Learning Who I am Day 2

Last night, I finally admitted to myself what I have been hearing all along.  That I need to love myself first.  Now the big issue is figuring out where to start.  My brain likes to get carried away with thinking of things that were and could have been.  I have been thinking about the mistakes I have made just within the past two months non-stop for the last week and as much as I try to make it stop, it just won't.  I'm having a hard time falling asleep at night because I just keep thinking back to what I did wrong and my fear that I will be alone forever.

I'd be lying to myself, and to anyone reading this, if I said that I was okay with everything I said and that I wasn't hurting right now.  Because I am.  All of the emotions I've been bottling up over the past 3 years, perhaps more, have come to the surface.  I cry for my dad, my grandmother, the failed relationships, the infertility, and my own heart being broken because of my selfish stupidity.  I cry because I've never allowed myself to truly feel, to experience the true sadness that lurks within my soul because of all of these mistakes I just can't take back.  But most of all, I cry because of the fear that it's too late to find out who I am, to love myself, and to let other people in like I've never let them in before.  True, I shared the entirety of my infertility struggle, but I shared information, not my feelings. I wrote down the facts and tried to convince myself and others that while it hurt, I was strong and able to deal with it.  This is how I've been my whole life.  I've never truly allowed myself to mourn my losses, whether it be the loss of a pet, a loved one, or a relationship/potential of one.

When things get hard, I run away.  I hide from them and pretend like they don't exist.  I tell people what I think they want to hear so that they'll back off, let me deal with things on my own, but the truth is, I never actually deal with them.  I've gone to counseling and gotten really good at eventually not crying so that they'll tell me I'm better as if that validation truly makes my heart not hurt.  I've loved and lost so many important people in my life and instead of allowing myself to feel, I throw myself into something else.  The biggest thing I throw myself into is food.  A majority of my life, if something upset me I would turn to food.  Nothing would make me feel temporarily better quite like a Little Debbie or a candy bar.  But then the happiness would subside and I'd be more upset, so I'd have to have another one.  Nothing available?  I'd make due with what I had.  At one point in my life, I'd take hot cocoa mix and add chocolate syrup to it just to get the "high" that food and sugar could give me.

Like some people turn to drugs and alcohol, I turned to food.  When I ate I could pretend that it was truly helping me feel better, that I could make all of the bad feelings go away.  I didn't recognize it as a crutch, didn't recognize that when I inevitably crashed, I'd need more food to fill that hole.  Eventually, just one candy bar didn't do the trick anymore.  I needed more and more to get the same high I had achieved before.  I became addicted to that feeling, the satisfied happiness that came from food.  When I crashed, I crashed hard.  Dealing with life became almost unbearable and if I wasn't sleeping, I was eating.  I hated the person I was becoming, hated the weight that was piling onto my body, but I just couldn't bring myself to admit that there was a problem and to learn how to deal with not only my emotions, but also learning how to live without that high.  When I could bear to get out of bed, I'd search for something else to fill that void, whether it be a friendship or a relationship.  I needed something to make me happy because I had no idea how to do it for myself.  I got more and more depressed as nothing seemed to be enough.

No amount of going out and trying to have fun, making friends, or diving head first into the, now all failed, relationships would do it.  My already shy and self conscious self sank even further into these feelings because I was gaining weight like crazy and, despite my attempts to convince myself that I was still worthwhile, my self esteem was plummeting.  So it only makes sense that if a guy paid attention to me, I'd jump on it as quickly as I could to make sure I hooked him before he realized how awful I looked.  This lead to the previously mentioned issues with attachment to men.  I would either get overly attached or not attached at all, both of which cause problems.  I'd do one of two things: deny them my heart completely or give it completely without thinking about the potential repercussions.  I never stopped to reflect on how I was behaving, I just went with whatever mood hit me.  As I've said before, I would ignore signs that this was not the right thing for me to be doing and push them to the back of my head to pursue the one thing I thought would make me happy.

