An Open Letter

Hey. For the last two months, I’ve been fairly depressed. It isn’t nearly as bad as it used to be, which is a godsend in its own right – but I just haven’t felt joy for a while. Today I did. I pushed myself pretty hard working out my legs, even though I had to stop squatting due to a health complication. Afterward, I ran on a treadmill until I couldn’t anymore. Then I walked for a tenth of a mile and then ran the same distance.

By the time I got off the treadmill, I had to lay down and was grabbing my left ankle because it hurt so bad with the kind of pain where nothing gives it relief, and you just have to ride it out until it stops rearing its head. My face was grimaced, but also smiling intently. I felt proud, and I felt alive again. I know it was just endorphins, but in that moment I finally felt like myself for the first time in a while.

While biking back home, I was dancing and drumming in the air. Music made me happy, and the cold air on my sweat-drenched face was blissful. I felt pure joy. I went home and put in tremendous conscious effort to do several tasks that I hadn’t been able to do for almost weeks.

---

At some point last year I figured out that one of my greatest tools for fighting depression was overexerting myself. Of course, there are several other things to it, but this was a huge thing for being able to regulate my mood, and overall give me a better baseline dopamine. Around two months ago, I stopped running and doing such heavy cardio for some reason or another – and I eventually stopped altogether. Now that I’m virtually fully recovered, I’m going to force myself to stick to this – originally it required a lot of discipline, but I know how it gets easier if you don’t slip up, so I’m going to vow to myself I’m going to do that now. Today I was able to do a bit over half a mile, and I plan on getting that much farther.

Recently I’ve lived life in a pretty angry, depressed, and resentful way. I remember how I used to do this, and I see a lot of this in other friends – but I think I’d like to reclaim the worldview of being grateful and falling in love with everything.

Everything will be ok. It just may be different.

I don’t want to explain why I wanted to find this image so badly, but I remembered it about a week ago and I spent a few hours trying to find it again. I finally found it through coincidence, and it felt like someone gave me a hug.

Maybe things will be ok. I always ask god for harder times when I’m fine, and for relief when I get harder times. I find out over and over again I am loved, and maybe it sinks in a bit more every time.

If I’m going to be honest, I’ve felt like shit for at least a month now. Something feels different today, as there’s no anger – just grief. I would always think I held no regrets, and that if I died now, I would have done it the same.

I do have regrets.

I wish I was hugged more. I wish I was told “I love you”, and I wish I was allowed to express emotion. I wish I wasn’t alone all the time, and I wish I wasn’t pushed online to interact with humans.

I wish I wasn’t taken advantage of as a child, and I wish someone was there to stop it from happening again. I wish I had someone who watched out for me, and who was there for me when I needed it the most. I wish I had someone who checked up on highschool me who would sit on the bathroom floor for hours at a time in agony.

I wish both that someone would give me genuine sympathy, and that I could also accept that.

It’s strange to long to be held in a way I never was – what am I missing?

A bit earlier today I watched a YouTube video of my favorite content creator playing the game Before Your Eyes. Within the span of about 5 minutes, I found myself crying.

There’s something incredibly sobering about seeing a parent struggle. I’ve always thought about how it’s a parent’s responsibility to give a child a good life and to be an appropriate parent for them, but it’s pretty gut-wrenching to see a parent lost. It’s a weird feeling to see someone blind to their own mistakes lay the ones they love down on railroad tracks. It doesn’t make it any easier when the train hits them.

I guess it all just boils down to my own childhood, doesn’t it? This is my blog after all, it’s not like this is written down for anyone else. I’m sorry she had to see her grandmother hung at a young age, but I also wish I didn’t have that pain passed onto me. I wish she was somehow unnecessarily strong enough to handle that pain and trauma and prevent it from being passed onto me. But it also wasn’t fair to her. I find myself blaming her less and less, when I think back to the neglect all I see is a traumatized little girl watching her dead grandmother, and god knows what else happened to her to make her so afraid of men.

