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.

Fear is the Mind Killer

I have no less than 20 entries queued up, but they're all crap. They're woebegotten crap. They're customer service epic fail crap. They're rambling stories that make no sense crap. I save them, shove them in the vault, and swear that I'll come back in a few hours, and edit them to something vaguely resembling coherency.

I never do. Because I'm a perfectionist, and they're crap.

All the while, the quadzillion other blogs I read keep racing past me, and 50 Shades of Fucking Grey is a bestseller.

I almost maybe totally believe that even the first draft shit I crank out is better than 50 Shades of Fucking Grey.

So. I can either:

Keep convincing myself that I'm a shit writer, and never write anything, ever. (This plan is awesome, insofar as it satisfies my Freeze instinct, which gives me that mild pleasure of base satisfaction by doing a thing that my body is naturally inclined to do when coping with difficulties, ie, nothing. It is largely a shit plan.)

Keep writing, sporadically, and burying everything I write in a poorly tagged, poorly organized slushpile where it will never see the light of day, but, hey, I WROTE things! (This plan is awesome, insofar as it satisfies my Flight instinct, where I see something wrong then scamper away in the other direction, because dealing with things is haaaaaaaard. It is also largely a shit plan.)

Publish ("publish," lol) things anyway, even if they're not perfect, because some content is better than no content? I don't know. I can't bring myself to subscribe to that one, because putting imperfect, poorly constructed entries (like this one! Oh, the irony!) out towards a bunch of internet strangers (web crawling bots) makes me feel like I'm failing. Letting someone (mostly myself) down.

I try to cram this in to last year's mantra of Do One Thing, and my brain overloads. How can I Do One Thing, when that one thing isn't good enough, isn't coherent enough? Of course, if I listened to that part of my brain while I was skating, I'd never do anything, ever.

So I'm publishing this, even though it's self indulgent and whiny, and I'm hoping that something about that action will break the gates, and allow me to start actually pushing out some of the writing that I've been doing.

It can't be worse than 50 Shades of Grey.

Try v. 1.2

What do you want to try next year? Is there something you wanted to try in 2010? What happened when you did / didn’t go for it?

Roller derby is tangible (tho, bad news, due to inventory delays I don't get my gear til January. Rats.), let's try getting a bit more esoteric, here.

Next year, I want to try failing. Not the self-sabotage sort of failing that I'm so damn good at, but rather, trying things and not liking them. Walking away from situations. Making decisions knowing that whatever I decide, it's not the end of the world.

See, I have this issue with fatalism. In my head, every decision ever made is the final one. There's no going back, no changing my mind. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.

This results in things like sticking with a job I hate, even though I'm miserable there and no good at it. Holding on to friendships even when they're not healthy for me, or stubbornly refusing to speak to old friends because of past differences, even if enough time has passed that we could, conceivably, be civil to each other. Refusing to stray from my chosen career path because, it's a path, I can't wander off of it.

Doorways don't represent possibilities to me, they lead into rooms with no windows and no way out, and the door that led me there slams shut behind me. Every decision I make, I agonize over, because there's something in me that makes me believe that I'll never have a chance to reverse it.

So, next year, I want to try failing. I want to see what it's like to not hold myself to a life choice, to walk back through an open door and try something different.

I don't particularly know how to manifest this. I just want to be able to do new things (or change old things) without them being a decision that will lock me in for the rest of my life. I want to be free from the weight of the world that has rested on my shoulders for as long as I can remember.

I'm seriously toying with the idea of a vacation semester. I've never taken time off from school (outside of breaks and graduation, anyway), I've never transferred programs. Education has always been a strictly linear engagement, and not finishing the things you start with it - I've never perceived that as an option. It's never been presented to me as one. I spent 13 years at a private school that I hated, did my undergrad in 4 years straight. (2 of those years, I hated my school and desperately wanted to leave. Did I? No. Did it work out for the best? Yes. I ended up loving it. In retrospect, I even liked my private school, and would like to send my future children somewhere similar, though not for 13 years.)

I know what the arguments against such a thing are. Just get it done. Muscle through it, crank it out, put it behind me, move on. I've been struggling so much the past few semesters, though, that I can't see how that's a good idea. I think I need to take some time off (even though the possibility of doing "nothing" terrifies me) so that I can regroup, rethink, reassess. Fail a little bit now, so I can do something spectacular later.

I don't like the feeling of not finishing something - yet when I self-sabotage, that's exactly what happens. What if, instead of backing myself into a corner, and consequently feeling awful about my inability to follow through with things, I opt-out? Take the time to finish things at my own pace, try new things, do something different?

I don't know. That route, it's new. It's foreign. It's scary. But I'm thinking, the old routes haven't been working out so well. So maybe it's time to try something different.