I figured that if I couldn't love myself, I'd find someone else who would.  Who would accept my faults.  Unfortunately, I couldn't accept my own faults.  I'd begin to do things similar to what a bully would do, focus on the faults of others so that mine wouldn't be as apparent to me.  If I was fat, this other girl was fatter.  If I was ugly, she was uglier.  I'd never say any of this to them, but I'd snark about it behind their back.  I hated the person I was becoming, but that only added fuel to the fire.  I always had to find something to make me feel superior to someone and figured they were looking at my faults so I might as well look at theirs.  My jealousy knew no bounds.  I'd see girls walking around so confidently and be jealous of them.  How could they be so confident in their bodies when I couldn't be confident in mine?  I'd see people in happy, healthy relationships and wonder where I had gone wrong.  I'd find reasons to blame the other person in a relationship/friendship for why things failed.  Obviously the guy was just a jerk or my friend wasn't a true friend.  While this was true in some instances (I mean, you don't cheat on your wife and lie to the person you are cheating with if you aren't a douche), in many it was a combination of issues with them that I ignored and major issues within myself that I pretended didn't exist.  When any issues with me would be pointed out, I'd take it as a personal slight and it would reduce my self esteem that much more.  Instead of looking at what would be said as a way to help me, I'd look at it as an attack, a way to make me feel inferior to them.  Sometimes, this would upset me so much that I'd write them off.  Obviously, if they felt that I was that terrible they weren't worth my time.  I've lost so many people because of my own personal inability to take criticism.  I've focused so hard on the opinions of other people that I even started to put how I felt onto them.

My weight ballooned after high school, when I didn't have the added high of being active to complement the high of food.  Between the fall of my senior year and graduation, I put on over 25 lbs.  Then the freshman 15..plus 30.  At the end of freshman year, I had a friend who encouraged me to go to the gym and work out with her, so between that and a lack of time to eat more than one meal per day I dropped about 30-40 lbs.  Sophomore year, it all came back on minus 10 lbs.  I "didn't have time" to be active and my friends and I liked to make Wegman's trips to get snacks.  They would get fruit and veggies, things to cook, I'd get ice cream.  That year we were able to pick our roommates.  My friends all chose each other and I was the odd man out.  I got put with girls I didn't know and who didn't care to know me, so I hid in my room a lot and ate.  Things got worse with them after my car accident.  I had a class with one of them that had an exam the same night I crashed, and because of this, she wasn't able to get her test back when she wanted to.  This made her HATE me.  So I went from roommates who pretended I didn't exist to roommates who flat out hated me.  I'd spend time with my friends, but they had their own lives, classes, and friendships to maintain and eventually I began to feel like I wasn't even wanted there.  So I retreated into my shell, didn't trust anyone, and would sit by myself all day and night.  If I skipped a class, which I did a lot, I'd be afraid to go back because people would make fun of me.  I saw my dream slipping out of my grasp and instead of trying to get it back, I got more and more depressed and let it go and let the friendships go with it, figuring that they couldn't possibly still like me after I had failed so badly.  The emotional eating came back full force, I'd go out and eat fast food, I was working at a fast food restaurant so it was very easy to eat crappy for cheap or even free.

I knew I had to get out of there, that being around fast food all the time was a bad idea,so I found a job at a pet store.  I've always loved animals so I thought this job would be a great fit, and it was.  For a while.  I made some amazing friends, one of whom I saw last month in Florida and miss terribly, but I also had a girl who hated me just because she could.  Eventually, I got fired for something out of my control-a huge slap in the face and another dig at my self esteem.  So I went back to Burger King.  It's a sad state of affairs when the one nice thing you can say about yourself is that you are loved at a fast food restaurant, but it was something I could say.  Everyone always told me how much they loved working with me, what a hard worker I was, and what a great person I was.  I relied on that confidence boost to get me through the day.  I didn't believe them, but it made me feel good anyway.

