I’ve told bits and pieces of my story, snapshots of moments in time and emotions. To be honest, I don’t think my story is particularly riveting if I tell it from start to finish. I think anyone reading it would find parts of themself in it, parts that resonate with them. Lately, I’ve been grappling with the need to tell more of it. To let everyone know the reasons behind my writing, the experiences that shape it and shape me.
Then I realized I was looking for justification. On proving to my audience, however small or large, that I am qualified and have lived through enough to be able to write and tell my thoughts and stories.
I wanted to play the victim. To say look at me, look at everything I have been through, look at these tragic moments of my life and recognize that I am adequately traumatized and wise enough to be able to share and give advice on them.
Shame is a funny emotion, not funny in the sense of hilarity but funny in the sense that it makes you want to cry. I feel the need to justify my writing because shame has been a weight upon my shoulders for years. It’s been a noose around my neck, the secret hiding in my closet, and mix in a healthy dose of guilt and you will discover the real reason I feel the need to justify my writing.
Instead of telling you the events in my life that have shaped me into who I am, I’m going to tell you of my shame. I’ve written about the death of my father, of my reaction and withdrawal from anxiety medication, of my battle with anxiety and fear. I won’t say all of that is motivated by this arbitrary sense of shame and guilt, but a lot is motivated by the sense of not being enough because of how I have handled certain situations. Instead of putting on airs about who I want to be, insinuating that I am somehow fixing my life by learning from my mistakes, here are the moments that drown me.
I don’t trust myself to be alone. Somewhere along the way over the last few years it’s become almost impossible for me to be by myself for more than a few hours at a time. I know a lot of people struggle with loneliness, that’s not what this is. I don’t trust that I won’t fall to pieces and shatter when I am by myself. I am 27 years old and am terrified to live on my own again because I fear what will happen to me when I have to be by myself. It’s gotten more manageable, I can control it and distract myself, but the edge of panic is usually lurking in my subconscious. I don’t believe that I will hurt myself, I don’t believe that anyone is going to hurt me. It’s a baseless fear that won’t let me experience peace.
I struggle to drive anywhere further than five minutes from my house, and even that is still a struggle. I don’t fear the act of driving itself, I am a competent driver who hasn’t even had an accident. When driving I constantly think that at any moment I am going to panic over the fact that I am driving, and so I start to. And the cycle repeats and repeats. I used to love driving, listening to music and going somewhere and simply existing in my own space. It now fills me with a sense of fear, a loss of control of myself and surroundings.
To go along with my panic and avoidance of driving, I now lack a social life almost completely. It’s been a year since I got into my car by myself, and went to meet a friend for dinner. I don’t know the last time I made plans without having to think of how I will get there, and subsequently I’ve stopped making plans. I don’t fear being out in public, I don’t have much social anxiety, but simply figuring out how I am going to get there makes me not want to plan at all. So my relationships have suffered.
I’m 27 and live at home with my mom and brother. On the surface I tell people I’m still here because my mom needs my help financially. It’s not a lie, but it’s not the truth. My fears have made it so that I am afraid to be on my own, and my mom has become the anchor for me to feel that I’m not alone. While my mom faces financial problems, if I was not a burden to be considered she would have sold the house and been out of all debt.
I’ve mismanaged my money so thoroughly over the last three years that I can’t afford to live on my own. When I moved back to Pittsburgh three years ago I was in a position after a few months to pay off the majority of my debt (mainly credit cards) and to build savings. Truthfully, I don’t know what I spent my money on at that time, but I am now in thousands of dollars in debt and struggling to balance it at all.
I feel like I could have done more to prevent my dad from dying, and that I could have spent more time with him before he died. My dad had been unhealthy for years, decades. I never pushed him to stop smoking. I never pushed him to stop drinking. When I moved back home I could have cooked healthy and calorically dense meals to help him gain weight, I could have delved deeper into his medical history to attempt to connect dots, or at least gone to his doctors appointments with him and asked more questions. The last year of his life he canceled so many appointments because he didn’t feel well enough to go. I could have taken him. I could have questioned it.
I could have visited my dad more while he was in the hospital. He was there for five months, and I visited him every morning on the weekdays for 45 minutes before I had to work and a few hours on Saturday and Sunday. He was there all day, everyday, in the same room fighting for his life. And I couldn’t take more time out of my day to simply be there with him. I couldn’t rearrange my schedule so I could spend a few hours with him every day so that he wasn’t alone. The weekend before he died I wasn’t there. I went away for the weekend, and I didn’t see him. I missed his last fully lucid moments.
I expect everyone else around me to make up for the love that I don’t have for myself. I despise the way I look, how heavy I’ve become and how I don’t even recognize myself any longer when I look in the mirror. I have become a partial shell of myself trying to mitigate my anxiety and fear. I’ve lost my sense of vitality and energy, my love of life and all things that come with it. I look for others to validate me. To remind me that I am still worthy of being loved and appreciated. I overthink every interaction hoping that I gave enough to make up for what I lack.
I’m afraid that circumstances, behaviors and ingrained ways of being will never change. That I will be stuck with my fears forever, living in a constant loop of fear and avoidance. I fear that I will never have enough confidence and strength in myself to be able to make a lasting change. I fear fading away into obscurity, of never leaving a mark on anyone’s life, of never creating anything beautiful enough to be remembered. I fear stagnation and withering away almost as much as I fear change and taking a risk.
The weight of my shame constantly plays on loop in my head. In every interaction I have and in every decision I try to make. It forces me to feel like I need to overcompensate because alone, as I am, I am not enough. My failures will define me instead of my successes and I will drown in an ocean of my own making before learning how to kick free and reach the surface.
There’s more that I can write about, an endless list of shortcomings and faults, but this list is already getting long.
For once, I don’t know how to end this piece. It feels too heavy to leave it without acknowledging anything and at the same time feels like a deflection if I write anything motivating. I don’t write this for pity, nor am I trying to validate myself in a woe is me type of fashion. To me it felt like I was lying by omission and keeping these feelings a secret by not laying myself and my shame bare for those of you reading to see.
Before ending, I want to express my gratitude for the people in my life who love me right now. Those who know I am more, and can do more, but continue to love me anyways.
