Taking a Stand and All That Rot.

I really don't enjoy standing up for myself. Not that I enjoy being railroaded, but I really, really hate conflict and confrontation. So I have a hard time telling people in my life I don't like what they are doing or how they are treating me. Especially my friends. And if they tell me I am wrong and give their side, I am inclined to empathize with them and agree and I forget that my side is valid too. I'm very bad at standing my ground in that way. I do better with people I don't like as much. I am much less concerned about how they see me after the confrontation is over. But with friends, I really want them to like me, and not to be mad at me or think negatively about me. Which is not so realistic and doesn't really work. And yet, that is how I function.

With the whole thing with Red and Roomie, I did a lot of work on standing up for myself and setting boundaries. I have learned a little about how letting your friends treat you like crap is, in fact, not really doing them a favor and doesn't make you a better friend. Who knew? But seeing all that in retrospect does not make me any better about being assertive with other friends now. I still don't like conflict. It makes me anxious. Like, full-on panic attack, crazy-person-who-can't-think-rationally anxious. That's really hard to talk yourself through and overcome. But I am still trying to overcome it. I don't like the super-unhealthy feeling that I have when I am in those situations. I don't like what it does to my friendships. And I really want to feel not-crazy.

So a few weeks ago I told someone in my life that I didn't like the way she spoke to me one day, how it made me feel, and what I wanted from her. It was super hard. I get all nervous and weak sounding when I stand up for myself, which is not how one should sound, I'm pretty sure. But I did it, and fortunately it was someone who knows that this is difficult for me and did me the courtesy of hearing me out and not being too harsh in her response. I didn't think I had gotten anywhere. She didn't promise to change. She clearly thought I was overreacting. But I knew she would keep it in mind, and that I had at least planted a seed. I was so excited yesterday, when, indirectly, she conceded part of my point. She had seen the light regarding part of the thing I told her was bothering me. I don't know if she saw the correlation. I'm pretty sure she did, because she's one who is good at connecting things. I hope this means she has given what I said more thought. I know that this means that she values me, because of the way she weighed in my feelings in the discussion.

I'd like to say that in the future this will help me find more ease in standing up for myself. The reality is that I don't think this will magically fix the stupendous amount of anxiety I feel when addressing conflict. But it's a positive experience, and will hopefully help me be just a teensy less crazy the next time I need to put my foot down.

Dreams I Could Do Without

I have always had certain dreams I have in time of stress. There's the one where I'm driving on twisty roads and hills and my breaks don't work. There's the one where I start floating upwards and at first it feels freeing and then I realize I have no control and keep floating up (slightly reminiscent of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). There's the one where I wake up and think there is a spider on or near my bed, to the point where I get up out of bed, turn on the light, and possibly get a shoe or the vacuum before I realize it was a dream and that I can't see in the dark. These I've had since at least high school. Then there's the one I started having after college where I realize I am not done with high school and start going to class. Usually I spend a lot of time trying to figure out where to park because I drive now and I never drove to school. Once or twice it involved being naked. Interesting considering I never had naked dreams until my 20's.

Whenever I have those dreams, I know that I am stressing about things. There's a theme of control in most of them. Going out of control, needing to gain control.... It should not have been a surprise to me when my therapist pointed out, and Coolgirl confirmed, that I am a bit of a control freak. I did not think I was. Apparently I am. I need to feel in control of my environment. Awesome.

I'm not sure what my latest dream is about. I've had it twice now. Last month, I woke up (I swear my eyes were open) and there was a man standing next to my bed looking at me. Especially freaky since I was the only one home. I screamed, twice, and loudly. It was 2am. It was a little disconcerting that the neighbor didn't seem to notice. Coolgirl thinks it was a ghost. She thinks that it was probably a friendly ghost and maybe I should take comfort. Um... not so much. Last night I had the dream again. I went to bed at a decent hour, for once, and awoke to what I swear was a man standing in my room saying something with a deep voice. I do wonder if what woke me was my own loud snoring. But I screamed. Only once this time.

Is this what night terrors are like? Am I starting to lose it? Is this simply evidence of my heightened state of anxiety? All I know is that I feel real fear and an ookiness that my regular stress dreams do not bring. I feel unsettled. I don't want to sleep. Except that I really love sleep. I want someone to quiet my fear. And that other feeling. I can't quite put my finger on what it is.

Self-Loathing

This is a fun one. This is one that I have not talked about very much to... anyone. Not my counselor, not my friends, not my journal... not even you. But it's been on my mind a lot this week. In this whole process I've been going through in the last year, where I lost the Roomie and I lost Red, and then things got rocky with Coolgirl (something I have not alluded to on here, partly because I stopped writing), and I started to question my ability to have friends, who, you know, wanted to be around me. I'm still not feeling very confident about that one. Coolgirl and I are fine. I got my meds changed, and got less crazy, and stopped doing crazy things like bursting into tears in the middle of the work day. And I've had a lot of "ah ha" moments and insights into my own lovely craziness. I do take things really personally. I do get really emotional and irrational and worry that my friend hates me when they get a little irritated or distracted or busy with having their own life. Off meds, those crazy moments were amplified, which was fun for all involved. Now I'm regaining some sanity and perspective and seeing that I don't have to get emotional about someone else's bad day. Not that I can always convince my emotional self of that. Because regardless of how my reasonable side sees things, sometimes the urge to be sad and crawl under the table and curl into the fetal position is a wee bit stronger than it should be a healthy adult. And this is why I'm having a hard time not hating myself right now. I mean, I'm driving myself crazy. I'm always freaking out and getting mad and sad and anxious about EVERYTHING. I am TIRED of it. I try to find my happy place but sometimes i don't think I have one. Why WOULD anyone want to have a close friendship with THAT. I want to just isolate like crazy. I want to spare everyone of sharing in my crazy moments. And I can see why they are irritated with me. I'm empathizing with them. but I can't take breaks like they can. And if I isolate, it's ALL me, ALL the time. There are not distractions. That gets old quick.

