anhed0nia
Member
- Jun 17, 2023
- 31
I suffer from a combination of anxiety/depression/trauma on the one hand, and on the other, some kind of undiagnosed cognitive problem that makes daily life really hard for me. I get lost going to and from familiar places, I lose or break or otherwise ruin things at a shocking rate, I have a hard time filling out basic forms and doing very basic math, I even feel like I'm always struggling to figure out how to wear my clothes right. So besides the really deep psychological issues, I also just have a really hard time getting through my day like a normal adult. One of the biggest problems I have is just trying to discuss this with others. Often I just want to vent, and I just want someone to say something simple like, "I'm sorry, that sounds really hard." Instead I spend a lot of my time just fighting desperately to be believed. I guess I have a high IQ and people perceive me as smart, but to me that's just a party trick or something because it isn't affecting my life. It isn't making anything easier or better. It didn't even make school or work easier or better. I have to spend days of my life doing the same chore over and over again because I keep fucking it up, and I can't understand the advice or instruction I get, and slowing down and asking someone to do it with me basically just results in letting them do it FOR me, which is really sad and embarrassing. It's hard for me to just get out of bed knowing that I'm going to cause a big problem by the end of the day. But when I try to talk about this with close friends, family, and even therapists, the typical response is to try to convince me that none of it is really happening. I'm just being "too hard on myself", or worse, I just have a negative attitude and whatever happens is my own fault because I'm not trying hard enough to be positive, which somehow conveys the magical ability to do everything perfectly I guess. I'm starting to regret ever expressing myself to anybody, I'm so sick of being called a liar, especially by people who supposedly care and are acting like they're doing me a big favor. It's making me feel even dumber than I already am.
I think it's just too hard for a lot of people to accept that they are associated with someone dysfunctional, and/or to admit that some things will never "all work out in the end". I think this might be more pronounced in the US, with the whole American exceptionalism thing going on. Like I'm very close with my dad, but I've started to notice this angry, rejecting attitude when I bring up my mental health to him; I think he might feel a little guilty or embarrassed about having such a fucked up kid, whether or not it's his fault, and he deals with it by giving me these little speeches about all the reasons he knows that I'm fine and I don't need any help--or, perversely, he claims that he tried to get me help and that I refused. I don't know when that's supposed to have happened, but obviously it wasn't a big enough episode to stick in my memory. In any case I'm starting to regret ever trying to talk to him about what's wrong with me, it seems to just make him mad.
For a little while I thought I had trained my husband to believe the things I say about what it's like to be me, or at least to act like he believes me, but I'm afraid he's finding new ways to challenge me on everything. I think it was just too hard for him to sustain the act, maybe. We're very close, everybody who knows us can tell we have a great marriage, but obviously nothing is perfect and this is one of our few issues. He used to make excuses for my relentless fuckups; he had an elaborate explanation in his pocket for every stupid, clumsy thing that I do, it was always a coincidence, or someone else's fault, or an innocent mistake, or I was just flustered, or I just have to try harder. There's no possible way someone as "smart" as me could screw up, there has to always be some anomalous, complicated excuse, even if the excuse is totally irrational. Finally, after living with me for some years, he seemed to accept that if you have to make excuses every single day, then the fuckups are not exceptional--they're actually the rule. This is the way I am and it makes my life really hard and the only thing I can ask for is for people to believe me, and maybe let me complain about it now and again. So for a little while he seemed to just accept me as I am. But lately I'm noticing that the excuses are filtering back in, and his new technique is that every time I get mad at myself for something, he tries to explain how he makes the exact same mistakes. It's like he's trying to cut me off by making it seem like if I look down on myself, then I must look down on him, too. ...I just tried several times to type out some complicated examples of this, but I can't ask anyone to read that stuff. To simplify things, it's more useful to say that, for example, 9/10 of the broken dishes in our home were broken by me. But since he broke dish #10, he'll try to argue that I'm not allowed to be upset about my constantly-broken dishes because he himself has broken one dish one time. Or I have a continuous problem of missing appointments because I can't figure out the train or the calendar or the map or whatever, no matter how hard I try; this is a routine problem for me, it's expensive and embarrassing and it confronts me with the many normal adult things I just can't handle. But when my husband misses one appointment in several years, due to a purely innocent glitch, he argues with me that I can't be upset about my own persistent and destructive disorganization because he himself missed one appointment one time. It's not really rational, to insist that his once-in-a-blue-moon bad day is somehow the same as my bad day, every day.
*And on that note I have a hard time with the accusation of black and white thinking, because of this very thing. Someone might be inclined to ding me for saying I have a hard day "every day". Maybe it's not true, maybe it's more like 4/7 days. But if I say "most days", more accurately, that really doesn't change the picture for me in any practical way. Let's say you have an airline whose planes crash 70% of the time. Nobody in their right mind would tell you to go easy on them because maybe 30% of the time they don't kill anyone. Nobody would penalize you for saying hyperbolically that they crash "all the time".
