This Is (Actually) Why I Can't Have Nice Things

Caveat: there is a 100% chance I am writing this from a place of depression.

I didn't go to practice again tonite. It's the off season, and I don't have to go, but I should. Healthy-me knows that I like roller derby, and that roller derby makes me feel good, even when it's hard, and so, I should go.

Healthy-me is not home right now.

Needs-otters-me is in that place where practice is far, so I should stay home. Practice is independent study, and I don't do well on my own, so I should stay home. It's mostly been A team skaters showing up, and I am not A team, so I should stay home. Roller derby is for people who are capable of doing good things, for people who want things more than I do, who are better than I am, and so, clearly, I should stay home, because trying is hard and failing is easy and why leave the house when I can be the architect of my own disappointment from right here in this spot?

Thank you to ThePhotoForum user Overread for taking a bunch of really incredible pictures of really sad looking otters.

And, hey, since I stayed home, thus satisfying my terrible proof of only good people go to practice, I did not go to practice, I am not a good person, how about I just spend the rest of the night self-flagellating? That seems like a good idea, right? Of course it does.

I have a tendency (it's not a tendency, tendency implies that it only happens sometimes, this is a course of thought that I have roughly 100% of always) to believe that I am not worthy of good things. "Good things" is a catch-all term, but it often includes things like a base level of happiness, proper nutrition, and access to healthcare/medication. Without even looking at what wider circles of that clearly flawed logic include, it causes me to exist in cycles where I deny myself access to things that I should not be denying myself - my anxiety meds, decent meals, anything one could deem a "luxury" - in an effort to satisfy the part of my lizard brain that is more concerned with being right than being healthy. (My lizard brain is a jackass.) (I almost said dick, but I am making a concerned effort to remove gendered insults from my lexicon. Note to self, keep working on that.)

Which brings me to the point of why I opened my computer - I don't want to keep satisfying my lizard brain. Because it is a jackass. I want to figure out how to keep myself in check, to hold myself outside of that base instinct that I do not deserve nice things (kind things, healthy things, things that make my life more tolerable), and to not fall in to its clutches. I want to take my anxiety meds, even if I don't feel like I need them, because they don't just stop my anxiety after it ramps up, they are useful in preventing those feels in the first place. I want to go to practice, even if it's hard and I suck and I'm still afraid that I won't make Brawlers again, because I like roller derby. And because two shitty hours on the track are still better than two shitty hours sitting at home feeling shitty about myself. Because I understand that while the act of denial is in itself a trigger for the pleasure center, it is a terrible one, and there have got to be better ways of indulging those synapses.

I made a Facebook post vaguely about this last week, in an effort to hold myself accountable and not do the thing I just did all over again (skip practice and feel shitty about it.) Will writing a blog post about it help? Probably not. But writing out why I do these things to myself at least sucks a little bit of how terrible I feel about myself out of my insides, and that's helpful. Sort of. Take your meds, Marissa.