Therapy for Free

            Somewhere over the years I became everyone’s therapist. I think it started with my best friend, Iggy. No, that’s not her real name but it’s an inside joke between her and I so I’m sticking with it. Seasonal depression is most definitely a real thing and every year like clockwork when I was in high school, Spring would come around and it seemed as if every terrible thing was happening to Iggy. She would call me almost every day with another issue, another problem. The thing you should know about Iggy is, she’s not one for sharing her problems with anyone which made her outpouring even more troubling.

            I listened to her and I would offer some advice or I would offer to just go for a walk with her to give her a nice ear to rant into. Along the way, she started calling me her “Oprah”. I love Oprah so I took this as a huge compliment. For a long time, I relished in being the one my friends come to with their problems. The person they trust enough to confide in, it felt great. For a while.

            My friends mean the world to me. I would do anything for any of them and they all know it. Of course I would be there to listen to them when they needed me. Any time, day or night, I was ready to listen and do my best to offer any advice I could (I didn’t take those psychology classes and watch Dr. Phil all the time for nothing). For me, the problem with being everyone’s therapist is I felt as if I took on their problems and troubles and issues.

            Empathy is something I have always struggled with in my life. Not because I’m lacking it but because it pours out of me all the time. I’m too empathetic and yes, I believe this to be a thing. When a friend would confide in me about how depressed they are about the way they look or about their home life or about their relationship problems, I felt as if I was experiencing all of those things as well. Their depression fed into my own depression.

            I faced all the normal issues of being a teenager but my self-confidence is the one that held me back the most. I hid in hoodies and hand me down t-shirts from my Dad and brother because I knew they would fit. I hated changing in gym class and I despised wearing anything that clung to my stomach. My self-confidence issues lasted well into my early twenties before I ended up changing the voices in my head to be positive instead of constantly being negative. I say that as if it was a switch I just flipped, it wasn’t. It took years of cathartic writing and surrounding myself with the right people to finally do it.

            The point is, I already had pretty horrendous thoughts about myself swimming around in my head as a teenager. Then my friends would confide in me about their eating disorders or their verbally abusive parents or their constant struggle to even get up in the morning and it all felt like a weight was being added onto my shoulders. As if every piece of information they divulged, I would pick it up and carry it for them so they wouldn’t have to anymore. I would take it on hoping their day might be a little easier. My days were becoming unbearable. I absorbed their depression like a sponge and it began taking a toll on my everyday life.

            But how do I stop?  I couldn’t tell them all to stop talking to me. I didn’t want them to stop talking, I still wanted to be there for them and listen and help the best I could but it was hurting me. Eventually, I had to start taking breaks. Breaks from being around the same people constantly. I mixed it up more, I would space out my time with different friends and left ample amount of time for myself. I didn’t realize it then but I needed to fix my own baggage before I could help anyone else carry theirs.

            And I did. I fixed my life one piece at a time. School became easier in college because once I picked a major, I found so many people like me and they became such good friends. My self-confidence rose when I started hanging out with people who accepted me, nerdy tendencies and all. I started dressing my body better which helped my confidence when I would go out because I would start the night feeling good and not thinking, “Ugh, this looks horrible, I look horrible. This night is going to blow.” Eventually, I found jobs I loved and I moved out and my life came together.

            Slowly, through all of my changes I was able to go back and be the therapist. I was able to listen to their problems and not let them upset me to the point of crippling me. Every now and again though, my overpowering empathy rears its head again.

            Recently, one of my best friends told me he felt so embarrassed and ashamed of his life before he even get out of bed in the morning. I immediately teared up thinking someone I’m close to felt this way every single day. My immediate reaction was to fix it. Fix his life, fix him, fix everything he sees wrong. I talked to him for hours about what was making him feel this way and what he could do to change the way he’s feeling. But that’s just it; I had to offer him ways for HIM to fix his life. I can’t do it for him. I can’t fix anyone’s life expect my own. It took me years to realize this and it is still a hard realization when all I want to do is make someone else’s life easier.