I started noticing that the manager from a different location would come in all the time and flirt with me.  I've mentioned him before, he's the guy who didn't tell me he was married.  My self esteem was outwardly through the roof, but inside I was worrying that he'd leave me.  I didn't pay attention to the warning signs and got hurt.  Soon after, I met Geoff, and my confidence relied entirely on him.  If he didn't call me, I was heartbroken and it was obvious that he was just going to leave me.  If he even talked to another girl, I looked for whatever flaw there was within me that there wasn't with her.  Everything I was, who I became, was tailored to what I thought he wanted and needed.  My obsession with food continued, but as I had joined Weight Watchers with my dad, I transformed from an obsession with eating in general to an obsession with eating things that were under 5 points so I could still binge eat without gaining weight.  Yes, I lost about 40 lbs during that time, but I didn't follow the program the right way and when I stopped going, the weight came back on because I never learned how to control the emotional eating.  Between April of 2007 and my wedding in June, I packed back on about 20 lbs, my dress almost didn't fit and I was depressed because of it.  I spent my wedding day sad and defeated, concentrating only on how I looked and how other people were behaving.

Within a month we had moved to Kentucky, 9 hours away from everything and everyone I had ever known. I thought that this would be a chance to reinvent myself, to become someone new.  Instead of taking that time to focus on myself, I focused on being who I thought Geoff's new (and old-some went to RIT) friends would want me to be.  If they wanted to go to an arena football game, I was all for it.  If they wanted to go out to the bar or club, I was there.  For what seems like the millionth time in my life, I put what I wanted and needed on hold to make others happy.  I got a job at a vet clinic, which I loved, but always felt out of place-that I didn't belong.  When my boss learned that I had a mental illness, shit hit the fan and it was made abundantly clear that I wasn't wanted.  She sent me to NY to get my meds taken care of and, while I was gone, hired my replacement in hopes that I wouldn't come back or at least wouldn't know that I had rights under the ADA.  Even though I knew I wasn't wanted, I stayed.  I loved working with the animals and getting to know the clients so I put up with a lot of crap, including her telling clients about my mental illness, in order to stay.  I made friends, some real, some not, and I am still close with one of them-ironically the one they hired to replace me.  I gained almost 90 lbs between April of 2007 and July of 2008 because I was so lonely, unhappy, and depressed, but I convinced myself it wasn't that bad.

After I quit the vet clinic, when I had finally had enough, I dropped about 40 lbs quickly.  The reduced stress from not being around people who clearly didn't like me helped and I settled into a new routine and started going to school again to finish my degree.  By March, I was physically healthier but emotionally still in the same place I had been for years-lonely and depressed.  Shit started to hit the fan at the company Geoff worked for, but they were still hiring some people so it felt like he wouldn't be let go.  My inability to deal with my own depression and feelings combined with Geoff's own personal depression and fear of being fired led to constant fighting.  We were both unhappy but wanted to fix things.  He had made friends with a new coworker who had been hired in January and I embraced her with open arms.  She had what she described as an abusive marriage and I invited her into my home any time she needed, made dinner for her, called her a friend, and was comfortable with Geoff carpooling with her to work because it saved us money.  Soon after, I started to become suspicious of their "friendship" but was assured by friends and family that Geoff would never cheat on me and that I was reading into things, he was just being there for her during a rough time.  When I found out he had actually cheated it devastated me.  I found the emails back and forth between them, where he gave her a pet name and they would talk about how horrible I was, not only as a wife, but as a person.  Needless to say, my self esteem plummeted.  Here, this man who had pledged to love me forever, was not only lying to me-but attacking me at the same time.  I wanted to leave right then and there but felt that I couldn't-that I should try to make things work.

So I did.  But while I was trying to make them work, I wasn't dealing with my own depression, only with the issues in our marriage.  I gained back the 40 lbs I had lost plus some and was at a new all time high weight.  I felt guilty after Geoff tried to kill himself, felt that it was all my fault because of how I reacted to him cheating, and was informed by my mother in law that I should just sit back and let him do whatever he wanted and not be an "ass" by trying to keep him from other women.  She told him to go ahead and cheat anytime he felt like it.  I was still so scared to be alone that I let this go, let my anger toward him fester in the back of my mind instead of letting it out because he might hurt himself again and I couldn't live with myself if he was dead because of me.  I put his happiness before my own and, while I was able to lose some of the weight, it never stayed off.  The following year, I felt that things seemed better and, as I said previously, we should try having kids.  I have always wanted kids and felt that I was getting too old (at 25) to have them.  It was "too late" to start over, and I wouldn't have known where to start to find someone new anyway, plus he'll be a great father, so what could possibly go wrong?  We tried for about 7 months before I realized that I was having a lot of pelvic pain that turned out to be a huge cyst and we found that I had two root causes of infertility-endometriosis and polycystic ovarian syndrome.  I had surgery to remove the cyst and endo and was assured by my physician that many of her patients get pregnant after this surgery.  Obviously, that didn't happen and I became depressed.

