The Night Before Therapy

well, here I am again. After dreading writing for a few months, dragging my ass to write here to make sure my monthly history doesn't have an odd gap, then realising how many thoughts and emotions I've dammed up as a result of not writing... and then having a million draft, unfinished posts sitting like an underdeveloped fetus in my dashboard, too incomplete to see the light of day, too cruel to delete, but I as a "mother" don't have what it takes to really finish them.

Here I am, million draft posts and all, starting another post. Who knows if this will ever see light of day.

It's the morning of my first therapy session with - in what seems like forever, because she couldn't make the last two scheduled sessions due to medical leave and compassionate leave. I'm someone who's always an intense and sensitive person, which is just a recipe for disaster if that needs spelling out. So, in the month or so that I haven't been able to talk with -, a lot of old fears, insecurities, even thoughts of suicide have crept back into my mind, and now I'm customarily losing sleep on the night before an appointment with IMH. It's not that I'm not tired; it's just that my mind is racing between every single issue I might need help with, that I want someone loving and supporting to talk to about, from every phase of my life, and I'm just... terrified, of it all.

The scope of my problems terrify me. I can smile, I can laugh, I can enjoy myself, I can convince myself to live another day when friends and family are around. But, because I am my own worst enemy, and because I know myself best, I tend to kick myself in my balls the hardest as a result. I'm scared of my multitude of problems. I'm scared of how long it'd take to sort them all out. I'm scared that I'd be unable to ever come clean with mental illnesses with potential employers, so that I could take frequent leaves for more therapy and medication. I'm afraid that I'd never find a loving relationship, all the jargon, terms, and overlapping symptoms that I can associate with. The more I find that describes me, the more afraid I get, yet at the same time not knowing is somehow equally terrifying. Anxiety, depression, dysthymia, rumination, BPD, PTSD, CPTSD, transference... the list goes on and on, and the more I can relate with, the more it terrifies me. How many parts of me are broken? Can I be repaired, and is it worth the time and money to repair something this damaged? Will I have enough time and money to see myself through all this? What if I'm victimising myself again? What if this is my anxiety kicking me in the nuts for no logical reason? What if I'm self diagnosing? Why doesn't anyone ever tell me straight up what's wrong with me? If psychology is a "soft" thing, is there really a definitive way to say what exactly I'm struggling with?

That I can find it in me to still laugh and enjoy fragments of my life at times... even of that too, I am terrified. What if this is escapism? What if the only way I can have some semblance of a normal life is to run away from my problems and pretend I'm okay? How much of a tough appearance until it becomes a bad thing? I'm tired. Of fighting. Of pretending. Perhaps even of existing. I'm tired. I'm scared.

What if the only way I can meaningfully express all this is via a paid professional? Can - be my surrogate friend forever? Can I really never form such relationships by my own power? Am I going to be cripplingly lonely forever?

Is it really so awful to want it all to end?

Homework: Self Compassion

Hisashiburi desu! It's been a while since my last post, I know. For as much as my writing meanders and dragons ooonn and ooooooon, I find that putting my thoughts into words, and self expression in general, is a huge challenge for me. Particularly when it comes to matters that are awful enough to disrupt my life, which is just about everything worth writing about, eheh. To put it metaphorically, my thoughts are like lava, and to bring you my thoughts, I have to scoop up that lava by hand and arrange them into coherent sentences. At times it feels downright stupid and self destructive to attempt. In fact, I'm almost sure it is, if it weren't for the fact that therapists seem to love encouraging journalling, as mine has.

So, I guess this is my homework. I was tasked to write about self compassion, since I beat myself up mentally a lot. I actually don't know how the heck writing about my own shortcomings and being kinder to myself helps. I mean, to be kinder to yourself and pat yourself on the back for something you did wrong is just... wrong, for one, and two, if you can rationalise it, doesn't it mean you've already processed through the event? The heck does writing help?

(Sorry, I've always been a rebellious kid at school, questioning authority and such. It's a knee jerk reaction... *deep breath*)

I've been an absolute jackass to my immediate family members, especially my mother. Yeah, yeah, I know, this is when you toss in the stereotypical Asian scoldings like "how dare you you unfilial piece of garbage just you wait you'll get struck by lighting as karma!", and perhaps it's precisely that kind of customary response that has fostered all this angst in me, and convinced me that I can never open up to my family members about anything. It's a weird relationship I have with my family members, wherein I hesitate to really say I love them, but at the same time I rely on them for sustenance. I only barely tolerate their loud, boorish arguments at home, and constantly bugging me at the worst times when it's evidently clear I'm engrossed in something on my computer (which is most of the time, actually...), yet I can't imagine a tomorrow without any one of them. I can't really say I totally understand it myself. It's always been a weird notion to me how parents are "supposed" to love, raise, and support their kids. After all, you get cases of parents disowning their kids for something as genetics as sexuality, or preferential as religion. That is to say, a lot of times I question if they really love me, even if I "know" they love me. Even if they keep beating the fact that they love me and know me the best over my head. It's just an odd mismatch between what I'm told and what I feel. After all, I never had my parents support when I wanted to skip on bullshit activities in school like national day celebrations, or garbage overnight camps, when several of my classmates did. Every time I expressed a problem or a need, I'd just be chided for being weak and stupid. Even until now, their reactions to my need for professional mental help is met with the most disparaging, ignorant, chiding responses ever. "What the hell are you remembering your bullying from 10 years ago for?! Just forget it!", "just get another job! I need your financial support!", "why are you wasting time bumming out at home?! You know how much money you could've made if you've been working for these past x months?!" Even when it came to something as harmless and small as a job preference, I get talked down. "Why the fuck would you want to be a technician?! That's a job for dirty foreigners with no education!"

I know that, logically speaking, I have every right and reason to dislike my family members and be in their presence. But it's not a logical thing, is it? Which part of parental love and cultural expectations is logical? It's a lesson I learned from young that it's a lot more convenient and easier if I were to just shut the fuck up and keep to myself. Just being in the presence of people who'd so quickly criticise someone on a surface level for being unfilial already drains me so, much less actually try to have a civil, fruitful conversation with them. My family members moreso than most, actually. In the words of a silly Chinese saying, it's almost as if I were "picked out of a garbage bin", instead of being their biological son. I feel so... disconnected and distant, so different, from them.

So when they ask me asinine questions I don't even want to answer when I'm free to answer, during a session where I'm recording gameplay footage, or driving in a simulator, of course I'd lose my shit. This is the part of the assignment where I'm supposed to be like, "oh if I weren't in a rush, or if I didn't have such a bad day before this incident, maybe I wouldn't have been so rude to the waitress". But I don't know what the heck to say. I mean, I get why office politics exist. I get why I need to do slavery. But knowing doesn't make the pain go away. What am I supposed to do, wish to be born in an ideal world with ideal people? Pfft.

It's just that, they will always without fail shame me for being rude to them, my own parents, which just adds to the frustration.