these are the things that get me down in y life in simple bullet points:
Not really knowing who I am.
-- Posted by Hi Carie at 5:55 am on May 21, 2008
Hey, It seems to me that several of those points are related. You need to work on your self esteem and the rest of it will start to sort itself out.
I have heard you talk about this Catherine girl alot. You need to let it go. If it is meant to be, it is meant to be, if not, then there is someone else out there for you, more fish in the sea and all that jazz. You cannot spend the rest of your life chasing after someone who ooes not want you.
Before people will like you, you have to like yourself. I know that is a cliche, but it is true as well. As long as you appear to be down on yourself, and desperately searching for people to like you, people will be turned off by you.
-- Posted by hithere at 3:09 pm on May 22, 2008
i would guess that you're trying too hard. exerting yourself an awful lot to make everything perfect within the circumstances.
it's a good thing you noted that you don't really know yourself, or i would've said it for you. that's probably the cause of everything else. you can't figure out what you care about nor of what you're capable, so you just go along with everything almost blindly. dive into one thing after another and attempt to balance it all by switching between all of them and giving an unsatisfactory effort. it eventually becomes too much for you. you can't deal with all of it to such an extent when you don't even know where it's gonna take you. of course, i can't read you like a book, but i assume this's what's going on with you because it's a pretty common trend.
so focus on that last bullet point and forget directly improving the other issues/situations you listed. i think you'll see some hope, and you can build off of that. think about yourself, think about why you do things and why you don't do things, think about why you care about things, predict what would happen if you stopped trying, question whether you ever deceive yourself. and don't let up: think about thinking about yourself. you should always be able to have a basis of introspection and eventually a slightly better understanding. you might tire yourself out with thinking, but you can stop and you'll always still have learned something.
i'm not just being lame and giving you the easy answer. you can really get somewhere on your own.
how about that?
-- Posted by ElephantStone at 3:20 pm on May 22, 2008
see, i was myself with catherine, and i just didnt give a fuck, literally, i drove fast, i drank a lot and i started on drugs, i was carefree, i was funny and i loved myself, i didnt care what anyone else though because i only cared about what catherine thought. the peopl at work didnt treat me any differently than anyone else anywhere else. Ive realided that it was catherine that was the result of it, and the effects stayed wih me till i went back to school in september.
-- Posted by britishguy at 12:06 pm on May 25, 2008
Okay, I am bound to miss some stuff and forget some stuff here, because I literally didn't know who you were until pretty recently. I've had my own shit to deal with lately and all the time I've spent at LW I've either been moderating, updating my own topics in the mod forum and here in the serious forum or I've been helping people on eHelp - where I spend most of my time.
So basically I spent yesterday evening reading through all your topics and trying to get everything in my head, but some of it is bound to fall out and shit, so we'll see how this goes!
"Catherine/not finding a girl i like"
This is a huge one for you isn't it? And I am not going to reply to it in full here because I really want to go back through and bump some of your old topics to add replies there (I don't care about bumping - you haven't resolved the issues and it's better to bump than make new topics about them - people bump for far more stupid reasons).
You can't find a girl you like because you haven't let go of Catherine. Is that stating the obvious? Do you realise that already? How could you find a girl you like? I mean from what I've read I gather you've had at least one rebound girl who you met at the music festival and who you fucked and such and that was partly because she reminded you of Catherine and then you've had Claire who is nothing Like Catherine, actually seems more compatible for you - nice car and great looks, etc - but who you can't seem to muster up any real interest in. That basically right?
I find the thing with Claire particularly interesting because you seem to recognise that she's a great girl and someone that you should have an interest in. Hell she even has a nice car(!). So what's stopping you? Catherine, Catherine, Catherine. Like you said in your topic on Claire, the best you see is that Claire is a route to get closer to Catherine again.