I’m sorry that happened to you, but I’m also sorry about the things that happened to me. It’s not fair to you, but it’s also not fair to me. It is unfair to ask you to somehow handle all the generational trauma passed onto you, but I also wish you decided to confront that pain before it manifested its way onto me.

I feel like I push myself so hard to process things and to grow as a person mentally with the hope of giving a child a good life. I want to finally break the chain of suicides and stop the pattern of hurt. I’m afraid now though, as watching the game unfold, she loved us so much. Yet she hurt us the same way too. I fear what I do is not enough, and I fall victim to the same trap of my parents, and those before me too. Maybe I shouldn’t have a kid.

As much as that hurts to write, I think I need to consider that possibility for me to be able to consider having one in the future – I need to be confident that if I have a child it is because I think it is good, not because I want to prove I can stop this chain.

“I killed a plant once because I gave it too much water. Lord, I worry that love is violence.”

― José Olivarez, Citizen Illegal

I’ve had friends talk about how it’s hard to stay motivated to go to the gym, but for me, I don’t think it was hard with a certain realization. When I started going to the gym, I was horribly depressed. In the past, I would spend weeks without leaving my room and would just spiral into self-destructive tendencies until I would end up with a suicide scare. I was pretty desperate to do anything to stop that cycle, and I was trying everything I could find.

What I ended up telling myself was that I either force myself to go to the gym regardless if I was in pain, fatigued, depressed, busy, or any other excuse – or I end up killing myself because I am not strong enough to fight it. Then it became simple, it’s either force myself to do something shown to help depression no matter what, or just kill myself because I can’t even do that. If I am incapable of doing something so simple as that, I honestly don’t deserve a shot at life. That’s all it was, self-preservation in some sense.

Honestly, these are some of my favorite days while reflecting. The days where I don’t dance, smile or laugh. The days where I just keep my eyes on the floor and avoid any interaction. I love violently disregarding consequences and forcing my body to do what I want it to. About a week ago I tried to hit a PR on deadlift, and I failed 355lbs. I just couldn’t lift it enough to lock out. About 3-4 days later, I tried again, and at first, I couldn’t even get the bar off the ground before my back hurt too much. I took a second to rest, then told myself I didn’t care, I was going to grab it and lift it no matter what happened. Just look.

I love realizing my body is shaking, and feeling that pain in my throat and jaw from clenching so hard. I love beating the shit out of my own body in this way, as my way of getting even. I usually tell myself these days “Either kill yourself or kill yourself” as a reminder of how if I don’t destroy myself, I’ll probably end up killing myself anyway. God romanticization of suicide is nice ♥

“A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with reality, and lives in a world of illusion.” – Alan Watts

Edgy quote aside, I was talking with a friend earlier about the bad stuff that’s happened in the past, and how it’s ‘character building’. I’ve thought about this a decent amount, on whether or not it was worth it to have bad things happen to me in the past. I guess to some extent, thinking about it is pointless, as the only answer you should have is that it was worth it – as you cannot change it so something about imagining a guy happy pushing a rock. But I also do think that there were a good amount of things that happened in my life that I wish didn’t, and I don’t think were necessary for my development as a person.

It’s incredibly easy to see someone’s reaction to some traumatic experience in the past and think “Wow that’s incredibly irrational”, and almost trivialize it. I think there’s an important distinction to make about how your gut instinct and knee-jerk reaction to it will be drastically different because you haven’t gone through the same pain that causes that aversion to it. Not to make this another series in the vent posts, but I was thinking about this earlier – a relatively innocent action ended up becoming incredibly harmful due to scars of the past. I was thinking of an analogy earlier so I might as well write it down here:

Imagine you had your foot crushed horribly badly, to the point of excruciating pain and breaking all the bones in it. Picture going through so much pain, just the thought of your foot touching something makes you terrified of that pain again. Now imagine it’s been about a year, and your foot is more or less healed, but still very fragile. Now suddenly you start feeling pain again – a lot of it is mental, so it’s easy to tell yourself that it’s just in your head and it isn’t real. But this pain lingers around, and you keep telling yourself nothing happened and you’ve recovered, the pain is just mental. Then you find out oh, someone stepped on that foot a bit ago, and that pain is all justified.