This is kind of killing me. I can't be honest with anyone about my problems because when I am, everyone calls me a liar, even the people who supposedly love me, or who I am paying to treat my mental problems. It's humiliating and isolating and it just makes me want to stop talking to everybody about this, forever, period. And I probably should. I should just pretend everything's fine until I absolutely have to ctb or until someone drops a house on me or something. Trying to find fellowship and sympathy is making everything worse. But it's just hard to avoid saying a certain thing when it's the main thing on your mind, all the time. It always seems to pop out eventually. Maybe in 2024 I can learn to get better at pretending to be whoever other people have decided I am, because trying to share myself with others has been really bad for the relationships.
I think it's just too hard for a lot of people to accept that they are associated with someone dysfunctional, and/or to admit that some things will never "all work out in the end". I think this might be more pronounced in the US, with the whole American exceptionalism thing going on. Like I'm very close with my dad, but I've started to notice this angry, rejecting attitude when I bring up my mental health to him; I think he might feel a little guilty or embarrassed about having such a fucked up kid, whether or not it's his fault, and he deals with it by giving me these little speeches about all the reasons he knows that I'm fine and I don't need any help--or, perversely, he claims that he tried to get me help and that I refused. I don't know when that's supposed to have happened, but obviously it wasn't a big enough episode to stick in my memory. In any case I'm starting to regret ever trying to talk to him about what's wrong with me, it seems to just make him mad.
For a little while I thought I had trained my husband to believe the things I say about what it's like to be me, or at least to act like he believes me, but I'm afraid he's finding new ways to challenge me on everything. I think it was just too hard for him to sustain the act, maybe. We're very close, everybody who knows us can tell we have a great marriage, but obviously nothing is perfect and this is one of our few issues. He used to make excuses for my relentless fuckups; he had an elaborate explanation in his pocket for every stupid, clumsy thing that I do, it was always a coincidence, or someone else's fault, or an innocent mistake, or I was just flustered, or I just have to try harder. There's no possible way someone as "smart" as me could screw up, there has to always be some anomalous, complicated excuse, even if the excuse is totally irrational. Finally, after living with me for some years, he seemed to accept that if you have to make excuses every single day, then the fuckups are not exceptional--they're actually the rule. This is the way I am and it makes my life really hard and the only thing I can ask for is for people to believe me, and maybe let me complain about it now and again. So for a little while he seemed to just accept me as I am. But lately I'm noticing that the excuses are filtering back in, and his new technique is that every time I get mad at myself for something, he tries to explain how he makes the exact same mistakes. It's like he's trying to cut me off by making it seem like if I look down on myself, then I must look down on him, too. ...I just tried several times to type out some complicated examples of this, but I can't ask anyone to read that stuff. To simplify things, it's more useful to say that, for example, 9/10 of the broken dishes in our home were broken by me. But since he broke dish #10, he'll try to argue that I'm not allowed to be upset about my constantly-broken dishes because he himself has broken one dish one time. Or I have a continuous problem of missing appointments because I can't figure out the train or the calendar or the map or whatever, no matter how hard I try; this is a routine problem for me, it's expensive and embarrassing and it confronts me with the many normal adult things I just can't handle. But when my husband misses one appointment in several years, due to a purely innocent glitch, he argues with me that I can't be upset about my own persistent and destructive disorganization because he himself missed one appointment one time. It's not really rational, to insist that his once-in-a-blue-moon bad day is somehow the same as my bad day, every day.
*And on that note I have a hard time with the accusation of black and white thinking, because of this very thing. Someone might be inclined to ding me for saying I have a hard day "every day". Maybe it's not true, maybe it's more like 4/7 days. But if I say "most days", more accurately, that really doesn't change the picture for me in any practical way. Let's say you have an airline whose planes crash 70% of the time. Nobody in their right mind would tell you to go easy on them because maybe 30% of the time they don't kill anyone. Nobody would penalize you for saying hyperbolically that they crash "all the time".
This is kind of killing me. I can't be honest with anyone about my problems because when I am, everyone calls me a liar, even the people who supposedly love me, or who I am paying to treat my mental problems. It's humiliating and isolating and it just makes me want to stop talking to everybody about this, forever, period. And I probably should. I should just pretend everything's fine until I absolutely have to ctb or until someone drops a house on me or something. Trying to find fellowship and sympathy is making everything worse. But it's just hard to avoid saying a certain thing when it's the main thing on your mind, all the time. It always seems to pop out eventually. Maybe in 2024 I can learn to get better at pretending to be whoever other people have decided I am, because trying to share myself with others has been really bad for the relationships.