You're seriously lacking closure on Catherine. I mean you never actually really got opened did you? I'm not saying that to make fun of you either. I know people have slated you because you basically never even kissed Catherine, but all the same your feelings for her were fairly intense and ultimately I don't give a flying fuck what other people say about whether you had a right to those feelings or not - you felt them and that's that. Emotionally speaking, you opened up a relationship with this woman in your heart and in your mind and yet you (1) never actually physically opened up that relationship and (2) never received any sort of closure when that relationship was terminated "prematurely" and without warning. Really I don't understand why people can't relate to how that's fucked with your mind. It seems pretty obvious to me. If I met a girl, went on a few dates, never really kissed her but felt led to believe that there was more to come, and then one day she just said "ciao" and drove off never to be seen again then I would feel fucked in the head - especially if I was besotted by her. I know that's not quite what happened here, but I'm trying to relate you your perception of the events, not what physically happened in the real world.
So anyhoo, you have no closure form this woman. You felt led on by her and you got your mind all excited and your heart all excited about the possibility of having a relationship with her and now you're left hanging there with no idea whether she even ever liked you or WHAT. I mean you have no idea what she really thought. And to boot you feel small because it seems like her friends are laughing at you and stopping you from even getting that closure.
Part of you still feels for Catherine. Part of you is mad with Catherine. Part of you wants to move on, e.g. with Claire. You describe yourself in places as being at war with yourself and this is just one example of why you feel that way. You're pulling in all different directions at once. I know other people have said this to you but I'm going to say it as well: You have to finish this Catherine thing one way or another. If you can't bring yourself to talk to her then write to her. You know where she is for the summer now, right? Well write her a letter then. Give it to her by hand if you have to and then run as fast as you can as far as you can. Tell her everything. Tell her how much you loved her company when you worked in Londis. Tell her how much you hoped you could go out with her. Tell her you were hurt because someone told you she had a boyfriend and you didn't know whether to believe it. Explain to her that you have met other girls since then and they just don't seem to compare to her. Ask her to write back and explain whether she ever had any feelings for you and if there is any chance of hooking up sometime. Ask her what she thought of you. DO IT. Tell her to write back to you because you don't want to embarrass her by having to talk to you in person.
Make sure that you include the bit about seeing other girls and them not comparing to her. I say that because right now, if you look at things from Catherine's perspective, she probably thinks you're a stalker or something. I'm not being mean, I just want you to turn this around in your mind and see things form her perspective. I mean you spent a lot of time hanging round her at work, and basically flirting with her, then you got her number and made a couple of phone-calls, and since then you've had a hard time letting her go and you keep bumping into her. You even go into her shop to buy breakfast and shit. I know that's because it's the only place that's open and everything, but seriously, does SHE know that? Do her friends know that? I doubt it. So in this letter you have to make your actions clear. You have to tell her that you never meant to make her feel uncomfortable. You have to tell her that you never meant to always be around - it's just a small town and things kind of worked out that way.
You say that you've tried to pluck up the balls to talk to her but you bottle out, so do this - write the letter. You're an articulate guy - at least in writing - and you can do this. Re-write it. Think it over. Keep to the points I've mentioned and if there are other things you want to say - like an explanation for the nightclub incident - then add the,, but make sure you have a list of things you want to say beforehand and stick to those. Don't ramble on or you'll lose her. And get her to write you a reply. Then all you have to do is post it or hand it to her personally if you want to be sure she gets it and then run a mile. Over.
Then you get some sort of closure. Maybe what she says will make you feel mad with her. Great - you can move on. Maybe she'll actually show an interest. Maybe she'll at least give you the closure you need to finally say that this was just never going to work. It's at least worth a try because what you're doing right now is not working.
My other advice to you about the girl thing is that you try going out with some girls - e.g. Claire - even if you are just going through the motions. Get to know them. You seem to be using Catherine and your experience with her as your template for any meaningful relationship. I was head over heels for my first girlfriend, Kate, and we didn't do anything except go on a couple of dates. We never even kissed. I was still head over heels for her months after we broke up and stopped talking. When I met Louise it took me two or three weeks to ask her out and even then it was a month before we even kissed (our fourth date). So it took like six weeks from meeting her to kissing her. I mean I know I was only 14 and you've fucked other girls in their twenties before but we're not talking about sex here - we're talking about relationships. I get the feeling that though sex is pretty familiar to you relationships aren't. Maybe you need some practice at that whole part of things and maybe you'd do well to just go out with some girls and actually get to know them and shit in a different way. I think that might really benefit you. You don't have to use them - tell them that you want to take things slow and get to know them because you had a hard time with one girl and you think your mistake was that you didn't really get to know her well enough. Just try and work on building relationships instead of seeing them as purely lustful encounters.
