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I'm like a child or a prey animal, scared of everything, all the time. It's getting worse, not better. For a long time it was getting better but I feel like those days are gone.

My therapist says that the reason I have so much trouble doing things for myself is that I feel that I don't deserve to be comfortable and taken care of. I don't doubt her but I also don't really understand what that means or what to do about it. I can list reasons to support the idea that I do deserve care and comfort and love, and I can't list any that support the idea that I don't so why don't I believe it? How can I convince myself?

Yesterday someone told me I need to have more compassion for myself. There's another pithy bit of incomprehensible self-help. And here I am still wondering why I can't get the hang of simply being a person, and why I have to be here at all.

 

I "should" myself constantly about these self-care things.  Obviously, that doesn't help.  I have a fantasy about being a clean, tidy person in an orderly house.  It feels impossible, though it feels like it "should" be possible.  Like, what's really so hard about it bathing, doing laundry, preparing food, throwing away the junk mail?  I "should", I "should", I "should".  Here I am, buried under a pile of "should".

With that said, I washed my bedding yesterday.  It felt like a major triumph!

Cascade, I relate to this.

Let's all break things.  And hug!  Thank you, friends 

Meanwhile, I'm over here trying to find a self.  I don't know if I ever had one.  I may have sort of had one when I was younger, but there's really almost nothing now that I can put my finger on as being ME.  The other day someone asked me what my hobbies were and I couldn't answer.  I am empty.  There is NOTHING in here. 

Thank you, friends, for being here, for reading and replying and offering your love and support. I'm trying not to wallow in my pain and angst but also trying not to negate it with apologies or false positivity. I'm a mess. I am frustrated and suppressed and afraid and angry, and the only thing I know how to do with those feelings is turn them inward, into shame and despair and  depression. Make excuses. Fawn. Grovel. Hate myself. Take blame for I don't even know what. For having feelings, maybe? For taking up space and breathing air? GOD I HATE THIS. I feel like breaking things.

...the late, great Ian Dury.

"Hit me with your rhythm stick! S'nice to be a lunatic..." 

From the other side of this, I crave affectionate physical touch. Sex confuses the issue, but I yearn for uncomplicated hugging and cuddling. When I was in my late teens I had a couple of friendships that consisted mostly of talking and cuddling or watching TV and cuddling. I still think longingly of those friendships.

I feel slightly less weird now for my habit of cutting up my hairballs to add to the compost.

This journal, proof that I was falling to pieces even before the two big floods.  Really, I suppose I've spent my whole life falling to pieces, simultaneously scrambling to pick those pieces up and put them back together in an eternally frustrating and fruitless attempt to make myself whole.  I've gone through some better times when more pieces were in place, when either there were fewer pieces falling, or the pieces weren't falling so fast, or they weren't careening around as much, or I was able to pick them up and put them back more quickly and easily or...Okay, I've stretched this metaphor until it's screaming, you get the idea.  Now there are so many pieces and so little me that I don't know if I can ever come back. 

NarcKiddo, I have no advice but I wanted to let you know that I also struggle with this. I have often felt that I am selfish or bad or unloving because I HATE it when my husband uses anything of mine or even so much as opens the door to my bedroom without permission, while he is so open and generous and has a "what's mine is yours" kind of attitude. It's a real thing! And so confusing. I have no answer, but I offer my sympathy and understanding 

I'm having such a hard time right now.  I can't anything.

   to you, too, san and Hope.

Last week when My Person was travelling, I got sick, and in looking back I wonder whether it wasn't a sort of self-inflicted sickness.  I didn't consciously do anything to make myself sick, but I realise now that I wanted a nice long break from everything, from all obligations, real or imagined, to myself or to anyone else, and I can't do that without being sick.  So I did some weird little things to mess myself up.  Timed some activities wrong. Indulged both sides of my eating disorder a little bit.  Messed around a touch with pain meds.  Nothing big, nothing serious, but sufficient to mess me up just enough to justify my lying on the couch watching TV all day and ignoring everything I'd planned to do to have a healthy functional week I could feel good about when My Person came home.  Heaven help me, I enjoyed it, at least up to a point.  Probably not as much as it seems from the perspective of now working to get myself back into the rhythm of my "normal" life.  I've been holding it together well even though I'm not really okay.  I mean, I AM okay, or I'll BE okay, I'm not going to act out in any horribly self-destructive way like I might have when I was younger, but the thing is, I'm just so tired.  I'm tired of struggling through my life, negotiating all my broken mechanisms and miswired circuits.  All those sparking things.  I'm tired of feeling like I should be further along, like I should be able to actually LIVE my life and not just cope.  I want to feel some joy, dang it.  Or at least some contentment.  The relentless grind of self-improvement, well, there's nothing else, really, and no way to be excused from it, but shouldn't it all at least hurt a little less by now?

I was reading Bermuda's thread about the childhood self, and in it there was some discussion about the confusing feeling of "I want my mother" when the mother is/was one who hurts and doesn't nurture.  That resonated with me greatly, and reminded me of how even when I was a child with no understanding of what was happening to me I was confused by the feeling of "I want my mother," because I knew that what I wanted wasn't MY mother.  Even then I knew that I was wanting something that I needed that she wouldn't give me.  I used to cry that I wanted my Mommy and that nobody loved me, and it was the most confusing feeling in the world at the time because I wanted Mommy but I was scared of Mommy, and Mommy said she loved me but I never felt like she did.  I'm feeling an inner child in me right now that is hurting and crying for Mommy, feeling the helpless falling sensation of needing, needing, needing, and not having, and not being loved.  I think that's where the feeling of "Why didn't anybody love me?" that I've been experiencing lately comes from.