ME
What You Can’t Change: You cannot make someone be more interested in you or care for you more than they do. You cannot force yourself to be someone’s priority, even if they are yours. You cannot force people to get along if they fundamentally have little in common, even if that means you will have somewhat separated groups of friends. You can’t make yourself transform into a new person every time you meet someone who wants you to be different.
What You Can’t Change: You cannot change the person your boss is. You cannot change who he or she may favor in spite of every effort you could make. You cannot make someone else work less to make yourself look better by comparison, even if the two of you are in direct competition. You can’t know the full reasoning behind every decision that is made, even the ones that you perceive to be unfair.
What You Can’t Change: You cannot make someone be attracted to you who simply isn’t. You can’t make someone else’s petty judgments go away if they are silly enough to hold them in the first place. You can’t force someone to feel a spark with you, even if you felt an unbelievable one with them. You can’t hate someone for wanting to end something with you, as long as they went about ending it with dignity and respect and care. You can’t hope for more than being treated the way you are willing to treat them.
What You Can’t Change: You can’t make your body be naturally predisposed to a different shape. You can’t guarantee that you will always be in a certain weight range. You can’t ensure perfect skin, or find a diet and exercise regime that works without fail. You can’t spend your entire life denying yourself the things you want every now and again, nor can you give into every craving or whim and deny your body the care that it needs to function normally. You can’t make the scale replace every other source of value in your life.
What You Can’t Change: You can’t go over budget every month and still manage to save the money you need to have some security. You can’t give up on essentials like insurance to subsidize something like partying or eating out at restaurants. You can’t change what your friends are going to want to do when they go out, or if you know a lot of people who have an easier time financially than you do. You cannot force your raises to come before you’ve earned them. You cannot force your apartment to cost less (though you could move into a smaller one).
What You Can’t Change: You can’t please everyone — you probably can’t even please most people. You can live your life perfectly well and still find people who will be nasty, who will disagree, who will make you feel badly for being who you are. You cannot make them any better. You cannot get rid of the people who will reject you, or insult you, or make you cry.
But you can choose not to be one of those people. You can choose to be kind, even if the world isn’t always kind to you.
I can't even begin to describe the misery that I've been living with everyday for the past one month. It greets me every morning when I wake up, accompanies me throughout the day, and haunts me in my dreams. It's a constant, never dying presence with me, in me. I've never felt so sad, alone, and helpless in my life before.
What triggered all this is a long story- and I don't think I want to go into too much details here- but I guess I'll summarize the essentials. If I were to really pinpoint the 2 main causes, it would be being shunned out of the blue without any explanation by my closest friends here, and then finding out that my dad's cancer had spread to his brain. It all began around mid September, when I realized that my 2 closest friends here were slowly starting to avoid me. They isolated me from our normal routine activities, like walking home from school. I knew they each had their own set of problems with me, but neither would tell me what was going on. So they just stuck together and left me out. At first I pretended nothing was wrong and just carried on life as normal, but the isolation slowly became increasingly obvious. And then one day, one of them burst on me because I'd used her hot water to take a shower. That was the day everything just went rapidly downhill. Said hot water theft victim started to completely avoid me, changing her routine around to avoid me, and wouldn't even look me in the eye if I talk to her, and wouldn't acknowledge my presence even if I walked past her. She just wore this black face whenever I was around. The other one, whom I was closer to and who actually started avoiding me first, started avoiding me even more, and would not give me a reason as to why she was behaving this way despite my repeated attempts to find out. She hemmed and hawed her way through my questions, and even though she actually did text me one night to ask if she could talk to me, she never did. After a lot of probing on my part, she gave this reason: that she was sick of me and this other guy constantly hating on each other, did I know that she soured her friendship with this guy because she was standing up for me against them, that she needed time to sort out her feelings. And after a whole lot of Skype conversation (yes, she never talked to me face to face), I still don't understand how all this is reason for her behavior.
So I felt abandoned. Deserted and isolated by my 2 closest friends here, thousands of miles away from home, I felt like I had no one here at all. I can't even begin to describe how lost and lonely I felt then. I was confused about their behavior, and no matter how much I asked, no one would tell me what was wrong, or what I did wrong. My initial confusion gave way to feelings of hurt, loneliness and abandonment, and finally a sort of despair. I despaired at the loss of our friendship, at how we suddenly became strangers to each other, when we were once such close friends. It's kind of like breaking up, but without being given an explanation as to why you've been dumped. I internalized everything, and spent countless days and nights wondering what went wrong, and what I did that was wrong. I took it upon myself, that I did something immensely unforgivable, and I felt like a horrible person. I felt like I was a bad person, because if so many people dislike you, the problem must be you, right? Within this small town I have 4 people disliking me, and these are all people that were once my close friends.I feel so hated, and I feel like I'm such a horrible person, for so many people to dislike me.