It's interesting because you say you don't believe in love at 17/18 and yet you are unwilling to really explore a relationship with a girl unless there is some real chemistry going on there. I doesn't hurt to explore does it? No-one's asking you to jump into her bed and fuck her like a goddess and then declare your undying love for her all in one night. Just get to know them on a one to one basis, learn to be mentally intimate. There were times with Louise when we went through patches with no sex for ages. That wasn't a problem though because we always had mental intimacy and sometimes that can be just as involving. I think you're scared of that and I think it would help you to get over Catherine if you could start to just explore that side of women and forget the whole sex part for the time being - or unless you find someone who you really do connect with.
"This whole self-loathing thing i have going on"
I really sympathise for you here. Where to start? When I was 11 I wanted to kill myself. I believed my family wanted me dead and that my death would be a blessing to so many people. I dreamt about them killing me and I genuinely believed they were poisoning my food or something. I loathed myself for being a horrible, shitty, evil child who ruined my family's existence. I blamed myself for everything. I hadn't been to school properly in well over a year. I was a complete failure, at only 11. That was self loathing round 1.
I did just about pull my life together for a long while and then I met Louise and things really started to pick up. I found the strength to really fight for what I wanted, and that was Louise, good grades in my exams and a good university place. I ended up with all A*s and As at GCSE, and then straight As in my A levels. I could have gone to Oxbridge but I chose not to because I wanted to make sure Louise and I got into the same university. I sued the money I'd saved since I was 13 to set us up with a flat in Sussex and furniture and shit and we were happy. I even helped her take her father to court because he was trying to stop her from going to uni with me by withholding financial support she had been promised by a court order made five years prior during her parents divorce.
You would think that made me quite successful, no? I mean I was doing a degree that less than twenty people in the university got on to. I had a wife, a good relationship (see the pictures in my Image Basket in the album called "Louise") and I seemed to have "made it" academically despite missing two years of school and being suicidal at 11. But by the last year of uni I felt like a failure. I began to comfort eat, I put on weight, my grades started to drop (in the most important year!), and I began to neglect my wife. I was finally safe and I could stop fighting, and now all these feelings form the past to do with physical abuse in my childhood and the family that I had run away from to come to Sussex were coming back into my mind and haunting me. As long as I had been fighting I was able to keep them out, but now they were free to start coming to mind. As the depression got more severe I hated myself for what was happening to me and the way I was treating my wife as well and I got stuck in a vicious, downward spiral. I shut myself off from the world because I was scared of leaving academia. I was scared of other people seeing how depressed I was and I was ashamed. I thought they would reject me. I ruined my wife's life by controlling her because I wanted to just isolate us and make it "us against the world" like it always used to be - but she wanted to be part of the world. And every day as I saw this happening I loathed myself even more. In January I told my wife all of this. I cried and cried because it hurt so much. "You don't know what it's like being me," I said to her.
"You don't know what it's like to wake up in the morning and feel like you don't belong on the earth, like you're a mistake, like you're just a complete fucking failure of a man. I'm not like you, I'm not like your friends or like other people, I'm fucking useless and I just want to live my life in as little pain as possible until it's over."
Does that convince you that I can at least relate to what you describe as self-loathing, even if I don't understand your particular life, your particular causes and feelings? Does it help you feel just a little less alone, just a little less like this is some deficit in your character that only you possess?
Yes, it sucks. It really fucking sucks. All I can tell you is that there was a time when I didn't loathe myself. There was a time when Louise married me when I felt that I was achieving something with my life and actually had something to share with her. I guess what I'm trying to say is that even people like us can like ourselves given the right circumstances, but I understand how hard it is.
