You know you’re in bad shape…

You know you’re in bad shape when you wish your parents would hurry up and die so you can go ahead and kill yourself without having to worry about hurting anyone.

I feel like a fraud :(

I finally have time to write. I finished my final exams for this semester yesterday. I’m pretty sure I blew most, if not all of them. There’s one I know I definitely blew, in the class I was doing the worst in. I knew that I’d have to ace the final to even get a B-, now I don’t know if I’ll even get the credit toward graduation. You have to have a solid C to get the credit to graduate, so a C- might as well be an F. I had to get at least a 70 on the final for a C and I’m sure I didn’t manage that either. I even blew the final in the one class where I had a solid A. I knew all the material and I studied hard, but it seemed like at least half of the questions were trick questions. They didn’t seem to match any of the previous course work or anything I had on my formula sheet. I don’t know what any of my grades are going to look like.

Well, I got in

I guess they weren’t scared off by the depression essay. I hope this university experience is better than the last one.

The End of the Line

I submitted my application to the nearby university a couple of weeks ago. I don’t know whether they will want me or not. I have the required GPA to get in. Sort of. When I went to college right after high school, I started out really badly and managed to claw my way to mediocre. I’ve discussed the social experience I had in the year I went away to school, and a little about academics.

Another Year Almost Gone

Wow, I can’t believe it’s been seven months since I posted. I’ve been under a lot of stress lately what with school and everything. I barely scraped by this semester. I feel like I can’t do anything right lately. I really just want to bury myself under the covers and never come out.

I’m also kind of upset with my father right now. Well, he was in the hospital for the past week because he had a nodule on his stomach that was making his stomach bleed and making him have difficulty breathing. He got transferred to a rehab facility yesterday. I’ve been going to his house every 1-2 days to pick up his mail, put his trash out for trash day, etc. Today I was there and I started thinking about just how much his house is falling apart. Then I remembered a conversation we had a couple of weeks ago. About a year ago, he was saying that he thought he had enough money saved up to pay his house off. Then a couple of weeks ago he said it was going to take him 5 years to pay his house off. In short, the amount he owes is more than he bought it for in 1989 and about half of what the house is worth now. He should have had it paid off a couple of years ago, but he got it refinanced four years ago. I asked him why. I know exactly why, but I wanted to hear what he would say. He said, “I just wanted to have some money”.

A Letter to Jeanette

I ended up staying up late Wednesday night writing this. I didn’t realize how much I had to say until I started writing. It was 2.5 pages in 11-pt Times New Roman font. As I was writing, I remembered a lot of things I hadn’t thought about since high school. It actually was kind of therapeutic, to my surprise.

Changes

I have a new therapist, D. My old one, R, graduated a week ago. My group is also getting a new group leader as one of the leaders also graduated. I liked them both a lot and I hope I’ll like the new ones. My new therapist has also graduated, but she’s doing a different program and will be around for at least the next year.

I also have a new psychiatrist, Dr. K. I don’t like her too much. She’s not mean or anything, but all she does is look in my file, ask if I’m still taking my medicine, and that’s about it. I don’t think she even knows my face and she wouldn’t know what my issues are if she didn’t have my file in front of her. One thing I liked about Dr. O is that she actually talked to me.

I’m still biting myself, but it’s a bit less now that I usually wear a rubber band around my wrist and snap it whenever I get the urge to bite. That was R’s suggestion.

I’m a little depressed, worrying about how I’m going to pay for school over the next few years. If I don’t get some kind of income soon, I won’t even have enough money to support myself.

For my first two sessions with D, we’ve been talking about my background. Last week, we ended up discussing a lot of what I wrote in this post, especially my ex-best friend Jeanette. My “homework” for next week is to write her a letter, saying the things I would say to her if I could talk to her today. Then I’ll rip up the letter and throw it away. I guess it’s supposed to symbolize me getting rid of my demons.

