Others Over Me
Recovering from an eating disorder is hard. Recovering from years of self-loathing is harder. You have to learn to have base-line respect for your body in order to achieve recovery with a goal of leaning more towards body-trust. When someone expresses hatred toward themselves, it can come off as them always putting others first. They value themselves so little that they don't doubt that everyone else is more deserving then they are. In this I also often feel like I am the forgotten one. Because I feel so unspecial and boring, I feel like nobody would think of me outside of seeing me and interacting with me. It's a very lonely feeling that comes with deep self-hatred. I simply can't fathom how others would think I am remotely interesting and worthwhile, for I don't even see myself as those things.
It seems that I have now defined for you one of my core fears: being forgotten. My whole life I have seemed to live out of this fear. It makes everything a competition, because if I am the best at something, people won't forget me. I am constantly worried that if I don't impress or perform well enough in my day-to-day life, that I will not earn other's interest. This sort of belief originated a long time ago, but it wasn't until I started therapy that I was able to put it into words. It follows that each person I come into contact with has a finite amount of love/affection/empathy for me, and I have to preserve these things by not giving anyone reasons to waste them on things I consider unimportant. Let me break that down with an example. If I reach out to a friend when I am struggling, I am using up a portion of all the love they will ever have for me. Because this is the case for me, I try to withhold reaching out for support because I am terrified that by doing so I am depriving future me of that support since it can run out. Talk about living life on the edge, right? I am left always on edge, constantly concerned about what other's are thinking of me, and existentially afraid that I am forgettable.
I don't even know where to go after saying that. I know that I am living too much out of my core fear and not enough out of my core meaning, which is the opposite of my core fear. Perhaps we could say it is: I am impactful. Something I was assigned to do was to write about how living out of this would be like. In other words, what would be different if I wasn't constantly trying to prevent myself from being the forgotten one?
This is a hard thing for me to imagine because it's essentially asking me to imagine a different life I could be living. I know I would be way less concerned with other's opinions of me. Because I wouldn't be worrying whether or not they will be influenced by me. I would genuinely care less about how my actions, thoughts and words are being interpreted by others. This isn't to say I would become entirely apathetic, however. Rather the excessive energy I currently place on all the ways I am being thought of by others could be redistributed to other things. I think it would generally alleviate a lot of the fears I have about being successful. Being exemplary in all I do would be less of a priority to me and I would instead be able to do things because I genuinely enjoy them. I would be able to pursue my creative side with more enthusiasm because despite my lack of intense experience in the area, I believe I would be more concerned with the experience of doing something I love rather than how good I am at it. I have gotten a taste of this in treatment. We do a lot of expressing our feelings and sometimes this is through art. I really have enjoyed being able to do the work for the process instead of focusing on the final product. Like I mentioned in a previous post, since I have started treatment I have also done a lot more writing. At first this looked like making lists of things I wanted to cover during session, then it became journaling at the end of each day about what happened, and now I enjoy taking my experiences and finding meaning from them in these blog posts. Overall, I think living my life this way would leave me more confident, happier, and overall more present.
Self-hatred is a tricky topic to talk about because it carries with it great deal of shame. Speaking to it, however, simultaneously combats the shame with it's opposite emotion: vulnerability. In contrast to the stigma that this word carries, vulnerability is the best and most powerful way we can strengthen connection and relationships. This includes our relationship with ourselves. That's why sharing about self-hatred is a fruitful experience in regards to healing ourselves, and it's why I use this as an attempt to make myself vulnerable in sharing as authentically as I know how.
Glo
It seems that I have now defined for you one of my core fears: being forgotten. My whole life I have seemed to live out of this fear. It makes everything a competition, because if I am the best at something, people won't forget me. I am constantly worried that if I don't impress or perform well enough in my day-to-day life, that I will not earn other's interest. This sort of belief originated a long time ago, but it wasn't until I started therapy that I was able to put it into words. It follows that each person I come into contact with has a finite amount of love/affection/empathy for me, and I have to preserve these things by not giving anyone reasons to waste them on things I consider unimportant. Let me break that down with an example. If I reach out to a friend when I am struggling, I am using up a portion of all the love they will ever have for me. Because this is the case for me, I try to withhold reaching out for support because I am terrified that by doing so I am depriving future me of that support since it can run out. Talk about living life on the edge, right? I am left always on edge, constantly concerned about what other's are thinking of me, and existentially afraid that I am forgettable.
I don't even know where to go after saying that. I know that I am living too much out of my core fear and not enough out of my core meaning, which is the opposite of my core fear. Perhaps we could say it is: I am impactful. Something I was assigned to do was to write about how living out of this would be like. In other words, what would be different if I wasn't constantly trying to prevent myself from being the forgotten one?
This is a hard thing for me to imagine because it's essentially asking me to imagine a different life I could be living. I know I would be way less concerned with other's opinions of me. Because I wouldn't be worrying whether or not they will be influenced by me. I would genuinely care less about how my actions, thoughts and words are being interpreted by others. This isn't to say I would become entirely apathetic, however. Rather the excessive energy I currently place on all the ways I am being thought of by others could be redistributed to other things. I think it would generally alleviate a lot of the fears I have about being successful. Being exemplary in all I do would be less of a priority to me and I would instead be able to do things because I genuinely enjoy them. I would be able to pursue my creative side with more enthusiasm because despite my lack of intense experience in the area, I believe I would be more concerned with the experience of doing something I love rather than how good I am at it. I have gotten a taste of this in treatment. We do a lot of expressing our feelings and sometimes this is through art. I really have enjoyed being able to do the work for the process instead of focusing on the final product. Like I mentioned in a previous post, since I have started treatment I have also done a lot more writing. At first this looked like making lists of things I wanted to cover during session, then it became journaling at the end of each day about what happened, and now I enjoy taking my experiences and finding meaning from them in these blog posts. Overall, I think living my life this way would leave me more confident, happier, and overall more present.
Self-hatred is a tricky topic to talk about because it carries with it great deal of shame. Speaking to it, however, simultaneously combats the shame with it's opposite emotion: vulnerability. In contrast to the stigma that this word carries, vulnerability is the best and most powerful way we can strengthen connection and relationships. This includes our relationship with ourselves. That's why sharing about self-hatred is a fruitful experience in regards to healing ourselves, and it's why I use this as an attempt to make myself vulnerable in sharing as authentically as I know how.
Glo
Comments
Post a Comment