Tag: Coping

Posted in Adventures in Love

If You Love Me, I’ll (still) Hate Myself

Posted on by Lizzie Gomez

Damn. I feel like I have been able to avoid writing for so long now. I don’t even know why, but it has been a point of pride for the last several months to not word vomit all over this blog anymore. I guess in a sense it felt like I had resolved all my issues or at the very least they weren’t overwhelming enough that I had to put them all out of my head. It felt like I could or was able to handle them if I kept them inside, contained and pushed down. But fine! I give up. I give in. Here I am.

Now, not a lot has changed. Although so much has since the last time I posted anything here. But this is not about that. YouTube channel did well until life happened and I stopped making it a priority. A lot of that has happened since then. It feels as if life is just a formality at this point. I don’t know what to do with it and often I feel guilty about that. I feel guilty about a lot of things. Darn, I really do not type as fast as I used to. That’s frustrating. But I am a much better speller, I suppose. Welp that’s making me mess up. Okay, tangent. Stop that. Anyway…

One big thing I feel guilty about is semi new. Since having a partner that seemingly loves me and cares about me, I feel guilty at times for wanting love and attention because it feels like I want things done or solved for me in a sense. It feels like a free pass to continue with my horrible coping mechanisms and ignore whatever is bothering me. Especially when it comes to my good ol’ pal self hatered. That’s a really easy one to fall back on.

And usually- when I was in a better state of mind- I would sing or read or something constructive to work these feelings out or – shocker!- I’d actually sit with my feelings, write it out, and then do something to directly work on it. For example, the problem I keep coming back to and continue to ignore is about my self image and how much I dislike it. Recently…over the past year or more, I have been ignoring it and just letting it get worse over time. Pretty easy when I have someone who embraces me and actively wants me to get out of that mind set. It’s easy when there is someone else there to forgive my mess ups and terrible coping mechanisms.

Which makes it so much easier to cope with things in the worst possible way for the problem. Maybe this is the masochist in me speaking, but I think I do better, and maybe most people do to a certain extent, when there are consequences. I mean, for what I’m abstractly talking about now, if I hate myself and my body and my natural catastrophic reaction to this is to binge eat and talk negatively about myself then this makes me feel bad then….eventually….I get to a point where I can’t take the self abuse any longer and I make a ton of radical changes and if I somehow am able to pace myself and make these things gradual, I have successfully been able to make real meaningful changes in how I see myself and how I handle my issues. Something in that mechanism is obviously broken and has been broken long before I found someone that is much more forgiving of me than myself, but I don’t really have the time or energy to go into that right now.

What I want to explore is the idea that since I’ve been in a relationship, this cycle is even more foreign and unknown and tumultuous. Nowadays if I absolutely hate myself and everything I do/every glimpse in a mirror or other horrific self reflective media, I have someone there to tell me …..ugh, not that my self hatred isn’t true. well. Actually maybe yeah. Maybe that’s exactly what is happening. I feel a certain way about myself which is largely negative and I’m being told by someone I love and trust the complete opposite. I obviously do not believe it myself, but I believe that my partner believes it. And that is usually enough to ahhh I don’t want to say invalidate my feelings, because that sounds mean and wrong and completely the opposite of what any loving partner is trying to do…but maybe that’s part of it.

It sounds absurd, but that’s pretty much what is happening. I say, “I’m disgusting” only to be told that, “no, [I’m] not”. It’s a direct contradiction and the strange, trippy thing about this is it becomes a trust thing. Who’s point of view do I trust more? Often times, it ends up being anyone’s point of view but mine….. So, does that mean I am the one invalidating myself?! *sigh

You see? This is why I don’t- didn’t- I guess still almost wish I hadn’t come here to write. Why I’ve been avoiding it. Other than I also think my writing must suck now, since I am so out of practice when even so, I didn’t think highly of my writing to begin with. Gosh. This is the cycle. I think it’s a cycle at least. I hope it still is. Like I was saying: self hatred leads to emotional rock bottom leads to taking steps out of the ditch leads to improvement with my self worth leads to tripping over obstacles leads to tumbling down leads to harder and harder to ignore self hatred because that never really went away, just the behaviors stemming from it being manhandled into healthier actions which ultimately leads to the cycle repeating.

