Hey. I'm not all too sure who will end up reading this. I guess it doesn't really matter? So whatever. Whoever you are, I.. hope you're well. I've been pretty up and down lately. Tonight is more of a down and I guess I just wanted to get my feelings out of my head, instead of sitting here and stewing in them. If you object to that kinda thing, it's probably good for you to stop reading now. Sorry.
I value my relationships/friendships a lot, and I tend to get pretty attached to my friends. I'll usually have one close friend that I get really attached to, and they kinda become the centre of my life for a while. It's not really healthy but it's definitely a recurring pattern - albeit one I wish I wasn't the victim of. I'm pretty naive emotionally, so I don't really know what to call the feelings I develop as part of that pattern. I think the easiest way for me to describe it is as "paralysing obsession" - my emotional state and sense of self is kinda contingent on that person for a while. I'll talk to them lots and put a lot of trust in them. That kinda thing. For the most part, it's fine. I generally have pretty okay friends I think, so I don't really have falling-outs often. But if something happens to the person on the other end, or I do have a falling out, then it.. hits me really hard. My close friends make up so much of my life that losing them feels like losing a chunk of myself. This is kinda what I mean by the "sense of self is kinda contingent on that person" part. Because without the people I value, I suddenly don't really feel like a person anymore, and lots of really difficult feelings start to bubble up. Jealousy, envy, anger - that kinda thing. Usually I lose friends to someone else, which is where I think the jealousy and envy comes from. Maybe they've entered a relationship with someone and don't want to talk to me as much, or.. something like that.
That's kinda what my usual thought process for these things looks like. I guess it's what I'm feeling right now too. These past couple weeks have been full of feelings like that, and that last one has really been sticking with me. Why not just.. write it all off? I'm struggling to internally justify why I can't just give up and shrink into a corner.
But I guess that probably needs some form of context. Oh well.
A person I am (or was?) very close with is dating somebody now, and.. they told me that they wanted to tone things down with me. This shouldn't have had any effect on me, but the feeling of them pulling away has become a constant lump in my chest. I'm really struggling to regulate my emotions so I've been up and down a lot. For the past week they've been purposefully distancing themselves from me, and it hurts a lot. It really, really hurts. I almost want to scream at them, and call them a coward. They told me previously that they missed me, and wanted to talk to me, and then they just disappeared. And I don't understand at all.
I have pretty big issues with feeling second-best or inferior, and that's hitting me now too. I guess that maybe I wasn't good enough after all?
But I digress. My anger's been coming back, and that (along with everything else) has opened an introspective pandora's box - who am I really? In 2018 I was a pretty angry person. I was dealing with acute PTSD symptoms and a criminal justice system that couldn't care less about me. I think the only thing that really kept me going back then was how angry I was. It was the reason I kept fighting against how I'd been treated and what I'd been through, but I guess that after a while I kind of.. resigned myself? to what had happened. I'm not sure if I should really call it acceptance - "giving up" feels like a more apt way to describe it. I buried the feelings I had and tried to become a new person. I was tired of being angry all the time. And I guess that's how I got here. I try to be kind, and open-minded, and honest. But with all of the anger I'm feeling - is that really who I am? How much of that is a facade that I built subconsciously to avoid feelings I didn't want? I don't know. I want to think that I've changed, but it feels like I just swept what I didn't like under the rug. I don't know.
I really don't know. I'm lost again.