I can relate to what you say frequently about Catherine making you feel invincible. I can understand what you might mean when you say that Catherine made you feel happy with yourself. Louise had that effect on me. Ever since we first met I feel I got something from her that somehow made me more complete. When I started to suffer from depression I relied on Louise to prop me up. When I loathed myself it was knowing that she was there next to me every morning that gave me the strength to get up and get through another day. Knowing that she was coming home that night made it possible to get through the day. Her love and her support kept me going when I felt like a failure and when I felt inadequate.
I think to some extent you're doing a similar thing. You are very preoccupied with what other people think of you. You spend a lot of time talking about what Catherine thinks, what her friends think, what people on Livewire think, what your real-life acquaintances think, etc., and I think because of that you put a lot of your well being into other people's hands. If they think well of you - or better still, if someone like Catherine seems to really adore you - then you feel good about yourself. But if they don't seem to like you, if there's no-one in your life to really give you that ego boost, then you loathe yourself.
You're like a mirror reflecting other people's perceptions of you. The problem with that is that the second you get any negative responses form people they feed back into you an make you feel negative about yourself and that in turn causes you to act more negatively, which the causes other people to view you even more negatively, and thus you perpetuate this downward spiral of self loathing. Add to that the fact that you are not like a true mirror - you are more like a distorted fun fair mirror that doesn't always reflect reality - and you have some real problems.
I'm guessing you feel worthless in some respects (I wouldn't mind betting that has something to do with your father's treatment of you) and that this is the reason for your dependency on other people's opinion of you. You know, your father made you feel like crap but everyone at school seemed to like you so you learned to find recognition and acceptance in others. Any of that ring true? You see that's what I did, but with me it was academia. I felt worthless because of the way my mother treated me so I sought refuge and self worth in the one thing that ever rewarded me or got me recognition - academia. Then when the end of uni approached - BAM! My security blanket was gone and I had to resort to my wife to make me feel worthwhile instead. You have to try and start to recognise your own self worth though - your own talents and your own innate value. You can't keep living your life based on what other people think of you. You have to start to respect your own abilities and gifts and from what I read of you, you seem to have a wealth of those if only you would recognise them! I mean, you bear a resemblance to Timothy Dalton, you look older than you are, you can socialise, even if that backfires on you sometimes, you can clearly pull girls, you have an independent spirit even at a young age (I gather that from your travelling to festivals and such) and you are artistic, intelligent and articulate. Sure those are all things that can backfire and cause you various problems as you've told me in PMs, but they are also things that you can direct to your advantage. If you stop and actually take hold of your assets and use them to serve you instead of letting yourself be beaten around by the current of other peoples opinions then you could really use those things to give yourself a sense of achievement and direction.
"My family - being awkward, slagging me off, restricting the way i think and my beliefs, and embarassing me."
Get out of there. That's my answer. Go to college and get out of there. Right now your family may well be your family but you have a life ahead of you to think about. Right now you have to focus on laying the foundations for a life that is better than the one you have known. Your life is not going to be given to you on a silver platter. You have to work hard for it and you have to start today because otherwise you will never see it happen. You have to start taking responsibility for laying those foundations so that as you go through the next few years of your life you can begin to build a future for yourself that is determined by you, defined by you and that uses your talents and gifts to give you the best chance if life that you can achieve. You mustn't let your family hold you back on that one - this is your life and they have no right to hold you back by making you feel small emotionally or by making you feel like you can't do it. You can do it and you must.
I don't want you to run away from them though. Louise and I ran away from our families and changed our names so they wouldn't know where we were or what we were doing. They didn't even know we got married or what university we got into or anything. That was one of my biggest mistakes because I ran from the shitty feelings my family left me with rather than confronting them and as a result those feelings came back and bit me in the arse when I was least expecting it.