With someone who loves me I feel like I get stuck at the bottom. Feeling emotionally at rock bottom, but being told I’m not there and trusting the other person about that, because logically I know I’m not really the scum of the earth. But in not fully and completely hating myself like I am used to my infinitely messed up mind can not comprehend that it’s time to start climbing out of the ditch. So I stay.

I guess moral of the story is I don’t know who to let myself be loved. I take love– no! I can’t even take the love. I– love is in my life and somehow it’s like oil and water or maybe more like mixing all the paints together to make a grotesque murky color. Love and I don’t mix. I don’t know how to take love and grow with it.

And this is what I was afraid of. This. I have so much to do to get to a point where I even tolerate myself- let alone love myself. And I was on my way there. It’s awful to the mainstream sense of love, because I was really enjoying getting to know myself and working on being kind to myself, but I just have not taken the time to do that since having someone else in my life to love. That sounds stupid, but it’s true. It’s also fucking sad when the person you hate- and thus have immense difficulty loving- is you.

I think that’s it. I don’t know how to give anyone going through the same thing hope. I’m not mentally in a space for that. I wish it was as simple as people make it seem. *fake super positive voice: Yeah! Just love yourself, eat healthy, be active, laugh with friends! BLEH. It’s not. Once again, I’m sorry I tend to only come on here one in a blue moon and also usually only to share the grim thoughts on my mind. I don’t know what will happen from here on out. Will I ever not hate myself for more than a couple months at a time? (if that!) I don’t know. I hope so. But even if I do it’s not necessarily something I can teach anyone else. I wish it was. Maybe I wouldn’t be on here trying to decipher it for myself or anyone else who has the time and, for whatever reason, desire to read my word spittle. Anyway….good luck to us all, I guess.

Posted in Texas- Living with Parents

Fall 2019- Being Sad then Doing Something About It (Overall Summary of the First Six Months since Moving Back in with my Parents After 5 Years Away at University and Such)

Posted on by Lizzie Gomez

A lot has happened since summer when I wrote my last “weekly” blog, haha…… so before posting that this weekend, this is the shortest version I could bring myself to write about the highlights (and lowlights) of the last six months since I’ve moved back in with my parents.

 

Lots of Sadness with One Glimmer of Happiness for someone else, not me (of course!)

Continue reading “Fall 2019- Being Sad then Doing Something About It (Overall Summary of the First Six Months since Moving Back in with my Parents After 5 Years Away at University and Such)” →

Posted in Personal Poetry Collection

Guide me Away from Here – Personal Poetry Collection

Posted on by Lizzie Gomez

I’m going a bit insane here. My licensure exam is in four days from the time I write this and though life has gotten much better since I moved back home about six months ago, I feel as though if I fail this exam… I feel that if I pass it, I can say this half a year of moping and, frankly, recovering from the time away were worth something. If I fail… that just confirms my fears that I’m a waste of space and ultimately a burden on my family.

It’s unbelievable how much support I’ve gained in those five years. My life and myself changed drastically and (mostly) for the better.  I have some amazing people behind me, but recently, I’ve been thinking about the first friend who believed in me. I call him AJ on this blog. He was my first and best mentor, in the truest sense of the word. I meant to pay tribute to him in my previous post, but got a bit off topic. He told me to never stop sharing my poetry, so here you go… for AJ.

 

Guide me Away from Here

December 22, 2019

2:48 AM

Papers, pens, and practice.

I’d rather toss some dice,

but a friend told me twice

(at least), “We aren’t mice.

Work past your vice

and cut yourself off a slice

of success. Being nice

is for the lice.

 

You are wise.

Youth only a guise.

So, pick a bigger fight!

Someone your size,

now that would be a sight.”

 

 

He is right.

Yet, on this height

lays my kite

string binding me tight.

Posted in Uncategorized

My Experience with Self Harm (Don’t Worry, I’m a Wimp)

Posted on by Lizzie Gomez

It Started Again with a Zit

I had this monstrous zit, almost on the tip of my nose, this past week. I’m talking massive, like the size of a reasonable thumbtack. A zit that my roommate kept bugging me to pop. I have a bit of a problem with picking, so I’d been restraining myself from doing that. Plus, I know every time I’ve popped a zit in my life, it’s gotten worse and taken longer to heal than when I’ve left it alone and let it go away on its own.