Maybe things wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't been living with the 2 of them, but the fact is that I do. And every single day I am reminded of how left out I am, how alone I've become, how destroyed our friendship was, and how I have no idea what went wrong. Maybe I'd done something wrong, maybe I haven't. But whatever the real reason was, I realized one painful fact: that they don't care enough about me as a friend to even try and work things out with me. They'd rather just avoid the real issue at hand and drop me as a friend. Easy out.
I ended up going for counseling therapy, because I knew I needed help. My paranoia, my depression, my loneliness, my crumbling sense of self-worth, they were all adding up fast and turning me into a mental wreck. I was losing it fast. Really fast. I was lucky, I have a good counselor. And therapy did help, and I was starting to do somewhat better. And then I got the news that my father's nose cancer (which he recently underwent chemotherapy and surgery for) was back. And that the tumor had gone to his brain.
I don't think I can even begin to describe how I felt at that moment when my mother broke the news to me. I remembered I started crying, but not from sadness. It was from a mixture of despair, hopelessness, grief, anxiety, fear, worry, and possibly anger. I couldn't take the reality of the situation, I refused to accept it. That evening when I went for my weekly counseling session, I completely lost it in front of my counselor. I was just sobbing and shaking throughout the session. After everything that my father had done, after all the therapies and surgeries he had underwent, the cancer still came back, and it didn't just come back- it had spread to his brain. And the thought that my father might die soon, that he might die before I graduate from school, that he might die before he gets to walk me down the aisle and carry my babies, broke something down in me.
I'm so drained. I'm so worn out by everything that's been going on. Right now, essentially, I've blocked my heart from feeling anymore. I've shut down that part of me that feels. I can't let myself feel anymore, because then I will just be a walking emotional mess. It's not the best or the right coping mechanism, I know, but it's all I can do to hang on from now till Christmas. Going about life without a heart is a hollow, empty existence, devoid entirely of meaning and emotion. You don't live anymore, you merely exist.
On the orders of my counselor, I've been taking things very slowly nowadays, being gentle with myself and minding myself a lot. I've been trying to do activities that I enjoy, activities that might make me happier. I call them my "Happy Tasks". I have a list here which I will add as I go along. They do give me something to fill the hours, and I do feel somewhat better after doing them, but I know I'm just doing them for the sake of doing them, not because I really want to.
(1) Went out for lunch and a movie with Sara
(2) Shopping in town one Saturday, and I indulged in a day of eatwhateveriwantto
(3) Salthill walk, lunch and shopping with Khalidah
(4) Friday movie in town, and I snuck in falalels and pitta bread and curry cheese fries
(5) Wednesday shopping and dinner with Khalidah
(6) Choc Biscuit Binge: ate as many chocolate biscuits as I wanted to at a go (must have ate almost 20)
I'm still struggling, my journey to recovery has barely begun. I read somewhere on a depression forum that writing about your journey helps, and because I've always loved writing, I've resolved to blog about this in the hopes that it might help me recover faster.
And before I end this, I just want to talk about one last thing. I don't think it's a right thing to do, and I know I shouldn't be doing this, but in a way I've decided that I have to in order to recover faster. I've decided to erase Jr from my life for the time being. Missing him, not hearing from him, is in a way destroying me, and making me down. And the fact is that I don't hear from him much nowadays anymore. I know he is busy, I know he is going through a lot right now, but sometimes I get angry that even though he always says he's sorry for not keeping up like he used to, it seems like he's not even making the effort to try and keep up. I know there are many things beyond his control, that the mail room could be holding his mail and that's why I'm not receiving anything, but I feel like he's not even trying to talk to me as much as before already. I hate that I'm feeling this way, but I can't deny that I am. I feel so unreasonable to want more than he can give, but I hate the feeling that it seems like he doesn't care about me as much anymore, that he's not even bothering putting in the effort to try and sustain our relationship anymore. I love and miss him so much that I hurt, and when I don't hear from him for an extended period of time I start getting paranoid and hurt. And right now, I can't deal with these feelings anymore. So for the time being, I've decided to block Jr's existence out of my life. I'm not erasing our past year together, I'm just burying it for now. We have no relationship at all. If and whenever I do hear from him, great, but if I don't, I won't keep holding out on the hope that I might soon. It's a tiring and frustrating process to wait eagerly for mail and getting your hopes dashed every single day, and I can't deal with that anymore.
