alone

I’ve always hated being alone. Not necessarily the solitude, but the fact that there is no one else to depend on if need be. I hate being alone because I hate being responsible for things. I hate being responsible for things because I still don’t trust myself. I’m always worried I’m going to screw everything up. When you’re told for so long that you are mentally ill, an addict, or unstable, you constantly worry, “Is today the day it’s all going to fall apart? Is today the day I snap? Is today the day I relapse?” No matter what I accomplish-I’m still worried that I’m not going to be able to hold it all together on my own. It’s weird that I still have this ingrained in my head because in most situations, people look to me to be the person in charge.

I know I don’t like being alone because I have always had abandonment issues. People have always left me, or just never shown up at all. When you strive to have people love you, and they choose to live their lives without you in it, you’re always going to think that what you do isn’t good enough-that you can’t get people to stay. And, although Ian didn’t choose to leave me, there’s another person that left me. When you have abandonment issues, your self-worth is based on people wanting to be around you, and right now no one is here. Whenever my husband and I fight, he always says he wants a divorce. I know that he uses it as a fighting tactic, but for me, it just feels like someone else who is supposed to love me can just throw me away that easily, it’s a borderline cruel thing to do.

I’m struggling because I’ve been alone for weeks. My husband is out of town for work and my mother in law is summering in NY, and then I realize that I have no one left here. There’s no one in Florida that is here for me. I’m not mad at anyone, my husband is working hard for our family, and my mother-in-law deserves her retirement, but it just makes me wonder what I’m doing here. I have a few friends, but I haven’t seen anyone in months. All I do is cart the kids around and have no real life. I don’t just have no social life, I don’t have a support system to speak of. If something were to happen to me right now, there’s no where I could go, there’s no one to help me out. Part of that is my own doing, I definitely have a tendency to isolate. I isolate to protect other people. My vibe is so sad, my life is so sad, things have always been hard for me-and I just can’t bring myself to bring other people down with it. People want to care, but the travesty I’ve been through is too immense for people to actually deal with. And I do it to protect myself. It hurts when your story makes people cringe, it hurts when people can’t handle your situation. It hurts when everyone looks at you like your damaged. And honestly, I just don’t have a lot in common with other people anymore.

I’m going back to work in a few weeks and that should bring me out of my isolation. It will make me feel better to be contributing financially again, and hopefully to have conversations with people again. It just sucks, because I feel like in order to interact with people again, I just have to turn into a big phony. “Doing as good as I can be!”, “Yeah, I’m starting to feel better”, “I know Ian’s in a better place” , “I have to pretend this trivial thing matters because society tells me I have to care about certain things to be a functional human” etc… SO, even when I’m around people, I’ll still be alone in my thoughts and feelings-I can never really divulge how I truly am doing, for risk of pushing people even further away than they are now.