He kept bugging me about it. I popped it while he was asleep. Pus oozed out. Then blood. A lot of blood. I felt there had to be more pus. Why was there so much blood? I wanted all of it out. Like when I pick at an ingrown hair with a needle until I manage to get it out. I needed all the pus out of this enormous zit. So, I told myself not to, but I got out my pack of needles. And I start stabbing holes into this blemish then squeezing out more blood.

Eventually, some clear liquid comes out, but it’s still mostly blood. I keep picking with the needle, going around this slow forming blood clot and squeezing until only the tiniest drop of clear liquid is struggling to come out. It was oddly satisfying to pick at my face with the needle. Sometimes it hurt, but at the tip of this zit I couldn’t feel anything and managed to essentially pierce from one side of the zit to the other. I pulled up, but the skin I’d pierced was too thick to rip apart. I was slightly paranoid my roommate would wake up and find me with a needle to my nose, and the two bloody tissues smeared with blots of blood. He was sleeping naught two feet away from me, but he didn’t wake.

I’d Wanted to Cut, At First, but I’m More of a Picker

I’ve always thought myself a pansy for not being brave enough to cut myself. The two times I’ve tried it, I couldn’t commit. I was too scared. But, I like seeing the blood when I’ve picked at ingrown hairs on my legs in the past. Now this with my nose. I had another instance where I got something stuck in the palm of my hand. I think I fell on the sidewalk or something which pushed some rock or metal into the palm of my hand.

Thing was, there was this diminutive, pathetic bit of something lodged in my palm and I was extremely stressed with the stuff in my life. This was last fall, by the way. So, it was my first semester of my nutrition internship.  That was awful. One day, my roommate, seeing how stressed out of my mind I was, asked if he could do anything to help and what did I want? I wanted to borrow his thin, precise tweezers to get this stupid thing out of my palm. I did manage to get it out. Or I thought I did.

A few days later I went in again, with his tweezers (and then my needle when that didn’t work) to get some black stuff out of the same spot where I swore I’d already taken out the foreign object. Looking back, I’m almost certain that second thing I agonized about, and near surgically removed with my needle, was a blood clot. It just bothered me so much. I didn’t want a marred palm! Especially from something as stupid as falling! It was deep. I thought I might be giving myself a scar with how far I drove that needle into my skin. But I couldn’t stop.

I needed the stuff out of my hand! At one point it did hurt, but I needed it out. My vision was laser focused on that one point in my palm and everything else was blurry. The world didn’t seem real when I turned away from my hand after the job was done. It felt… amazing. Satisfying. I get that way when picking at my legs. I’ve never picked without a purpose. Ingrown hair, thing jammed into my hand or, now, giant zit on my face. But… it worries me that I’ve found a way to make myself bleed that doesn’t scare me.

 

“We all do things”

I’ve been tempted by self harm for years, but like I said, I’m too much of a scardy cat for that. Also, I don’t like the concept of scars. I don’t want to be reminded of how much I hate myself everytime I look at my skin. I don’t like marks or imperfections on my skin, as you guys can probably tell from the hand picking story. So, cutting just never added up for me.

But, as a character in my favorite book, Cut by Patricia McCormick, says, “we all do things”.  Yes, we all find a way to cope with our miserable existence. Some people cut, some people drink, some people work even harder.  I binge eat, sing, and recently, sleep. As calming as picking is, I don’t want it to become a thing. It doesn’t bother me, but I know it’s understandably gruesome. I don’t know what I’m saying anymore. I just wanted to vent about having a big zit on my nose. And it turned into a whole post. Gosh. I suck.

 

Note:

Wow. Okay. It’s a day later, but it feels like much more than that. Sorry if that upset anyone. I am not promoting self harm, just sharing my not so disapproving personal experiences on the topic. I understand self harm isn’t ideal or a good coping strategy. I’m very stressed at the moment and find it hard to make sense. I’m not taking the post down, because it’s more of my story as jumbled and nonsensical as it was written. Also, I’m having a really hard time writing for this blog and a post is a post. Yeahh, sorry again.