It's all about me for now. Just me trying to get back on my own two feet again, and start living again.
<♥>
Hello, my name is Mylene.
Screams
Friday, October 26, 2012
This article just came out on Thought Catalog today, and I thought I'd share it with you guys. It's written by Chelsea Fagan, one of my favorite writers there. It's a brilliant piece, I love it. It's short, simple, and straight to the point about the things in the key aspects of our lives that we can change, and what to do about those that we can't. I've reproduced the article below, but here's the link to the original article as well.I hope you'll like it just as much as I do!Things You Can Change vs Things You Can't
Life is full of forks in the road at which we are faced with the option
of trying to make things work or letting it go. And while we are not
always going to pick the right direction, it’s always important to
distinguish between what is up to us and what, for better or worse,
never will be.
Friends
What You Can Change: You can change the degree to which you listen to people when they are talking, even if they’re telling you something you don’t want to hear. You can be more careful about how you give and receive your limited time. You can actively not reach out to people whom you know are never going to reciprocate. You can choose to answer the phone more, and be as receptive to people as you would want them to be to you. You can make time for people even when it isn’t convenient, because you know that one day you’ll need them, too.What You Can’t Change: You cannot make someone be more interested in you or care for you more than they do. You cannot force yourself to be someone’s priority, even if they are yours. You cannot force people to get along if they fundamentally have little in common, even if that means you will have somewhat separated groups of friends. You can’t make yourself transform into a new person every time you meet someone who wants you to be different.
Work
What You Can Change: You can change how long you stay at it, how much effort you put into every project, and to what degree you participate actively in moving up the ladder. You can pay attention to the relationship you have with coworkers and superiors, because they can end up being just as important in terms of success as the actual work that is getting done. You can avoid engaging in backstabbing or gossip or petty judgments about each other, even when it comes time for someone to get ahead and someone else to stay behind. You can focus your energy entirely on what you are doing and actively stay away from worrying about what someone else is getting that you’re not.What You Can’t Change: You cannot change the person your boss is. You cannot change who he or she may favor in spite of every effort you could make. You cannot make someone else work less to make yourself look better by comparison, even if the two of you are in direct competition. You can’t know the full reasoning behind every decision that is made, even the ones that you perceive to be unfair.
Relationships
What You Can Change: You can work on putting yourself out there more, trying new opportunities to meet people when you feel as though the dating pool is closing in on you. You can accept dates with people that you may have previously not considered, or open your mind about preferences you once thought immovable. You can make sacrifices and compromises for your partner, actively making their life easier when they need someone to lean on, and listening to them when they need to just talk things out. You can improve the qualities about yourself that you know might not be appealing, or may be preventing you from attracting the kind of people you’re looking for emotionally. You can work on being the kind of person that you would want to date.What You Can’t Change: You cannot make someone be attracted to you who simply isn’t. You can’t make someone else’s petty judgments go away if they are silly enough to hold them in the first place. You can’t force someone to feel a spark with you, even if you felt an unbelievable one with them. You can’t hate someone for wanting to end something with you, as long as they went about ending it with dignity and respect and care. You can’t hope for more than being treated the way you are willing to treat them.
Body
What You Can Change: You can work on eating cleaner, healthier foods that leave you feeling full of energy and in a good mood throughout the day. You can find an exercise plan that suits your needs and also doesn’t leave you feeling as though your life revolves around physical activity. You can wear clothes and style yourself in a way that makes you feel attractive and healthy, while still being aware that your physical appearance does not define you as a person. You can pursue a balance in life that involves both indulging yourself and treating your body with respect.What You Can’t Change: You can’t make your body be naturally predisposed to a different shape. You can’t guarantee that you will always be in a certain weight range. You can’t ensure perfect skin, or find a diet and exercise regime that works without fail. You can’t spend your entire life denying yourself the things you want every now and again, nor can you give into every craving or whim and deny your body the care that it needs to function normally. You can’t make the scale replace every other source of value in your life.