At some point you will have to address the problems with your family - particularly with your father. One day in the future you are going to have to stand up to him and show him, and tell him, that you are not stupid or clumsy and that you are a success. But that day is not yet here and you need first to build a strong and independent life that will support you when you have to say those things to him. Build that life now and then in the future you will have the strength to actually stand up to him and the rest of your family and show them what YOU can do. Do it to spite them if you have to, but do it. Stop living your life proving them right. Suck it up until you can get away and then fucking prove them wrong. Remind yourself when your father is berating you that he's wrong. He doesn't understand you and he has no right to talk to you like that. Remind yourself that he is probably jealous of your achievements. He most likely acts the way he does towards you because he feels threatened by you. He probably feels threatened by the fact that you are smarter than him and that you are growing up to be the man he wishes he could have been. It's actually kind of sad. But I expect his attitude is indeed born of fear and sadness and jealousy and you must remind yourself of that when he puts you down. It isn't your fault, it isn't your problem - it's his own feelings and his own inadequacies that are making him act that way. You are not responsible for his feelings or his actions and you must stop sacrificing yourself to him every time he asks you to. You don't have to physically speak out against him - you just have to stop mentally, inside your mind, giving him the power to make you feel that way.
I'm going to post what I have written so far and take a break before I come back to the rest.
-- Posted by britishguy at 2:38 pm on May 25, 2008
Here, have points 3 & 4. And I still haven't finished....
*****
"Never having any friends who seem too bothered about me - i.e. inviting me out for nights out, but never gong to the cinema or shopping."
I wish you lived in England - Brighton to be specific. I would happily do other things with you as you seem like a nice, intelligent guy. Hell I have no-one to go to the cinema with now that Louise has left me. Stupid as it sounds I was really looking forward to seeing The Dark Knight because I am a huge Batman fan (not of the movies - but of the graphic novels and comics, which the Chris Nolan movies are much more true to) and Lou and I had planned to go see it together and make a day out of it. So I wish I had people to do that kind of thing with as well.
It's funny - you have all these acquaintances around you that spend time with you and go out to pubs and shit with you, and I have no-one because I have isolated myself from the world completely and literally have no friends any more, and yet we are both in the same position. The world is fucked up, Joe.
I still think this comes down to you looking for approval outside of yourself; the more people who recognise you and the more people you have around you the more valued you feel as a person. You don't recognise yourself so you depend on other people to recognise you and your existence instead. Louise was like that so I can relate to it I think. Louise was a social creature which is why it ruined her life when I stopped her having friends and stuff. If you were nice to her then she was your friend for life. That's all it took. She surrounded herself with as many people as she could regardless of the depth of those relationships - it was something her father taught her to do. She didn't even really care what sort of people they were so long as they accepted her into a group and made her feel like she belonged. I would go so far as to say that she was desperate for acceptance. Like you she kind of convinced herself that her self worth lay in other people's opinion of her and acceptance of her. That's partly why she left me; she felt that she could get more recognition and acceptance from all the people telling her to leave me than she could from me as her husband or the few people that thought she should stay with me. Public opinion was always a massive factor in swaying Louise's decisions and her own opinions and she was easily influenced.
I may be reading far too much of my own life into your experience here so please forgive me if I am - I am just trying to relate to what you are saying and understand what's going on. I think you have chosen this behaviour at some point. I'm not saying you sat down and thought about it, but I do think that at some point you chose to act like this and you chose to put your self worth in the hands of other people because they made you feel good about yourself. You realised that as much as people at home can make you feel shit, so people at school could make you feel loved. On top of that I think Catherine is kind of the epitome of that investment. Catherine really made you feel recognised and loved and while she made you feel that way you felt the best you have ever felt in your life. When she withdrew she also took with her those feelings. Now you are searching for her, or for another Catherine, in exactly the same way that you search for more acquaintances in order to give you an underlying sense of recognition and worth.
The ironic thing is of course that you are surrounded by people most of whom don't really care about you or understand you. How many of them have you opened up to like you have opened up on this forum? How many of them can you approach when you have a problem? You've surrounded yourself with people to give you recognition but you have sacrificed genuine friendship that could compliment your life and make you feel fulfilled.
How do you actually feel about friendships? I mean are we back to the whole relationship thing again? Sure, having sex with girls reaffirms your ability to pull and reaffirms that you are good looking and popular, and gives you recognition, but you don't actually develop a relationship like the one you glimpsed with Catherine. What about with friends though? Sure having acquaintances gives you a sense of acceptance and recognition and reaffirms your place in the world but have you ever actually developed a relationship with someone who you care about or who you feel actually cares for you? How often do you actually move beyond jokes and small talk with either girls or friends? How often do you actually open up to people? Is that something you are frightened of? Are you scared that they will see how empty you feel? Are you scared that you are empty and that once they see past the exterior shell you present to them that they will fail to find anything of worth and reject you?
