April 12th, 2025 - "Despite everything, it's still you"

Due to the amount of stuff I've been going through, I'm not ending my "hiatus" from developing this website, but I am just going to do a bit of freewriting in this blog to really see if I can find a sense of direction for the immediate future. This is just going to be a blog of my pure, mostly unfiltered thoughts on all I'm going through, just simply to make sense of everything going on. I'll probably refer back to this in the future, or I'll get all self-conscious about it and remove it in a day, but who knows? This is definitely going to have a lot of rambling and a lot of all-over-the-place and unorganized thoughts, so if you don't want to read something like this, don't.

Currently, I have no idea what I can even control in my life right now. There's so much emotion going in every which direction, and I still can decide what I should focus on. It's really hard to bounce back from all that I'm going through, but it's also not something I can let debilitate me forever. There's a lot I could talk about, and there's plenty I can't talk about, but I want to try to at least rationalize my crashing out, and to come up with ways to improve on myself in the near future.

I hate to self-diagnose everything wrong with me, but after finding out recently that my father has bi-polar disorder, we'll just say things are starting to add up. The mood swings I've got for a large majority of my life can actually be explained. The depressive episodes I go through aren't just me being crazy. The intense intrusive thoughts have an explanation outside of me being crazy. It's definitely something to look into. Therapy and meds are a good start, but unfortunately there's no fast-working method to getting better mental health/managing mental illness. My meds clearly haven't had a real effect on me, and anything that could have been explained by them was 100% placebo-effect. My medication likely won't take effect for another week or two, which really sucks because my panic attacks have been coming back in full swing. Therapy would be so helpful for me if I didn't have 45-50 minute meetings. It's so evil that I can't really get everything that needs to be said (whether it be bottled up emotions, relationship problems that I can't express with anyone else, or the not-so-great thoughts that enter my mind from time to time) in such a short amount of time.

I wish I could go back to how I was feeling merely a week ago. I started to feel like my life had direction and purpose, and now I'm back to sheer confusion on where my life is going. When I felt more confident in my friendships, my identity, and my general mental health. Now I'm back to thinking all of my friends hate me and I genuinely hate how no matter what this feeling can never go away. I'm actually sick of it. It doesn't matter how many times I can tell myself that my friends actually do care about me and that they generally enjoy my company, or times that my friends indulge in hanging out with me and doing nice things for me. I don't know why I always think that other people only interact with me because they are too nice to tell me off. I always fear how I'm perceived by other people, and I fear even more that this will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. I think I'm getting better at not acting like I'm a burden to be around, but I definitely still suck at it. I'm at least self-aware, which I think is the first step of getting better. I am able to acknowledge when something I say to someone is really bad and I should not say something like it again.

For example, I NEED to get "I hate to be a bother/bother you with this" out of my vernacular immediately. I think I send this in every message that I ask people anything with. STOP DOING IT. It's not that I am doing it for pity points, it's that I genuinely believe that I'm being bothersome, but I sure as hell realize that this is not how it comes off. It comes off as very self-pitying for no reason at all. Also, in tandem with this, I NEED to stop being so apologetic about everything. I do feel sorry for my self-perceived bothersomeness, but I need to stop acting like it to other people! It's weird and attention-seeking behavior!!!!

Another thing I realize is that I always try to alleviate social pressure from others all the time by saying "you don't have to if you don't want to". This statement is implied by the mere fact that I'm asking them. I fear that this statement isn't perceived in the way that I want it to be. In my eyes, I'm telling the other person that I 100% respect their decision on not doing something for me, and that their genuine want/consent is something that I need in order to feel deserving to receiving anything. HOWEVER, I can see how other people might view this statement when I say it. It really comes off as me trying to put myself beneath the other person (pause) in the social interaction, and that I'm attempting to force them to pity me, I think? I'm very unsure because I personally don't see anything wrong with the statement, but I get this gut feeling that it's a very strange thing to say when asking something of someone else.

I think the last few paragraphs are truly just me overthinking how I am interacting with other people, as 90% of the time, most of what I say or how I act is forgotten after the conversation, unless it's something important/particularly memorable. I think part of the reason is that I'm someone who hates to keep secrets, yet also someone who needs secrets more than most others to keep myself safe. It's simultaneously a great survival mechanism, and also a detrimental one as well. I use secrecy to mask things that may result in risking my safety, but unfortunately, this coping mechanism also doesn't help when you allegedly (I say alleged because I'm not diagnosed, but I feel like it takes a five-minute conversation before you immediately think I'm autistic) have autism, so you use this survival mechanism as a means of hiding your true thoughts about others.

I often try to beat-around-the-bush when it comes to how I feel about other people. Part of this is good because I don't want to come off as obsessive to anyone, but I'm also really bad at hiding it. I feel the need to be around the people I like the most as much as possible, even if it jeapordizes my life, simply because it's one of the only times I can feel comfortable being (mostly) myself. I fear how this is perceived, but I don't ask anyone because nothing makes you sound more obsessive or creepy to someone than asking if that's how you come off. I think I just need to pull back a little bit because I think I've been trying to insert myself into other people's lives when I don't really belong there.

To spin this in a positive way, I'm able to see that my behavior could be perceived in such a way that I don't mean, and I am able to acknowledge it. The next step is to back away from these negative behaviors, slowly but surely. I think these will definitely come in handy next therapy session.

For the most part, I just want things to get better because I seemingly can only take L's. It's very hard to not feel discouraged when every good thing that happens to you has a caveat of some sort, and every bad thing that happens to you has long-lasting effects. It's very challenging for me to see a reason to keep going when a lot of the things I get excited for are disappointing/don't happen, and the things I dread the most almost always happen in the exact way I don't want them to go.

I want to say I'm doing my best, but I really am not. I know I can be better than I am right now by far. I've hit a low point again, and I think I just really need an opportunity to get back on my feet. I would love for more positive things to happen in my life, but nothing is promised in life (except death and taxes) and I need to allow for these positive things to happen by giving out some of that energy.

Also, Undertale quote because I've been replaying it recently, and also, "despite everything, it's still you" has been one of the most impactful quotes from any media I've ever heard/seen in my entire life, and something reminds me to keep going. Despite all the hardships and everything it took to get me where I am today, and through my slow but sure process of transitioning, I'm still me, and I will continue to be me. The person I'll see in the mirror tomorrow morning, and the person I saw in the mirror yesterday are the same person, even through all the shit that happens in my life.

TL;DR: my behavior has been quite erratic recently, I recognize my social flaws, and how my social ineptitude can be improved, and I'm taking steps to getting better, but I need to ride out the bad before anything good can happen. Also, Undertale is a good game, go play it!

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