Money
What You Can Change: You can change the amount of things you imagine you need to make yourself happy in a given day. You can accept that some of the items you idolize are just going to be out of your reach for the foreseeable future, and that there are always alternatives to any particular object. You can work on DIY projects and homemade foods that help make some of your more elaborate tastes financially feasible. You can treat yourself to something special every once in a while without feeling like you need to constantly be giving into your desires. You can say “no” when people invite you out to things that you simply cannot afford, and work on finding things to do that don’t cost anything. You can be more honest with your partner or social circle about your constraints, and be understanding of theirs.What You Can’t Change: You can’t go over budget every month and still manage to save the money you need to have some security. You can’t give up on essentials like insurance to subsidize something like partying or eating out at restaurants. You can’t change what your friends are going to want to do when they go out, or if you know a lot of people who have an easier time financially than you do. You cannot force your raises to come before you’ve earned them. You cannot force your apartment to cost less (though you could move into a smaller one).
You
What You Can Change: You can smile at people you pass in the street, hold open doors, and say “hello.” You can treat everyone — even the barista at Starbucks when you’re hungover at 8 AM — like they are deserving of your respect and friendliness. You can do favors for people without expecting anything in return. You can associate yourself with people who are supportive of your life choices and your achievements. You can end social media contacts which are no good for your self-esteem. You can turn down offers and accept opportunities without feeling guilty about them. You can tell people you love them more often, and tell them what makes them special.What You Can’t Change: You can’t please everyone — you probably can’t even please most people. You can live your life perfectly well and still find people who will be nasty, who will disagree, who will make you feel badly for being who you are. You cannot make them any better. You cannot get rid of the people who will reject you, or insult you, or make you cry.
But you can choose not to be one of those people. You can choose to be kind, even if the world isn’t always kind to you.
Labels: chelsea fagan, Things You Can Change Vs Things You Can’t, thought catalog
Thursday, October 25, 2012
So I guess you must be wondering where I've been for the past month since I last blogged. I wish I could say my absence is because I've been busy with my life, with schoolwork and socializing and all, but in truth, it's because I've been battling depression. Again. I really am so full of shit; I keep motivating myself and prepping myself up, telling myself to change my attitude, but in the end, I still fall back into the same old vicious cycle. Except that this time, I'm having a very hard time getting out. It's like just when I thought I couldn't sink any lower, I do.I can't even begin to describe the misery that I've been living with everyday for the past one month. It greets me every morning when I wake up, accompanies me throughout the day, and haunts me in my dreams. It's a constant, never dying presence with me, in me. I've never felt so sad, alone, and helpless in my life before.
What triggered all this is a long story- and I don't think I want to go into too much details here- but I guess I'll summarize the essentials. If I were to really pinpoint the 2 main causes, it would be being shunned out of the blue without any explanation by my closest friends here, and then finding out that my dad's cancer had spread to his brain. It all began around mid September, when I realized that my 2 closest friends here were slowly starting to avoid me. They isolated me from our normal routine activities, like walking home from school. I knew they each had their own set of problems with me, but neither would tell me what was going on. So they just stuck together and left me out. At first I pretended nothing was wrong and just carried on life as normal, but the isolation slowly became increasingly obvious. And then one day, one of them burst on me because I'd used her hot water to take a shower. That was the day everything just went rapidly downhill. Said hot water theft victim started to completely avoid me, changing her routine around to avoid me, and wouldn't even look me in the eye if I talk to her, and wouldn't acknowledge my presence even if I walked past her. She just wore this black face whenever I was around. The other one, whom I was closer to and who actually started avoiding me first, started avoiding me even more, and would not give me a reason as to why she was behaving this way despite my repeated attempts to find out. She hemmed and hawed her way through my questions, and even though she actually did text me one night to ask if she could talk to me, she never did. After a lot of probing on my part, she gave this reason: that she was sick of me and this other guy constantly hating on each other, did I know that she soured her friendship with this guy because she was standing up for me against them, that she needed time to sort out her feelings. And after a whole lot of Skype conversation (yes, she never talked to me face to face), I still don't understand how all this is reason for her behavior.
So I felt abandoned. Deserted and isolated by my 2 closest friends here, thousands of miles away from home, I felt like I had no one here at all. I can't even begin to describe how lost and lonely I felt then. I was confused about their behavior, and no matter how much I asked, no one would tell me what was wrong, or what I did wrong. My initial confusion gave way to feelings of hurt, loneliness and abandonment, and finally a sort of despair. I despaired at the loss of our friendship, at how we suddenly became strangers to each other, when we were once such close friends. It's kind of like breaking up, but without being given an explanation as to why you've been dumped. I internalized everything, and spent countless days and nights wondering what went wrong, and what I did that was wrong. I took it upon myself, that I did something immensely unforgivable, and I felt like a horrible person. I felt like I was a bad person, because if so many people dislike you, the problem must be you, right? Within this small town I have 4 people disliking me, and these are all people that were once my close friends.I feel so hated, and I feel like I'm such a horrible person, for so many people to dislike me.