            The truth is, being their therapist, being the person they can always talk to, might be exactly how I make their life a little easier.

@Valtimari

Confessions of a Single 25 Year Old Woman

Note: I wrote this when I was 23 but I've gone over it again and updated it a bit. Whether these are still my confessions or not doesn't make them any less important. 23 year old me poured her heart out and I'm sure she wants me to share (or she's cursing me off, whatever).

Usually when I write for my blog, I try to write about something everyone can relate to in some way and I write about situations my friends are in. But today, it’s going to be about me and my feelings as of late. Maybe someone will be able to relate to it but that’s not what I’m focusing on. Sometimes, when I don’t write for a while, my head just gets filled and my emotions run really high and it feels like if I don’t write it down soon my head will explode.

Here’s a little background, like I said before, all of my friends (with the exception of 4 guys and 1 girl) are in relationships. They are all dating, engaged, married, or practically married. I’m happy for all of them, nervous for some, and envy very few of them. It’s never been a goal of mine to get married and have children; in fact it’s a conventional 1950s lifestyle that I’ve rebelled against for years and years. For some reason, the thought of marriage and being a mother makes me anxious and almost physically ill. Even the idea of spending the rest of my life attached to another person boggles my mind.

When I think about what I want out of life there are only a few things I desire: to write, to travel, to take care of my family, and to live comfortably. Most of the time, when I think about myself being older, it’s only me in the picture. I never needed anyone else. And if we were to go into the psychological reasons behind this thinking it would probably be because I’ve always been severely independent. My whole life I’ve felt like no one could hear me or no one would listen (besides some family) and yet I talk nonstop. I’m a chatterbox. My Grandpop used to pick me up from school if I had a half day and he would take me to Burger King and then we would go home. He would tell my Mom, “School must be torture for her. She doesn’t stop talking from the second I pick her up.” But you know what? He listened to me.

 So…I write. Paper has to listen to me, it has no other choice. As I was saying, I never pictured myself with anyone else before…except Leonardo DiCaprio, he might the only guy to change my mind. But now, with all my friends paired up, a quote from Sex and the City keeps popping into my head (stay with me, guys). It was Carrie Bradshaw’s 35th birthday and she wasn’t seeing anyone at the time. She was sitting in the café with her three best friends and she said, “I’m lonely. The loneliness is palpable.” I never thought of myself as being lonely. I LOVE living on my own. I love coming home to absolute and complete silence. I love having control of my TV all the time and being able to decorate and rearrange things at will without having to ask anyone if it’s okay. Not to say, living alone is perfect. Night still freaks me out from time to time. But other than that, living on my own is awesome.

 Where does the loneliness come in, you ask? Well when I go out with my friends and I become the third, fifth, or seventh wheel, that’s where it comes in. I love my friends, they know I love them and I would do anything for each and every one of them. But even when I’m in a room filled with them, I still feel utterly alone because at the end of the day, when they all go home, they have someone to talk to, someone to listen to them. I’m probably not painting my friends in a nice light which isn’t my intention. I know there are people I can go to talk to and they listen but none of them really get it because they all have someone. No one really gets the loneliness because none of them are alone. I’m not saying if I had a boyfriend it would solve all these problems, I’m not naïve enough to believe that load of bull. What I’m saying is, I miss when my friends were just my friends and not my friends plus *insert name here*.

 Sure, sometimes I can pull them away from their boyfriends for a night but there’s usually one that wants their significant other to come. I don’t know why, they generally just sit there and say nothing like a block of wood. (I’m aware I’m probably insulting people here but I’m telling the truth).  However, a lot of the time, they never go anywhere without their boyfriends or girlfriends. Don’t get me wrong, I like a lot of their significant others, they’re good guys and gals and I enjoy hanging out with them but I miss my friends. I miss when everyone was single at the same time and nothing else mattered. Our twenties are supposed to be fun, right? Staying out all night, drinking, or just having a good time with your friends? Gotta tell ya, those times are rare these days. Now it’s trying to schedule time with your friends between everyone’s jobs or trying to get them to leave the confines of their homes for a few hours on the weekend.