Honestly, I’m pretty upset with this as I feel like this analogy is just stupid, but I can’t figure out any analogy to convey that feeling. I went back and looked at the specific messages, and I honestly agree with them. If they want to spend less time than we did over the summer, that makes complete sense, as now that there are other friends and other things in person obviously we aren’t going to spend virtually 100% of our time together. That being said, I still want to remain at the same (if not more) level of friends, and still try to spend quality time together. But this also goes for my other friends, new and old – not just them. If they want to be a lower level of friend, that I do have an issue with, but I don’t necessarily think that’s the case. And if it is, oh well, I’d rather not be close friends with someone who wouldn’t want that. In a weird way, I’m glad for this situation, as I think it will help crush some doubts.

Hey, big dog! I don’t know about you, but I just got out of sitting on the floor of the shower for like 45 minutes just talking to myself. I had this as a status yesterday, but I realized how anger sits next to fear. The more I processed and confronted my fear, I found my anger going away. There were several cool insights I had that I wanted to write about, but I guess might as well stay consistent and just vent again.

I found myself angry, but not at them. I believe in intentionalism, and while trying to understand their point of view, I don’t feel like there was any malice. All I really felt was ignorance and fear. I don’t think they meant to hurt me like this, and so I’m not upset at them at all. But I still do feel upset, and I was trying to figure out who or what I was so upset at.

I don’t think this is a serious issue, I wouldn’t even consider this a fight. But I did ask for some space until my therapy on Wednesday, and it turns out that’s 5 days, which I think is overkill. Part of me guiltily hopes that they feel bad and miss me as a friend, but another part of me also believes that they are fully fine and they aren’t thinking about this at all. I also partially want to give them some time so they don’t feel pressured, so I can know if they actually want to be friends or not – I’d rather be friends with someone who has to think about it for a bit and decides that they do want to be friends. Another reason was I wanted to show them (and myself) how I do not depend on them; I am incredibly resourceful and resilient. I will be okay without them – I only say this because I don’t want them to have the pressure of feeling like I depend on them for anything. I want them to know that I prefer and really want to interact with them and spend time with them, but if that can’t happen I’ll survive just fine.

I was sitting on the floor of the shower thinking about how I was catastrophizing about how they might tell me “Hey with this time to think, I think I’m happier without you. I don’t want to be friends anymore”. Writing this out gave me a huge compulsion to check the friend’s server we have to see if they for some reason left it. I will consciously choose to simply not to do that, the same way I told my friend today to consciously make the decision to fight their own compulsion (hi S!). But yeah, about that thought of fear: I started to think about how I am more or less giving myself exposure to the feeling of rejection and almost a breakup, and I was treating it as an exercise. I know pain like that will happen in life, and it might not necessarily happen in this case – but I might as well hurt a bit right now to understand better and prepare for it.

I’ll close this off as a friend has been waiting for me, but I really want to send a message to them saying “Hey, 5 days is a long time – just wanted to let you know I am not upset at you at all, it is not that serious”, but I think this is me being overly compassionate. This is something I would want, but there’s also a solid chance they are completely fine and not anxious or feeling bad about it at all. I think we are pretty different in that sense, they are a pretty “fuck it we ball” kind of person, so this is fairly likely. I’ll instead selfishly use this time to practice fighting this compulsion. Even if you don’t say it back, I love you

Hey. Shame this is the 20th post in a row of just journaling, might as well preface this a bit: this blog originally was more meant for thoughts and writing, but I’ve transitioned it into a place for me to vent and process things. I no longer recommend reading it, I’m not writing anything worth reading anymore other than my journaling.

