I’m struggling to cope with every day life because of lots of different things. I don’t really know where to begin explaining my problems, as there are a lot and they don’t all happen all of the time. I thought if I list them, and group them into there frequency it might make it clearer.
The things that happen day to day:
• I can’t make friends or keep friends, because I worry that I’m not good enough to be there friend so I try far too hard and end up doing stupid things. These stupid things can be getting drunk and then getting upset or simply going over the top and making a spectacle of myself which pisses off the people I’m with who then don’t want me to be around them anymore. Or I do things that I think are helping which might be that I go out of my way to help people and get nothing in return which I then resent or I interfere in things that are none of my business which always causes friction for the people I think I’m helping and then when they get angry with me and tell me they want nothing more to do with me I get angry and defensive because I can’t see that what I’m doing is wrong. And then I think that they are just nasty people that judge me.
• I can’t concentrate on things, at home I’ll be watching a film, a TV programme or something and in the middle of it I just get up and walk off to do something random and unimportant. I then come back to the thing I was watching only to have no idea what’s going on. I then turn it over to something else and repeat the process. In addition to this I also can’t just do one thing at once, if I’m sitting in the living I’ll have a magazine, catalogue, writing material (for stories that I start and never finish) and I’ll also have the TV on watching a programme and in the space of a couple of hours I will have sifted through everything in front of me at least twice. Without having taken any of it in.
• I day dream, constantly. Even though I’m in a very happy relationship I day dream that I someone famous and important that’s very intelligent, talented and very pretty. I imagine that my famous self is married to someone else famous. I imagine the type of clothes this couple would both wear, the type of house they live in and the possessions they would own. I imagine that she is this big wonderful person that is herself around everyone and everyone still loves her for it. These daydreams can then take over my entire day, at work I’ll drift back to this daydream on and off all day long, and then on the way home I’m still day dreaming about this other life. Other times I might not be day dreaming about being someone else, just day dreaming about a better more successful version of me, that out dose everyone who’d ever been mean to me. For example I’d be thinner, I’d be in a highly successful well paid job, and we’d have a bigger better house and cars. And I’d have good friends who want to spend time with me. All of these daydreams I have I also talk to myself about when I’m home alone. Like I’ll sit in the mirror and have a conversation with myself where I’m the famous person or just the better version of me. Or I’m pretending I’m someone else and I’m talking about the more famous or just the better me.
• I over analyze every situation I’m confronted with, if I pass someone I know in the street and they don’t say hi I’m worried I’ve done something to upset them, if I don’t have contact with my sisters or family for a while I think it’s because they don’t like me and don’t want to talk to me. If I have an argument with my fiancée I over analyze it and turn it into something far bigger than it is. I over analyze myself. And am very self critical. On a low day this means I think I’m fat ugly and a nasty person that everyone avoids in the street. I go through phases of using alcohol to suppress this over analysis. I also use alcohol to sometimes help enhance my daydreams because the part of my brain that’s telling me it isn’t real goes quiet when I drink alcohol.
• I’ll go through stages of being very tired, regardless of how much sleep or little sleep I’ve had where I just can’t do anything this then has a knock on affect because I won’t want to tidy the house or do the food shopping or walk the dog and my fiancé calls me lazy for it but I hate it when he does because I’m just really tired and everything is an effort.
• I also don’t like taking or making phone calls at home. At work I’m fine no problem because there not to do with me they are work but at home I’ll use all other phones of communication before I phone up and I can answer my mobile because I already know who’s on the other end of the phone but if I don’t recognise the number I won’t answered it. And if we are in the car and my fiancé is driving and his phone rings and he asks me to answer it I panic. Even when I can clearly see it’s someone I know like his mum or one of his sisters. I don’t know if it’s the same thing but I also don’t like ordering drinks/or food from the bar of the pub we are in. I can do it if I have no choice and am on my own but when I’m with my fiancé he always orders it because I don’t like doing it. He calls me lazy for it but it’s not me being lazy I just for some reason don’t like it. I worry that I’m going to make a mistake in what I order or that I don’t have enough money on me to pay for what I’ve ordered. In addition to this I’m always checking and re checking money. If I’m in the queue at the supermarket or in any shop I check my purse for money or card at least a dozen times before I get to the till and then I get butterflies in my stomach just before the till person tells me the total in case I don’t have enough, if I’m using my card I will triple check my pin number before entering it even though I know it of by heart and then I get nervous until the receipt starts printing off meaning that ,my card is accepted.
Things that happen from time to time:
• I go through phases of not sleeping. My eating habits, drinking habits or working habits have not effect on this either. But I’ll go through months at a time of just not sleeping.
