I miss my old friends

I try to keep away from poisonous people after my bad experiences. But sometimes, like tonight, I wish that I had them in my life. There's something about pain understanding pain that I no longer have in my life in the same way. It's the poisonous ones that I understand and understand me. And my pain.


I've been struggling with friendship recently. Not the nature, but the presence. I miss those casual friends that just stop by. Or you can call on a dime for random stuff not big emergencies. I need more of those friendships. But, I live in a catch 22. I want that, but I don't want to go out and look for it. It takes so much energy and it puts myself in a position of possibly being hurt. Which I don't want to happen of course. Last year was a friendship fast. It's hard to move forward from that.

But, things are getting better. I've gained more energy. I'm lasting longer during the day. I can do more physical exercise without having fatigue. It's good. And then I have days like today where it was just exhausting. Where I was having a "Graves" day. Where I just wanted to stay at home and sleep.

a little bit about body image

I was reading Motherlode, one of my regular reads. It was this post: "The Hypocrisy of Parenting" . I read it sadly. It was talking about the challenge of body image and girls. And these parents--women, wrote in about how to balance those issues, to create positive outcomes. I was also reading a blog post about how to deal with introverted children (on a blog about introverts). It also made me sad. My mom was horrible about body image and was already worrying and talking about my weight when I was skinny and knobby kneed. I never had a chance to love my body. It was always a bad thing. And adding to that, the fact that she was/is so oversexualized and uses it as a weapon has ruined things for me in so many different ways.  There are so many consequences to her behavior that I have had to endure. And engage with.

She also never nurtured my personality. She hates and does not understand having an introverted daughter. She tried to crush my intelligence. She was jealous of my successes. She needed the support when things were challenging, but she has never had the capacity to appropriately support me. Ugh, it is really quite frustrating to think about. 

Accepting my personality type

I've always wanted to be an extrovert. Life seems like it's so much easier and so much more fun when you say what's on your mind instead of keeping it inside and mulling it over and then, possibly, speaking. At work, we've recently gone over our differing personality types. And last night, I did more research on mine. One thing I found is that its completely normal that I am not a tidy person. INFJs tend to be internally organized and externally disorganized. Just look at my piles. I'm constantly trying to keep up with them. It's not my strong point and quite honestly, I get bored with cleaning. It feels like so much work. I don't like to keep doing it over and over again. So, that's comforting. But it's still frustrating.

learning to like myself

Learning to like myself is an ongoing struggle. It's true, though, that I probably dislike myself more than others. My goal for tonight--which I spent alone, which is fine and I'm totally happy, is to accept that I like spending a lot of time alone.

On my own

I've been living by myself for a month now. It's so different, so quiet. It's not that lonely, especially since I'm gone most days for about 11 hours. Today I frantically cleaned the morning away. Forgoing the promise that I'd spend time at the gym on Saturdays. I have to go on Sunday instead. There's no mom telling me how messy things are. I don't control mess the way that she does. She goes crazy over it. I need it. I need the anchor of the clutter to remind me that I'm not her. And in some ways, I feel like the energy of trying to keep things as rigidly clean as she desires is just too much. That's not where I want to put my energy. I can't imagine focusing my energy in that way. It would be so boring. As it is, I do this cleaning in almost an ADD style. Beginning several projects at once and working on them all simultaneously. Well, maybe that's multi-tasking. Not ADD-style. I'm trying to unpack my things that I don't really need but want. And trying to find a place for them. Still at a loss. I think that it would be cool. But honestly, I think that I would need the reinforcements of another person. Which is not a position that will be filled any time soon.