Meds and Therapy Update

I’ve been on Wellbutrin for a little over a month. Truthfully, I don’t feel much differently yet. I guess I haven’t been crying as much and biting myself a little less. I know I’ve promised both Dr. E and Dr. O that I’d quit biting myself, but it’s just not that easy.

I’ve been assigned a new therapist. She’s an intern from the nearby university and I went to see her for the first time this past Thursday, the first of a standing appointment.

She asked me what personal goals I wanted to accomplish while I am with her. I told her I wanted to build up my self-esteem and work on my social skills. I no longer remember what it feels like to have self-esteem.

I told her about Jeanette and Lucy and how after those experiences I was afraid to put myself out there for fear of rejection.

I told her that my self-esteem has been pretty much shot since I was about 10 years old and that I fell behind my peers socially around 12 or 13 and never caught up. In fact, I keep falling farther and farther behind. Everyone else I know my age is married and/or has kids so their social lives revolve around date night or play dates with their kids. I have no kids or dates, so I get cut out.

I don’t know how to fix that. It’s weird — little kids always like me and people my parents’ age always like me but people within a decade of my age? I seem to repel them and I don’t know what I’m doing. Maybe this new therapist can help me figure out what to do about those problems.

Follow-up on Bullying Post

So I guess in my last post I must come across like one of those people who never gets over being a high school outcast and lives in my mother’s basement with a hit list of all the people who were mean to me in school. Well, that’s not true…I have my own place! And I don’t have a hit list. I guess it’s that I never really evolved past that point. I’m still the teenager who doesn’t know how to make people like me, the one who doesn’t know what to say when someone is nice for fear of saying the wrong thing, so I don’t say anything and then they think I’m stuck-up or slow, the one people don’t like, just put up with until they can get away. I had so many bad social experiences and not many good ones, that I’m too scared to put myself out there. I wait until someone approaches me, that way I know for sure that they want my company, but I’m rarely approached, so I’m usually lonely.

On a different, and more cheerful subject, someone actually called me pretty tonight. I was out with my aunt and uncle and they ran into a friend, a guy who looked to be about 80 years old. He asked who I was and my aunt said I was her niece. He said, “I can see the resemblance; she’s pretty like you.” I don’t think I look anything like my aunt, who is very pretty, and he might have been just being polite, but I’ll take it.

Blog Post: “The Lessons My Bullies Taught Me” by Adrienne

Posted here.

I read this post several months ago and I’ve been meaning to comment on it, especially with the It Gets Better project, but didn’t have the time to say everything I wanted. I guess a psychologist would call me a bully’s dream target. At certain times, my only respite was that I wasn’t gay. If I’d been bullied for being gay on top of what I got, I wouldn’t have made it to high school graduation, maybe not even high school, period.

One of my earliest memories was a kid picking on me in preschool. I don’t remember his name or what he said or did to me but I can look at the old class photo of three-year-olds from 1982 and pick him out. I remember being eight years old and being beaten up on a regular basis by Barry*, a boy who lived in my neighborhood. (* All names are fake) I remember being the target of all three of my classes in fifth grade. I remember high school, where my longtime best friend decided she’d rather be friends with the girls who hated me and had what felt like the entire school behind her. I remember when one of my cousins decided to hate me with no explanation. I remember feeling like my entire dorm wanted me dead my first semester of college.

That entire post rang so true to me. Especially this:

What my bullies taught me:

• I don’t matter.
• My suffering is not important.
• I am socially unacceptable, worthy only of rejection.
• I’m weak, a loser, destined to be a social bottom-feeder, or worse, absolutely alone.
• The best I can hope for, in my relationships with others, is to be left alone.
• I am a fundamentally unlikeable person.

What the adults taught me:

• I’m unworthy of help.
• To identify or talk about a problem is to whine or feel sorry for myself.
• When I ask for help, I will not get it.
• The way other people behave toward me, no matter how bad, is my fault.
• I am a fundamentally unlikeable person.