The month after my surgery, my dad wound up in the hospital with what seemed to be severe anemia-or at least I assumed.  Turned out that he had Stage IV Colorectal cancer.  I went into complete denial-it was impossible for my father, literally the strongest man I know, to have this awful disease that will likely kill him.  The doctors are wrong, it's not stage IV, it can't be worse than stage II-this is what I told myself.  My eating yet again went out of control because not only did he have cancer, he had a rare blood disorder that was killing him faster and transfusions weren't working.  Starting chemotherapy would either save him for now or kill him.  I was eating chicken fingers and french fries literally every day I spent at the hospital and fast food when I wasn't.  I was working at K-Mart at the time and would grab a candy bar or two, or one of those cheap fudge pies that has the same number of calories as an entire pizza.  Anything to not have to show my true sadness, to mask it so that I could be strong for my family.  When dad died, it devastated me.  I lost the one person who understood me better than anyone else can.  We both suffered from bipolar disorder and that bond helped me to deal with it-knowing that he understood its ups and downs.  My dad and I had always been close and losing him left a huge hole in me.  But I didn't feel like I could morn.  Geoff had just lost his father, my mom lost her husband, my brother lost his father, the list goes on and on.  Not a single one of these people told me that I couldn't morn, I just felt that I couldn't.  Someone had to be strong and I decided that it needed to be me.  I went to counseling, but even though I talked it through, my only goal with counseling was to get referred to a psychiatrist to get medication that would help me feel better.  I had been off my bipolar meds for over a year and couldn't handle life without them anymore.

So I threw myself into school.  I didn't try to make any friends, I didn't feel I needed them.  I had Danielle, the girl I met at the vet clinic, and Geoff's friends, I didn't need my own identity outside of that.  I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life now that I felt my dream was so far outside of my grasp.  I didn't have the grades to get into PA school again and worried that I couldn't get into nursing school with what I had, so I settled on General Studies.  I worked hard in my classes and created a place where my identity was based on how smart I was, and am.  I've always known that I'm smart, I just never knew how to apply it until I came to EKU.  Everything I did revolved around class or making Geoff happy.  I took an EMT class in summer of 2012 and, in my opinion, rocked it out.  I took it with my brother so I was able to come out of my shell a bit and make a few friends.  That fall, I started to become closer to one of my brother's friends, Autumn, and consider her to be one of the people I am closest to.  I got to know his friends.  I got to know people in one of my classes and really enjoyed seeing them every other day.  I learned that I have a love for writing both fiction and non-fiction and embraced it.  I started working on photography, something I have enjoyed for a long time, but I still didn't get to know who I was-just a few things I enjoy that I'd do when I had a homework assignment or somewhere to go that pictures would be fun.