Maybe things wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't been living with the 2 of them, but the fact is that I do. And every single day I am reminded of how left out I am, how alone I've become, how destroyed our friendship was, and how I have no idea what went wrong. Maybe I'd done something wrong, maybe I haven't. But whatever the real reason was, I realized one painful fact: that they don't care enough about me as a friend to even try and work things out with me. They'd rather just avoid the real issue at hand and drop me as a friend. Easy out.
I ended up going for counseling therapy, because I knew I needed help. My paranoia, my depression, my loneliness, my crumbling sense of self-worth, they were all adding up fast and turning me into a mental wreck. I was losing it fast. Really fast. I was lucky, I have a good counselor. And therapy did help, and I was starting to do somewhat better. And then I got the news that my father's nose cancer (which he recently underwent chemotherapy and surgery for) was back. And that the tumor had gone to his brain.
I don't think I can even begin to describe how I felt at that moment when my mother broke the news to me. I remembered I started crying, but not from sadness. It was from a mixture of despair, hopelessness, grief, anxiety, fear, worry, and possibly anger. I couldn't take the reality of the situation, I refused to accept it. That evening when I went for my weekly counseling session, I completely lost it in front of my counselor. I was just sobbing and shaking throughout the session. After everything that my father had done, after all the therapies and surgeries he had underwent, the cancer still came back, and it didn't just come back- it had spread to his brain. And the thought that my father might die soon, that he might die before I graduate from school, that he might die before he gets to walk me down the aisle and carry my babies, broke something down in me.
I'm so drained. I'm so worn out by everything that's been going on. Right now, essentially, I've blocked my heart from feeling anymore. I've shut down that part of me that feels. I can't let myself feel anymore, because then I will just be a walking emotional mess. It's not the best or the right coping mechanism, I know, but it's all I can do to hang on from now till Christmas. Going about life without a heart is a hollow, empty existence, devoid entirely of meaning and emotion. You don't live anymore, you merely exist.
On the orders of my counselor, I've been taking things very slowly nowadays, being gentle with myself and minding myself a lot. I've been trying to do activities that I enjoy, activities that might make me happier. I call them my "Happy Tasks". I have a list here which I will add as I go along. They do give me something to fill the hours, and I do feel somewhat better after doing them, but I know I'm just doing them for the sake of doing them, not because I really want to.
(1) Went out for lunch and a movie with Sara
(2) Shopping in town one Saturday, and I indulged in a day of eatwhateveriwantto
(3) Salthill walk, lunch and shopping with Khalidah
(4) Friday movie in town, and I snuck in falalels and pitta bread and curry cheese fries
(5) Wednesday shopping and dinner with Khalidah
(6) Choc Biscuit Binge: ate as many chocolate biscuits as I wanted to at a go (must have ate almost 20)
I'm still struggling, my journey to recovery has barely begun. I read somewhere on a depression forum that writing about your journey helps, and because I've always loved writing, I've resolved to blog about this in the hopes that it might help me recover faster.
And before I end this, I just want to talk about one last thing. I don't think it's a right thing to do, and I know I shouldn't be doing this, but in a way I've decided that I have to in order to recover faster. I've decided to erase Jr from my life for the time being. Missing him, not hearing from him, is in a way destroying me, and making me down. And the fact is that I don't hear from him much nowadays anymore. I know he is busy, I know he is going through a lot right now, but sometimes I get angry that even though he always says he's sorry for not keeping up like he used to, it seems like he's not even making the effort to try and keep up. I know there are many things beyond his control, that the mail room could be holding his mail and that's why I'm not receiving anything, but I feel like he's not even trying to talk to me as much as before already. I hate that I'm feeling this way, but I can't deny that I am. I feel so unreasonable to want more than he can give, but I hate the feeling that it seems like he doesn't care about me as much anymore, that he's not even bothering putting in the effort to try and sustain our relationship anymore. I love and miss him so much that I hurt, and when I don't hear from him for an extended period of time I start getting paranoid and hurt. And right now, I can't deal with these feelings anymore. So for the time being, I've decided to block Jr's existence out of my life. I'm not erasing our past year together, I'm just burying it for now. We have no relationship at all. If and whenever I do hear from him, great, but if I don't, I won't keep holding out on the hope that I might soon. It's a tiring and frustrating process to wait eagerly for mail and getting your hopes dashed every single day, and I can't deal with that anymore.
It's all about me for now. Just me trying to get back on my own two feet again, and start living again.