So I really kind of hate myself a lot of the time now. And I want someone who has been dealing with my crap and losing patience with me to tell me I have redeeming qualities. But apparently that is a needy thing to request. Or I don't know how to ask it. Or I'm not supposed to care? Specifically, I would like for Coolgirl to tell me my redeeming qualities, since she has had such a hard time going through all my crazy with me, and has seen all the ugly and barely made it through. She's all "you shouldn't worry about what other people think about you, and it shouldn't matter what I think." But, um, I need to know that a non-crazy person sees redeeming things in me. Because I am not trusting my own judgement right now. And I feel really ugly on the inside. I feel crippled. And I am feeling like, what's the point?

Shhhhhhh...

I've been trying the whole talking about my feelings and talking through them and all that crap. Now I'm thinking I would like for them to hush for a while. I've been trapped in a thought pattern over and over and over and over again about things about certain friendships I would like differently. I've talked to my friends about those things. They are aware of how I would like things to be. We have talked about the crazy parts of me and what they are willing to give me. I'm not pleased with certain parts. But I can't change them. And they are not being cruel. And I am tired of feeling yucky. Now I am thinking I would like to stop talking about it. Maybe if I stop venting to other people nearby about it, and stop thinking I need to talk to my friends about it, I will be able to get myself to stop thinking it. I'm tired of thinking about it. I'm thinking over and over and over again about things that I wish that were different and about how I can't change them and then getting really irritated with myself for thinking and thinking and thinking and thinking about things that just make me feel horrible. I'm hoping I can find a way to make my brain shut up. I'm really tired of being so unhappy with friendships that are actually great, and I'm tired of struggling to get past my yucky feelings and just live in the moment and appreciate the great friends I am blessed with. I need to find a way to make my brain be still.

My Brain Never Shuts Up.

It's been a while. I have been avoiding thinking about my feelings or expressing them. Always a good healthy thing. More accurately, I have been avoiding thinking about my feelings in a healthy way. They have sucked me under and kept me in bed for almost whole weekends. They have diminished my appetite, which at least has had the nice benefit of helping me have some portion control and drop some unnecessary weight. Usually I eat my feelings, so this whole lack of appetite thing is foreign to me, or was before this last year.

I still don't really want to talk about my feelings. They are painful and they will be real and ugly here on my blog. And I feel like I'll never be able to fix anything anyways... I don't seem to be getting any better and the same annoying things that drag me down into horrible abysses of anxiety just keep rearing their ugly heads. I have the same anxieties I was having at 12, and I'm thirty something now. Awesome.

I keep thinking about my alcoholic friend, Red. I haven't heard from him since last fall. Coolgirl came over a few weeks ago and helped me go through the things of his I was holding that I should have gotten rid of long ago, since they were a huge blaring monument to my codependency. I felt guilt, but I also felt a huge weight lifted. I now have a very small box of things I will mail to his dad. If I ever figure out his address, because I am not texting, emailing, or facebooking Red. He will answer, and he will make me cry. Whether he is mean or manipulative or something in between, I know it will rip my heart.

Having made it past that step, I'm now onto facing the reality that he is out of my life. I miss him when I think waaaay back, but I also have embraced the reality that he is not that person now. And that makes me sad. But I also still feel a sense of failure. I failed him as a friend. I failed to keep a friend. I have lost another friend. I lost Roomie, and then Red, all in a matter of months. And now other friends don't seem to be totally loving me (read, they don't have the time for me I want them to have), and I am having this insane, panicky, horrible, irrational feeling that soon I will be so, so truly alone. No one wants to love me. But see, there, those feelings I said I didn't want to talk about have slipped out.

So I now find myself wondering when I will hear that Red is dead. Will he live for years? Is he already dead? Is his liver about to go? Will he overdoes? Will he do something stupid when he is drunk and hi? Will he just get tied up with other equally stupid people at a stupid time and have something horrible happen to him? and if he does, will I get a phone call from his brother or his dad? It's a real fear. He kept saying the last few years we were in contact that he wants to live hard and die young. I think that was his way of pretending he chooses to have his addiction and sink into it. But I think he has embraced his mortality in a scary, scary way. We're still friends on facebook. I see him post every few months. A while back he was online every once in a while, and I totally could have tried to chat. The way I know my heart has changed is that I didn't want to. It would only have ended in tears. But I do want to know if he's doing okay. I hope he's doing better. I want to believe he is, and that somehow I've overestimated his addiction and the direction he is heading because of it. But I'm pretty sure I haven't.