So you have yourself in a bind don't you? Because you want people to get closer to you and you feel the need for a connection, but in actual fact when you do even think about being close to someone you immediately start to retreat because you find that scary. I was reading in one of your other posts about how you were scared of kissing a girl now. I guess that's all part of this though isn't it? You're scared of actually getting intimate.
If you want these friendships and you want to find another girl that can make you feel like Catherine then you have to be willing to open up to people. You have to be willing to say to them, "Hey, I need a friend right now - just someone to go to the cinema with, talk to when I'm low, maybe go shopping with - how would you feel about that?" You have to be willing to do that and to get to know them or else you won't be able to move beyond being acquaintances. If nothing else then when you go to college you have to work on that - work on talking to people one on one over coffee rather than in a big group. Find someone whose art you're interested in or whose style you like or someone who shares a common interest and just ask them if they'd like to meet you for coffee or a drink sometime. Have a one on one chat and get to know them. It's all very well being part of a crowd and getting recognition from that experience, but you need to work on intimacy if you want to develop these relationships.
And again we go back to that thing of working on your own self worth. You really need to find the things you are good at and the aspects of your character that you can use to your advantage and you need to start giving yourself credit for those things. You need to start respecting yourself and your worth so that you can put that across to people. Try to stop depending on social recognition and putting your feelings and worth in the hands of other people and try to start to take control of those things yourself and you might find it easier to handle more intimate situations. You can't keep defining your identity socially because you can't always be in a crowd. You need to establish an identity for yourself that is independent of the people you are around so that you have something to actually connect with other on a more individual basis.
"Always feeling a loser, even though the majority of people like me and think im great."
Like I said in my last post, I can really relate to this. Academically I am really quite successful I guess. I was always really good with presentations and seminars as well, and I always enjoyed leading discussions and presenting my studies to other people and helping them to understand them. Even throughout the time I started suffering with social anxiety disorder and hiding form people socially and staying at home all day I never had that problem academically. People would really enjoy my presentations and they'd ask me afterwards for coffee or a drink to talk more about it and I'd just freeze up and essentially just run off, much to their astonishment. People often tell me I am articulate, intelligent, warm, personable, interesting, blah, blah, but I have spent the last few years feeling like a complete fraud. Even coming back to Livewire a month ago people told me how pleased they were to see me and how much they remember me as this great guy full of advice and dedicated to the site, blah, blah and I was like WHAT THE FUCK? I have sent some emails in the past few days trying to convince people like ChalkboardSonata and Kira that no, really, I am an arsehole, please stop telling me I'm this great guy that you all love. So yeah, I can relate to the whole "loser in the face of all the evidence" thing.
And this is WHY you have to stop investing all your self worth in other people, Joe - because simply put, it ain't working. You've tried it - you've made a damn good show of it. You've surrounded yourself with people who tell you you're a good guy and they like you and you've even tried obsessing about a girl that made you feel really special just by talking to you but none of it has made up for the massive hole that's sitting in your gut where you should like yourself. I had the shock of having my safety blanket ripped away from me. My wife left me and there was my fucking gaping whole staring me in the face waiting for me to fall into it. You're there, you're on the edge of the same fucking hole, you just don't see it because you're hiding behind your acquaintances and behind the obsession you have with getting Catherine back. Sooner or later you have to face that emptiness, that sense of being a loser and start to try and make sense of your life for yourself. Sooner or later you have to start defining who you are and what you want from life .You have to start setting yourself goals, thinking about what you want from your future and actually taking steps to put those dreams into actions. Even if they are little baby steps you have to start working on those dreams and those goals to show yourself that you, Joe, are defining who you are and what you will become and that you are in control of your own destiny and your own self worth - no-one else. It's only by starting to take pride in what you are doing that you will even begin to feel like you might be someone who is worthwhile. Trust me - do this sooner rather than later, do it on your own terms, before you end up in my position where you have no choice and you feel like I have done the past month. I would give anything to go back a couple of months, to go back six months even, and do the things I am trying to do now from the position I was in then. I had someone to pay the rent, the bills, and I had someone to support me emotionally through the difficulties and I had a lot more security overall. I could have done things in my own time and on my own terms and at my own pace. Instead I sat around and hid fro the world and from my problems and I just tried to get through the day, as I said in my post above, with as little pain as possible. Then I was thrown in the shit because Louise left and I had to do it all alone and with no security and at the fastest pace I can do it. You do not want to end up in that position. Do it now, on your terms - you'll feel the better man for it and you'll find it easier in the long run.
