You never know what's going on in someone's head.
1. I can come across as stand offish and arrogant yet have been swamped with self – hatred. Passionate but lacking focus, I have overworked to the point of exhaustion (thriving at nothing). Never really connecting because, obviously, nothing I do has an impact anyway.
2. Going through life in a dream – like state and being spread so thin through my own doing (in the past) is exhausting. And confusing due to not feeling present.
3. Memory loss is something I regularly experience, but things I remember and focus on are criticisms and things that hurt me.
4. I feel shame over being a sensitive person at times, when I shouldn’t because it’s an important part of who I am.
5. Pushing people away comes so naturally, yet it’s painful when I’m doing it. Avoiding people who could potentially care about me and trying to convince myself of silly reasons for doing so.
6. Feeling ashamed of my body, my appearance and who I am makes me shy away from meeting people.
7. I often feel like I can’t connect, like everything is just out of my reach. Many look forward to and enjoy events like holidays (not at the moment, I know) rather than finding them exhausting.
8. Believing that my worth is in what I can give to or do for other people can feel difficult to challenge. That I have no value just through being me.
9. Chatting casually, or making small talk, with people that I am friends with can feel hard, because there is so much else going on internally... and must be with them too, because they are human, right?
10. Find compliments so difficult to take, especially in a group situation or if the focus is on me.
11. I was deemed awful for any anger I showed and now I have layers and layers of shame over any, even brief, anger I feel. I’m always looking for evidence as to why my anger is unjustified. When someone mentioned ‘healthy anger’ it bewildered me, as I believed it was always ‘wrong’ for me to feel or express anything.
12. My brain feels like mush. I am intelligent, but constantly doubt that and retaining information feels impossible.
13. I deal with guilt for ‘feeling too much’.
14. The body is fuelled on what the mind has needed to forget and, at times, I am in so much physical pain.
15. My whole life has been such a blur and I’ve felt so out of it that I doubt what’s real. I can’t trust my gut.
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