I realized I’ve been feeling pretty miserable, and it’s been because I’ve been thinking about the catastrophe situation of the close friend saying “I don’t want to be close friends anymore”, or anything along those lines. I think any indication of the sentiment of ‘this level of intimacy is more than what I’d like’ terrifies me. Immediately I feel like I’ve opened myself up for display, and after seeing that they reject it. I like who I am, so I don’t feel the overwhelming urge to suppress who I am as a person – this could always just be attributed to incompatibility, but this idea makes me horribly sad. I really like the idea of being close with this person, as I feel comfortable around them. But the thought of it not being reciprocated, or not genuine makes it virtually worthless.

I had a compulsion to want to message them something to try to manipulate them or steer them in the direction of “Hey, I’m fine with whatever! Don’t flat-out reject me!” so I could preserve the hope that potentially the feelings are fully authentic. I realized however this was just another compulsion, and if I gave into this I would doubt myself nearly immediately if they actually wanted to be friends with me like that. I think I need to hold out until therapy (Wednesday) before I message them again. I’ve been writing down big thoughts I’ve had regarding this, today in traffic I noted the big distinction I put at the top of this, and also how I don’t want this to be a relationship where I have to second guess if they want to be the friends we are.

I feel almost nauseous because in my mind I can see a fairly realistic situation where they echo the sentiment of not wanting to be as close, and the worst part is I don’t think it’s because of any fault of my own. I think they aren’t comfortable opening up like that, and so they don’t feel they can keep up with how close I’d want to be. That feeling fucking sucks. I guess I probably should also think about the words and how I speak about this stuff, as I have a bad habit of speaking objectively without considering how the connotations might affect the message to the other person. I guess with this insight, I should ask what stuff they are fine talking/doing, and what stuff they aren’t.

I feel pretty shitty because there’s a good chance this friendship ends up being relatively surface-level. In an ideal world, I would want them to actually want to be close to me and want to be able to open up and know more vulnerable things about each other. The thing that sucks is this is something that should be out of my hands, it is up to them to decide if that is something they want. I obviously know what I prefer, but as sad as the idea of them not wanting to be close – the thought of wasting all of it on someone who doesn’t want that is worse.

It sucks because I feel unfortunately good at manipulation here. I think if I explicitly ask them “Do you want to be close friends”, there’s a decent chance they say no because of the connotation in their mind. But if I ask them “Do you want to get to know each other on more than a surface level” I think they would say yes. To me both of these are the same thing, but with drastically different outcomes. I don’t like having the burden of having to consciously choose this now, as it just feels like manipulation. Why couldn’t my mother have just been normal…

Situation: A close friend potentially might not want to be ‘close’, especially if I ask it like that.

Thoughts: I think that this is a rejection and that I am losing a friend.

Feelings: I feel like shit, and I feel alone and unloveable.

Behavior: I sabotage the relationship, and I end up losing a good friend.

OBJECTION! -

Thoughts: First of all, I need to acknowledge the semantics behind this – if I phrase it differently then I don’t think that outcome will happen, this isn’t manipulation this is the whole “maternal” thing I talked about in therapy.

That being said, I would rather rip the bandaid off and know what they want instead of half-assing it and constantly second-guessing it. It would for sure suck if they didn’t want to be close friends, but I’d rather know that than put them in an uncomfortable situation and also be in a relationship that isn’t honest.

If the person I know is them (which I trust them about), nothing drastically bad will change. It might suck a bit, but I think the practical worst-case scenario is not terrible. Just sucks, but not terrible.

Feelings: I feel better, as I realize I’ve been overreacting. I feel still anxious, but a normal amount, not the amount earlier. Also, the compulsion has somewhat become quieter.

Behavior: I take a huge step towards being a healthier person.