• During the sleepless periods of time I also find that my mind over reacts. When lying in my bed I’ll start imagining that the bed is tipping my up and I’m falling down into some kind of hole. Or that there a small child I don’t recognise sitting in the corner of my bedroom just staring at me and laughing. I’ve also heard my dead Nan calling me a couple of times. I also imagine that objects in the bedroom and moving on there own accord. Or that there’s a grizzly monster inches from me. During all of these things I’ll also not be able to move my body at all, I’ll try and try but I just can’t move. I also get a ringing in my ears, like a high pitched sort of noise that makes me shudder. All of this happens in the time when I can’t sleep.
• Real low moods. I’ll have periods of time where I just can’t find anything to be happy about. It might be triggered by stress at work or difficulties in family relationships of friendships but it always equates to intensified daydreams in the hope of knocking me into being happy again.
• I also get urges to do silly things. Not terrible things but sometimes I’ll be holding a plate in my hand and I’ll have this urge to just smash it on the floor. I’ve also had an urge to reveal personal things about myself to strangers. Or I’ve had urges to tell other peoples secrets that I might know. Or I’ll have the urge to just leave, pack some things and just leave this can be with my fiancée or it can be without him if it’s after an argument. All these things are things I’ve never actually done. But the ones that I have acted upon are: After a colleague at work totally blanked me I felt this urgent need to tell my boss immediately. So the second I got home I sent her an email detailing what I thought of the colleague that annoyed me and also what everyone else though of her (which was actually true but not my place to say). This urge I had I also totally believed that I was doing a good thing by telling her, and when I found out that my boss had told everyone about the email I went ballistic. I was horrible to the person who told me, and deleted them all off my face book in a vain attempt to separate myself from them all. I sent the email 2 before left of the notice I’d given as I’d secured full time position with another company. As a result of this they all hate me, and I’ve also made things awkward for other friends whom both I know and some of the people I used to work with know. Another urge I acted upon was quitting jobs without finding other jobs first. All three times I did this it was in jobs I wasn’t enjoying that weren’t horrific I just didn’t enjoy them, and all three times I’d worked myself up so much that one day I broke down in tears and just couldn’t make myself go to work, and then just never went back.
• Food. I will go through phases of eating to much, then not eating enough. This isn’t something I do on purpose; I only know I do it because my fiancé notices it. This also goes for drink. Like I’ll go through a phase where I have to be constantly drinking coffee, or tea or water. It also goes for wine. I’ll go through phases where I have to drink wine. Whether it’s after work or on days off and my reason will always be because I’ve had a bad day or because of had a good day or just because it’s my day off. Again this comes and goes. With all these food and drink phases I’ll have them for about 2 weeks and then they just sort of stop without me even knowing I’m doing it.
Things that have only happened once:
• Suicidal thoughts. I went through a phase where I believed that everyone would be better off without me. In that time period I nearly gave myself alcoholic poisoning. I also drank disinfectant in the hope of making myself ill. I also tried to kill myself by over dosing on a range of pills. But I didn’t actually take very many because my throat closed up and I physically couldn’t take anymore. During this phase I also imagined being run over, or being on a bus that’s in a horrific accident or having some kind of accident at school. This phase lasted about 3 months when I was 15.
• Eating Disorder. I was really unhappy when I was 15-19 and in that time period I made myself believe that if I was thin I’d be happy. So I starved myself until I was very thin, then one day I decided I was thin enough and began to over eat. I couldn’t stop myself from eating. I gained weight, and then gained more than my original weight that I was before anorexia. So I felt even worse and by then I couldn’t stop eating so I decided to make myself sick, only I couldn’t make myself sick so I took laxatives, and I drank vinegar and I also drank large quantities of alcohol hoping to make myself sick. This lasted about 5 months and the suicidal thoughts were during this phase. I actually realised I had a problem and told my dad who helped me by going to the doctors and getting referred to an eating disorder specialist.
That is pretty much it. I have no real friends because of all these things, I’m very lucky to have a fiancé who loves me despite all these things and I don’t live near enough to my family for them to be effected because I moved away at 19 to have my own space and haven’t moved back since. What I want is to stop all of this, I want to be able to learn what hobbies and past times I’d actually like to do instead of trying to like things other people like to that they will like me for it, I’d like to make friends and keep them without messing it up and actually being myself and I’d like to enjoy my life because right now I’m struggling and it’s tearing me apart. I don’t know why I do any of the above, I can see what I’ve done after the fact and I mean a long time after the fact but I just can’t seem to recognise that I’m doing it in the first place. I’m afraid of myself right now, I’m afraid that if I don’t change it I’ll end up pushing everyone away and have nothing to show for my life but a lot of regrets and loneliness.
