Thursday, April 19, 2007

A fuckin' hothouse flower!

I feel like I'm disappearing. I can't tell if it's existential or social anxiety.

Apparently change of any kind triggers feelings of grief. Even positive changes.

I just had this memory of when I finished high school and i was moving away to go to university, as were a few other people that I knew. There was a party for Calum and a party for someone else, in honour of their leaving. I got a bit sad because no-one was throwing a party for me. My boyfriend at the time (the sweetie) desperately started gathering together my friends to have a small thing, and when I found out about the five people who were coming I felt even sadder and made him cancel it. Because I felt that, after 18 years living in one place, if there weren't enough people interested to make a proper party, what was the point?

I still feel like this, all the time. Trying to gather together some lame party. I can't believe that I still have these same adolescent insecurities. Stupid desire for the approval of, like, everyone. Just the approval of the people I love is not enough. I don't know what I'm trying to prove.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I feel like I'm disappearing. I can't tell if it's existential or social anxiety.

So do I. But in my case i'm fairly sure it's social anxiety.

I'll spare you the raw angstfest but basically since I quit uni I have mostly been avoiding getting the second job i badly need, because having to confront my level of real-world employability is too humiliating, depressing and generally crazy-making.

So I'm back more or less completely hiding away from the world, and I can feel my ability to socialise / present myself convincingly to strangers as a Regular Person rather than a strange, troubled, broken freak beginning to wither away.

I'm trying not to get too anxious about this, because that won't help. But the memory of where that particular avoidance trajectory has led to in the past is terrifying.

At best I feel like I'm right back where I was when you came to visit around a year ago. Except a year older and etc blah blah.

I cling to the idea that I've reinvented and transformed myself in all kinds of ways since moving to Melbourne - but I wonder if that whole notion is/was just a narcissistic, delusional exercise in running away from the Reality of Who I Am; that realistically at 30 I *can't* radically change the more-or-less lifelong patterns of avoidant, depressive-type behaviours that have left me feeling like I have no life, almost no prospects, and a fragmented, flimsy facade of an identity primarily geared towards disguising my miserable history of periodic breakdowns and almost unremitting failure in pretty much every aspect of life! :)

Sorry - I said I'd spare you the raw angst, didn't I? D'oh.

Because I felt that, after 18 years living in one place, if there weren't enough people interested to make a proper party, what was the point?

If it's any consolation, when I was 18 I felt the same way about suicide.

See, there's always someone worse off! Cheer up and count your blessings etc

Unknown said...

And other cliches etc

(But seriously! etc)