By all means put some of your worth in them. I don't believe that your strategy is an all-out fail, but every strategy is only useful in a particular context, and you are employing yours way overboard. You need to realise that social recognition is an innate part of our existence and that yes, you do need it to some extent - but it is no more of a substitute for recognising your own abilities or worth than Louise was for me. Christ, I know that it's a scary prospect for you to actually think about being involved with someone - getting intimate either in a friendship or a relationship, but that's a fear that's destroying you, man, and you need to confront it before it finishes you off. You don't have to jump in at the deep end, but try getting to know just one girl - try getting to know just one person in a more relaxed and intimate setting, even if it is just coffee or a drink. Start breaking down those barriers a little bit at a time and you can do this because there's a great guy inside that people will want to know. They're already telling you as much - you just aren't listening to them.
-- Posted by britishguy at 3:49 pm on May 25, 2008
"Caring what people think."
Now woah there, sonny! Caring what people think is not a "problem." You're an artist for a start. I mean fuck me - that's a good thing. It's called having a heart. Again we come back to you brow-beating yourself for having feelings. I mean you're doing it with the whole Catherine thing - you're beating on yourself for having feelings that you consider to be inappropriate. Your posts are full of a general contempt for your own emotions. You feel like they get in your way, you feel like a pussy or like you have no right to be feeling whatever it is you're feeling. I wonder who taught you that? I wonder who or what it was that taught you somewhere in your life that you shouldn't feel? It's like you've internalised some notion of self-deprecation and now you won't allow yourself to just be who you are, I'm not suggesting you should just wallow in your own emotions, but you don't give yourself enough lee-way to actually feel half of the things that seem to crop into your awareness.
Being sensitive to people's opinions and being sensitive emotionally is not always a bad thing. If you want to form relationships in fact it's an excellent thing - a great asset to you. You will be able to actually go on and make relationships where you can understand other people's feelings and emotions. You will be able to relate to their experiences and to comfort them, console them and show them that you care. People want friends and lovers like that, man! Look at my wife - she wanted someone who could relate to her needs and who wasn't so absorbed in his own depression! She'd have loved to have you around because you might actually have been sensitive enough to understand what she was going through. Some day some girl is going to fucking love that in you. You'll be the guy she goes to her girlfriends and tells about how sweet you are, how romantic you are and how you always understand her. She's going to be dead proud of you.
Your challenge - your choice - is to make this sensitive side work for you. Instead of being sensitive to other people's opinions of yourself, you need to work on being sensitive to other people's motives an needs. Stop thinking about what they think of you and focus on what they think, period. You have a great gift there and you can turn it around, like all your other gifts, to your advantage to use in your life to determine yourself and your existence for the better. You abuse your skill to beat yourself up, to punish yourself. You get inside people's heads and you try to work out what they think of you and then you use that to punish yourself. I don't know who taught you that you need punishing, but you don't You don't have to internalise the bull that your father has given you over the years. You don't have to carry a miniature version of your family around inside your head all day every day just so that they can make you feel small even when they aren't physically there. Give yourself permission to feel good about yourself. Instead of abusing your gifts to make yourself feel like crap on their behalf, use your talents to help you relate to other people. Get inside their heads by all means, but think about what they are feeling that has made them act the way they are acting. Imagine yourself in their position, try to understand their life and their feelings. I know you can do that because you have easy access to your emotions - otherwise you wouldn't need to protect yourself the way you do and you wouldn't be so prone to depressive feelings as you are.
