions, money, posessions… and perhaps it is a way of trying to make up for what I feel that I am lacking. I try to bridge the gap between my worth and someone else’s by giving more of myself. I also give in the hopes that this will prompt a return of the same from whoever I am giving to.
I don’t know myself enough to know what I really want. I know what I want in the heat of the moment, in conflicts that spring from feelings of worthlessness and taken-for-grantedness, but when I am happy, I generally just tend to want whatever I am getting. I don’t know what I want from others because I’m too busy concentrating on what I’m giving to them, in the hopes that they will be able to tell what I want and give that back to me.
I give to people what I think that they want from me. When a relationship affects me deeply, I give so much of myself that I lose all sense of what it means to be me. I lose my ability to think and function on my own. I base my self-worth on the way that other people treat me.
How can I learn from this? How can I comprehend anything, above the pain that I am feeling?
You really begin to understand what loneliness is when you’ve spent a great deal of time with someone. It’s a visceral thing. It eats away at you inside until you’re lying on your bed sobbing, wondering how you’re ever going to feel right again in your own life, how you’re ever going to enjoy anything that was a part of your life before this whole thing happened.
I keep getting the feeling that I’ve gone backward in the level of my maturity. I keep getting these flashes of who I was years ago, and feeling like I’m back there, at that stage in my life – an idiot, unaware of the way the world works. It was okay to be that clueless back then, but now… I should be more self-aware, more developed in my emotional and mental understandings of things. I feel like, if I go back to the things that occupied my time before I was in this relationship, then that means that I’m the same person. I’ve started to resent the person I used to be, and I resent the person that I was while I was in the relationship even more, because that person led to the end of something so important. So who is there left for me to like? How can I ever feel of value again?
I can’t keep basing my value on other people’s opinions and perceptions of me. If the only pride I feel is when others recognise me for something I’ve done or am, how am I ever going to feel okay just with myself?
I guess I don’t trust myself, because through my own actions, thoughts, insecurities, I have let myself down time and time again, more than anyone else could ever let me down. I have hurt myself more than anyone else could. I’ve done stupid things, and it doesn’t help to beat myself up over it, but if you don’t learn from your mistakes then there was no point in them being made in the first place.
I never knew that anything could hurt this much.