785 It's insane how consistently wrong my brain is, and that's a great thing because I sometimes hate my brain

Love you, look forward to Wednesday. You are stronger than compulsion Anshuman. ♥

Hey. It's 2:44 am and my laptops dead so I have to write this with my phone. I just got back from the rave, and am in the Airbnb with everyone else. At the rave they asked “does anyone here like Jojo(s bizarre adventure)”, and played a remix, and I wanted to send it to her. Later I opened my Instagram and saw a club showing it's members and one was named her name, accent and everything. Feels like the universe wants me to message you.

I've been thinking about it a decent amount, on one hand I realized how, for a lack of a better word, okay I would be if we weren't close friends, or friends. It would suck, and make me sad for a bit for sure, but I would be completely ok after some time. That made me feel happy, as I don't depend on you or rely on you.

I also realized I want to be close friends, but if you don't want that, the answers pretty clear; I don't want to be close with someone who doesn't want to be friends like that with me. I think I'll try to be clear and mention how that's an important thing for me – if we are to be friends I want to KNOW you want to. I absolutely hate the feeling of having to constantly second guess if you actually wanted to be friends like that. I never want to feel that again.

And a big thing I kept feeling was how I lost a lot of trust in you. I don't really know how I'm supposed to trust the things you say, when you've both lied to my face with no issues, and also said directly contradictory things to go your path of least resistance. I unfortunately understand why you're like this, which makes it hard for me to be mad at you – but it sucks you haven't realized some important things in life yet.

The thing that hurts me to think about is I don't know what you want going forwards. On one hand, I think it's pretty cruel and unnatural to purposefully be surface friends until you're back in person, and then more or less resume where we left off. But at the same time, I'm somewhat upset at myself for being so willing to jump through that hoop because of my fears of losing a good friend.

I'm pretty upset at myself for still thinking of you as a close friend, as I don't know what I'd do if you tell me you don't want to be close friends. I guess I'll live, but fuck that would hurt.

Hoo boy. So I had a pretty painful conversation with a close(?) friend. Turns out I wasn’t insane, and they have been pulling away for the last month or so. I feel pretty betrayed and hurt, to be honest, as I’ve been sitting here in this weird friendship limbo for the last month or so, all because they were too cowardly to bring it up. I’m pretty fucking sad/mad/hurt because I’ve been sitting around second-guessing myself trying to figure out what is going on, and thinking that it’s a me problem this whole time. Turns out I’m not insane, they’ve been pulling away and also been giving drastically mixed signals. They would both do very intimate things, and things to show we are close, while also neglecting and purposefully pushing towards surface-level interactions when I would try to treat them as a close friend. They have me all sorts of fucked up.

A lot of the issue stems from the fact they would make an assumption, which typically would result in the least amount of discomfort for them, and then based on that would end up hurting me much more. I hold some resentment here, as I think if they thought about it seriously and considered my point of view it would be pretty clear instead of them having a somewhat uncomfortable conversation once, I end up having to suffer and sit in this turmoil for over a month. I hate this so much, the same way I hate how my mother would refuse to acknowledge her problems and instead make me have to deal with that consequence.

My trust feels pretty broken to be honest, as I’ve spent all this time second-guessing what they say, and trying my best to take it at face value without reading into it. Turns out this whole time face value was a lie, and that ended up counteracting a lot of the work I’ve been doing on trying to unlearn painful patterns from childhood. That fucking sucks, I thought this relationship would be something safe and healthy but at no fault of my own turns out it’s been somewhat a lie.

I don’t think they really understand how they hurt me, as the closest apology they gave was an echoing of what they did, and saying “sorry”. I wish they would take a bit to try to empathize and understand what it feels like to be on the receiving end of constant mixed signals and nearly exactly the whole ‘hot-and-cold’ manipulation technique. With them constantly oscillating between giving me the cold shoulder and then being intimate and warm, I end up feeling fucking horrible as I have no clue what’s going on. I wish they understood the consequences of their actions, as it fucking sucks.