Again, I'd point out that your strategy is not innately bad - you are just over-applying it. Your strategy of trying to work out what other people think is a good one in some circumstances. If you are in a relationship and you want to support your partner then you are going to need to try and work out what it is they are thinking and what it is that they want from you. If you have friends then to some extent you want to be able to guess what they are thinking. But you are missing an important step in that process: You are failing to check what you assume. You are failing to actually ask them if that is what they are thinking. You are making the assumption and then acting on it as if it were God given truth. You are not a mind reader and you don't know for certain that you are right to assume what you do. You have to be willing to talk to someone about what you think might be on their mind. If you do start just seeing a girl and getting to know her as a person then try that - try saying "You look like you're thinking.... Is that right or am I way off?" She'll be pleased that you are showing an interest in her thoughts even if you are wrong. That's what I mean - being sensitive to other people's thoughts is a great gift that people will appreciate, but only if you share it with them, discuss it with them, and use it to make them feel wanted.
Don't forget that a lot of people are just like you. They are a bundle of insecurities of their own and they want others to like them as much as you want to be liked yourself. So remember that and by showing an interest in their thoughts and discussing them with the people involved you will actually show them that you are interested and interesting. But stop taking it too far, stop with this failure to check, and stop using it to punish yourself!
"Not really knowing who I am."
You're 18? Of course you don't know who you are. What's to know, Joe? You were born, you spent the next 7 odd years just forming what we call the conscious mind, acting on impulse for most of that time and basically watching everything that went o around you and absorbing it like a sponge. You essentially had no personality or critical ability. Then you started to actually think about things and before you knew it you were BAM into puberty. Now you're just finishing that. What do you actually know about yourself or about life? You're only just beginning - we all are. You don't have to know who you are - but you do have to start defining that.
Let's use an analogy. When you start a painting, do you know what it's going to look like when you're finished? Do you actually have every colour pre-mixed, every brushstroke planned? No, of course not. Your life is like that right now. You have some rough guidelines you've made and you have some preliminary sketches and you know what your general subject is (white Caucasian male, UK, artistic interests, intelligent, social, lacking in self confidence, good at pulling girls, etc) but you don't really have any content yet. You have to start applying the pain, mixing the colours, filling in the brushstrokes of your life, Joe. That's your task for the next ten years - define yourself step by step and just like you build up a painting layer by layer and stroke by stroke you have to build up your identity and your life. And just like painting that can be a wonderfully creative experience. You are going to make mistakes - yo will need to paint over certain areas and do them again and you may even feel sometimes like it's never going to be finished, but you have to start or else you'll never see anything begin to appear. But the more you see appearing on the canvas of your life the more you'll be able to focus and direct those feelings and intentions towards a final future that you actually want.
I'd also like to point out that it is hard to know who you are when you are seeing yourself basically as a mirror for other people's opinions of yourself. I mean you are a receiver but you're not a transmitter. You're walking around and as you meet people you're absorbing their ideas about who you are and you're constantly changing with those. If you come on LW an people are shitty to you then you think you're a waste of space and you feel like crap, but then if you meet some nice girl then you fall head over heels for her and she makes you feel great. It's a rollercoaster existence because you are dependent on the people you meet at any given time to define you. You need a consistent sense of identity that comes from within you - one that you take everywhere you go and one that follows you and that shapes you as well as which you shape as you go. That has to come from within you so that you won't be swayed by the thoughts and opinions of others. You need to define yourself so that when you encounter opinions of yourself at LW or anywhere else that you don't like you can compare them to your OWN definition of Joe and say "AM I really like that, or are they wrong? Right now you just accept those opinions like they are truth and you don't compare them to any rooted sense of identity within you, which is what you need. If you can start to define that now, and start to build some closer and more intimate relationships that reflect that identity then you will be on your way to knowing who you are and not being blown about like a feather in the breeze.
That's another good reason to get to know one or two girls on personal dates without sex and shit getting in the way - by making some more intimate relationships - even if they just turn into friendships - you will actually start to find that those relationships begin to reflect you on a more personal level than the whole crown mentality can do, and that will reaffirm your sense of self in a much more positive and stable way.