This spring, I decided to volunteer to help with the EMT lab since Autumn would be in the class.  It took me a while, but I eventually started coming out of my shell there too.  I met some awesome people who I was so proud to see pass the course.  I'd sit and chat with some of them as if I knew them my whole life, it seemed so easy when I let my guard down.  But I don't think that I even was finding who I am at that point.  I decided to become that funny, smart girl who would help them but tried hard not to get annoying or become too much of a know-it-all.  Toward the end of the semester was when I started to notice the guy that I mentioned in my last post.  It started out as just a dream, I had had dreams about other people previously but it seemed different this time.  There was just something about this guy that drew me in.  To be honest, I had no idea what his name was until after the dream, and it was funny that I had actually been trying to put a face to the name the week before when he had left his packet of check off sheets behind in class.  But I thought he was attractive and felt the desire to see what happened.  So I did.  I still had no idea who I was but I enjoyed being around him, feeling attractive and being told how great I was.  Yet again, instead of dealing with the pain I was going through, I found a new outlet that made me superficially happy.  I ignored warnings that I wasn't doing the right thing and even ignored him when he said that we should just start out by getting to know each other.  There was a mutual attraction so I went for it.  Turns out?  It didn't make me as happy as I thought it would, I was still bitter about Geoff and talked about it constantly.  But I wasn't overeating, I hadn't binged, and I thought I was happy.  When I'd go out with him I could pretend like none of the pain existed, when I got a text back it would make me smile.  My life started revolving around being able to talk to him, to see him.  All of the mistakes I had continuously made in the past were happening again and I didn't care, I needed that rush and my weight was finally continuing on a downward path so I didn't need to continue with my addiction to food-I had almost an addiction to him.  Not him as a person, but him as this creation in my mind, finally the guy who wanted me for me.

Now, I'm trying to pick up the pieces of my broken heart.  I'm not heartbroken because I loved him, or because I was going to stay with him for the rest of my life.  I knew, somewhere in the back of my mind, that things couldn't possibly have worked out there-he was 10 years my junior and nowhere near the point in life where I am.  I'm heartbroken because not only did I throw myself into it when I was clearly not ready to handle emotions more complex than the heartache from ending my marriage, but I drew him into it too.  I put him in a position that he wasn't ready for either and ruined everything.  In retrospect, I wanted to know that someone felt something for me, because it didn't seem that Geoff even remotely cared that I had left.  So I threw myself at a guy who ended up being great, but not great for me.  I realize now that I'm not ready for another relationship, that I have to love me, but I didn't realize it soon enough.  Before hurting myself and people I care about.  My tears and pain don't come from the loss of a relationship but from the loss of what could have been, the friendship that we seemed to share.  Everybody says that hindsight is 20/20, and it really is.  I just wish that foresight was.  That I could see the consequences of my actions, and inaction as far as my emotions go. I need to learn that it's okay to cry, okay to feel, and okay to be happy with me.  That it's even necessary for me to love myself if I'm going to find the kind of relationship I've always wanted.

First comes working on me, focusing on school, and maintaining my friendships, perhaps even making more.  I think that moving out on my own will be beneficial to me because there's no memories of what was or could have been in whatever new place I get.  Only the memories I choose to make for my future, the memories of my last two years of school before real life.  I've always been afraid to grow up, I think part of it coming from the fact that I'm not comfortable with myself and when I'm in school I can hide behind my grades and I'm so busy that I don't have time to dwell on what makes me sad, I have to focus.  This time, I'm going to make time for myself, to go out with my amazing friends, to open myself up to new possibilities, and to focus on the things that I love.  To go out to take pictures just because or to write a story just because the mood strikes me.  To read the books I haven't taken time to read, watch the movies that I want to watch, and spend time with who I want to spend time with.  For the first time in my life, I'm going to learn about me.  No focus on being in a relationship just so that I'm not alone, I need to learn to rely on myself both emotionally and financially.  When I graduate, I'll find a job and take care of myself.  I don't need a man to provide for me, and I need to get back to that 14 year old who wanted to be self-sufficient.

Writing this blog is the first step for me, it creates somewhere where I can not only delve into the parts of my life that have gone wrong, but what has gone right.  Where I can put everything out there so it no longer can be pushed to the back of my mind but is brought into the light.  I know that I can do this, that I can learn to be me and to love that.  It'll take time, hard work, a lot of tears, and a lot of reflection, but I can do it.  I'll always have regrets, I have to live with that.  I have to live with the fact that I've burned many bridges and move on.  I have friends and family who love me and for now, that's enough.  My goal is to write at least 2-3x per week and to deal with all of the emotional baggage that I've been hiding from myself and others by writing about it.  I'm so thankful that I'm able to have this outlet, that while I'm known personally by many of the people reading it, I can get it all out there with no interruptions and no feeling that I'm being annoying by bringing up all of my issues in a conversation when other people have theirs too.  It's just me, my computer, and an audience who chooses to listen.  An audience I am so grateful for.