I guess one of the upsides of having a significant other is someone is obligated to listen to you. No one is obligated to listen to me. And I’m not saying this to throw a pity party for myself; I hate people that do that shit. I’m saying it because this is how I actually feel. I feel sad sometimes when my friends tell me all the things they’re doing with their boyfriends or girlfriends. Because it’s the stuff we all used to do together. This is me really nostalgic for when times were easier and life wasn’t complicated and no one was engaged or married or in seriously committed relationships. I understand things change and people grow up, I just didn’t expect it to come this early in life. Truthfully, I don’t believe I’m ready for it.

 This is the part I think most of you have been waiting for in this whole entry. Do I wish I had a boyfriend? Occasionally. If I were to have a boyfriend, I would more or less like him to be part time. Which probably sounds horrible but it’s the honest to god truth, I hate clingy people, I hate people that have to text someone 24 hours a day because trust me, you have NOTHING interesting to say ALL DAY LONG, neither do I. I would hate someone being in my apartment all the time. I’m not a romantic person, I don’t like roses or candles or any of that junk. Romance in my book is you shutting up for two hours so we can watch a movie then AFTERWARDS discuss it. Does it frustrate me that I can’t find a boyfriend? Of course it does, I’m a woman, it’s something we spend more time thinking about than we admit. Even me, the person who thinks relationships are awkward and weird and pointless 75% of the time, occasionally wants a boyfriend. You know, at 15 years old, I thought by 25 someone would love me, someone has to by then right? Well no, that didn’t happen. Here’s the part where it becomes a little intense:

 Growing up, I never had a lot of self-confidence in the way I look. Bullied through high school didn’t help either. I’ve always had a pretty good sense of myself though. I knew I wanted to be a writer at an early age, I knew movies would always be my second love behind writing; I know I’m sarcastic, and I can be harsh sometimes. But I also know that I’m a really good listener and pretty good therapist when my friends need one. My best friend used to call me Oprah for god sake. So I always just assumed once I became comfortable with how I look then everything would fall into place. But when you have gorgeous friends and cousins who look like models, it’s hard to be happy with how you look. “When will my reflection show who I am inside?” Perfect lyric for this paragraph from the movie Mulan.

 However, within the past few years, I’ve started to care less about what other people think of me. I’m 25, I write, I’ve worked as an editor and a technical writer and I do a damn good job, I’m self-sufficient and I’m a pretty good person. And you know what? I like the way I look. I like that I have breasts and hips and an ass. Are they slightly bigger than average? Damn straight and guess what? I’m proud of it. Are there still parts of my body I’m not comfortable with? Of course, everyone has those and it’s something everyone has to come to terms with eventually. My point is this, you know that saying, “You have to love yourself before others can love you”? I call bullshit. Here’s why: I really do love who I am in my life right now. I have my life together and I’m finally, FINALLY, comfortable when I look in the mirror. So uh…where exactly is the love?

 I’ve come to believe everything having to do with love and relationships is completely random and up to fate. It has nothing to do with where you are in your life or if you love yourself or not. It’s a day to day random occurrence that no one has any control over, ever. And I believe if every single girl thinks of it in those terms, then it’s a little easier to get through the day without beating herself up. Personally, I’m hoping to meet mine in Ireland, he’ll be rich, with a thick accent and we’ll live happily ever after. See that? That’s a joke because this post was really hard for me to write and I need the jokes like I need oxygen. There you go, folks. That was more of me than I have ever put out here before. Cherish it, ignore it, scoff or laugh at it, but do me a favor? Just listen when other people speak. It means a lot to them.