It’s not that you have issues…… it’s that you have a tendency to continue using instincts you picked up in childhood that are no longer useful to you on your journey towards achieving openness and intimacy and reliability in your personal relationships w others. It’s not that you’re defective or difficult or incapable it’s just that what you learned to do to save yourself from the experience of abandonment or rejection or ridicule or failure is not helpful here anymore and you need to start thinking creatively and collaborating on better ways to cope with that instrinsic fear that you are not correct, that you are faking, that you will found out and left, whatever it is
In 2019:
- do more things that make you forget about your phone
- do not compare yourself to other people: trust that you are progressing in your own way
- keep your heart soft, remember that there are genuinely kind people & good things in the world
- finish what you start
- be consistent, and do not be swayed by temporary moods or criticisms from people who don’t matter.
- smile more often
- be okay with being bad at something
- do not blame yourself for people who make you feel unworthy. find new people to talk to and don’t isolate yourself even if you feel awkward or unlovable. don’t convince yourself that you’re better off alone.
- go outside more often and find beauty in small things
- read more books
- be the kindest person you can be
- be so busy you have no time to be bored or dwell on the past
- learn to be patient. don’t rely on instant gratification, wait for the sense of accomplishment after completing a daily goal or achieving a long-term goal
- see bad days as a chance to start again
- always remember that negative thoughts are not the truth. you can do amazing things even though you may feel stupid. you are worthy of love and self care even though you may hate yourself. you deserve kindness and friendship and unconditional love even though you don’t feel that way. people don’t hate you even though you think you’re unlovable. you made mistakes and had bad times but that’s ok - you can always start again.
Your mixed feelings about your parents are valid.
Shout out to people like me who have parents who are loving but are black holes of emotional labor… It took me a long time to realize that it’s okay to have mixed feelings about your parents, about your relationship with them.
Sometimes parents can love you but be somewhat toxic to you and your growth, and that’s a very hard realization to come to if you, like me, grew up extremely close to them.
Sometimes parents can love you genuinely but lack emotional maturity, forcing you to perform disproportionate amounts of emotional labor. Some parents manifest symptoms of their mental illness in ways that are toxic to your mental illness.
Some parents, like mine, try so hard to be good parents but fall back on habits of emotional manipulation because they haven’t processed their own traumas and are modeling behavior they grew up with. That doesn’t make their behavior acceptable, and it’s okay to feel exhausted and hurt when they betray you. You don’t have to forgive every mistake.
I want you to know that it’s okay to protect yourself, to need some space apart from them. The love you have for your parents is still valid, and you are making the right decision.
Placing a safe emotional distance between myself and my parents has been one of the most difficult, heartbreaking processes I’ve ever gone through… it hurts to try to curb the strength of your own natural empathy around people you love. It feels disingenuous to your heart’s natural state.
But I promise you, you are not hard-hearted or ungrateful, and you are not abandoning them. You are making a decision about your own emotional, mental, and spiritual health.
I know what it’s like in that confusing grey area of love mixed with guilt and anxiety, of exhaustion and quasi-manipulation and unreciprocated emotional labor, and I promise you, you are not alone.
Your mixed feelings about your parents are valid.
Thank you thank you thank you bless this post ohmygod thank you
You gotta understand that some people never really grow. They never learn their lesson. They never recognise their mistakes, they never acknowledge their faults, they never admit they were in the wrong. You will never receive an apology from them, and you will never see their behaviour change.
Nothing is a bigger waste of your time than having a discussion with someone who sees “changing one’s mind or opinion in a matter” as “losing”, that kind of person being a waste of time in and on themselves.
I have always considered commuting as a form of uncompensated labor and I always will
Worse, if anything - unless your employer subsidizes it, it’s labor that you have to pay to perform.
Especially now that we live in a world where the vast majority of office work can be done remotely from home.
A quick policy-wonk aside:
There was a brief period in American history - 1938-1947 - when the law was moving in the direction that employers should compensate you for that time. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (which established the minimum wage and overtime, and thus the workweek) didn’t have very precise definitions for what counted was part of “work.”
So there were a bunch of strikes, NLRB decisions, and legal cases over fights about whether various activities - walking from the mine entrance to the coal face, for example, or prepping your workspace, or changing into your uniforms, etc. - should be counted as work that should be compensated. And for once, the courts tended to side with the unions, deciding that if there activities that are required by your job, you have to be paid for them…including “travel time.”
But Congress had flipped from a progressive to a conservative majority, and so in 1947 they passed what’s called the “Portal-to-Portal” Act, which said that employers don’t have to pay for “preliminary and postliminary” activities.
no one wants to hear it but love is earned after the initial infatuation. commitment is something u both mutually agree to and then from there it’s work. it’s not work like it’s a chore it’s jus work like it takes effort. to get good at these things takes practice. it takes practice to learn to communicate better and it takes practice to learn to love each other in the ways u need to be loved.
your intelligence means fucking nothing if youre devoid of empathy