The Ugliest Side of Me.

Initially, I told myself that I would be able to journal all of the feelings I had and magically come out healed on the other side. I really wanted that to be true. I wanted to share with you my struggles to give you the strength to fight your own battles. I wanted to share with you my wins because every win was achieved with my complete effort and whole heart: the way I believe we should all try to succeed. 

What I found out in the last three months of not keeping that promise to myself though, was that some promises have to be broken, and that is okay. I did want to journal, I did want to write, I did want to process every feeling, thought, and emotion I had, but then again, I also didn’t. 

I didn’t want to share with anyone that I was so sad that getting out of bed some days was the win. That any thought of what my life had become would bring me to tears. I felt so pathetic. I didn’t want to share with anyone that I was fighting a fight I didn’t want to be a part of; I feel selfish to even type it now. I didn’t want to share - even with my closest friends - that I couldn’t stand to be around them because I felt such a disconnect to them. They were happy and so filled with life. It was so beautiful, but I was deeply envious of that happiness. 

It was the ugliest side of me and I had trapped myself there with such force that no amount of help from anyone was going to save me. If at any moment the feeling of self-hatred went away - along with the accompanied guilt and shame - it was then met with rage directed at anyone around me; if I was not to blame, then someone else was. I was so sure of it and I needed it to be true because I desperately wanted all that was transpiring around me to not be my fault. 

I wanted to write about it, but every time I put my energy into writing about what was happening, I quickly started drowning in my own misery all over again. Each entry was - from my perspective - an admission of failure; a personal struggle with self-hatred and rage seeping out onto the paper with every pessimistic thought I was trying to battle. That coupled with so many insecurities about what was being produced caused me to accept that journaling, even in private, wasn’t going to be my solution.