Isolation

Hey. 

  I’ve been struggling lately with the feeling of isolation.  I think that I’m starting to get used to it but am worried that my subconscious will want me to push everyone away.  I haven’t had the urge to push everyone away but I have wanted to push away those that bring negativity towards me.  I am keeping those that bring love to my life close though.   Then there’s the category of people who I’m attached to but are the ones who are bringing hurt and negativity to me.  I wish it was one person or maybe two so I could write another letter to them (that I’ll never send) to get my feelings out.  When I sat down to type out letters, my list quickly grew in my head and it worried me.  Yes, I have true friends.  Yes, I have true family.  But I am now seeing certain people around me who are not bringing me a single ounce of good.  Why put energy into trying to keep them in my life?  They don’t define me and never will.  Anyway… coming to the realization of how big my list of mean people I have in my life has made me really face the feeling of isolation.  I think I’m starting to accept the feeling now.  I’m not choosing to be alone or away from everyone though.  All I’m doing is accepting and acknowledging that strange feeling of isolation.  I want the feeling to exist and do its thing until I can figure out what I need to do next.

  I’m having a hard time eating lately.  I was eating breakfast this morning with a couple people (I don’t want to say who or where) and one of them made a comment about how much food I had ordered.  I know that joking is their nature, but it shot me back into that anxiety with eating.  I just can’t do it.  I can’t eat.  It’s getting harder and harder for me to have an appetite and enjoy food without getting uncontrollable thoughts about how bad I am.  Earlier tonight, I saw myself in the mirror while brushing my teeth and realized how heavy I look to myself.  It just doesn’t feel like me.  I feel enveloped in several layers of disguise—so many layers that I can’t even recognize myself.  And then when I realize that what I see in the mirror is truly me, I get sick to my stomach.  I don’t want to look or feel like this.  I look and feel repulsive in my own skin.  Yeah yeah I am accepting of who I am and what I look like, but that doesn’t mean that I like what I see.  I accept that I look the way I do but am not okay with it at the same time.  I feel like I’m finally getting small specks of confidence back into my consciousness and every time I become aware of how I look or someone says something triggering, those little specks of confidence crumble in the wind and disappear, placing me back at square one.  I want to figure out what my body is trying to hold on to.  Do I still need protection?  Am I still wearing armor that is growing thicker and thicker by the second?  What if I don’t want this armor anymore?  I can protect myself just fine without it!  I am absolutely sick of this battle.

  Oh and another thing… I got a new tattoo!  It’s a lot to explain so I’ll do my best.  The tattoo consists of a simple-looking butterfly, swirly doo-dads, forget-me-not flowers, and the quote “The best way out is always through.”  The location of my tattoo also has meaning.  First of all, with the butterfly design I picked—there’s something called The Butterfly Project that I became aware of a few years ago when my self-harm had picked back up.  The Project consisted of various suggestions of how to help fight the urge to self-harm.  One thing that was suggested was to draw a butterfly in the area where you were going to cut, metaphorically giving life to said butterfly.  If you didn’t cut and let the butterfly fade naturally, the butterfly is metaphorically released into the universe.  If you did cut, you have to wash the butterfly away, thus ‘killing’ it and not allowing it to be free and alive in the universe.  At the time I was so inspired to try this and looked up a simple butterfly design because I didn’t want to make one up on my own.  I found a really simple one and drew it on my leg.  This method worked for the longest time!  I eventually got distracted in life and stopped using this method obviously.  So when I was formulating this tattoo idea, I stumbled across that same butterfly design I had found years ago and started working on a tattoo design from that.  The swirly doo-dads I had been doodling for years and thought I’d add them behind the butterfly.  Forget-me-nots are and always have been my absolute favorite flower of all time.  They are so small but so beautiful and blue, my favorite color.  As far as the quote goes, it’s from a Robert Frost poem titled “A Servant to Servants.”  The poem is honestly too long of a read for my liking, but that particular line has stuck with me ever since I read it.  I knew instantly that I wanted a tattoo of it because of how much it meant to me and this butterfly design I had already come up with worked perfect.  I finished the design and took a while to find a spot to put the tattoo on my body.  There’s an area on my right leg where I had self-harmed several times in the past.  About three years ago or so, I had cut the words “ugly fat failure” into my leg.  The reason why I did it was stupid and it’s the only set of scars on my body that I absolutely can’t stand to look at.  They’re not true to me.  They don’t speak truth at all.  I’m not ugly.  I’m not fat.  And I’m not a failure.  I didn’t want such strong words to be seen on my body anymore, so I decided to put this beautiful tattoo on it.  Anyway, that’s the story about the tattoo.  I may or may not post a picture at this point in time mainly because it’s healing right now and looks scabby and gross.  I get so happy and excited every time I see it now.  I see something beautiful in an area that I wanted to ignore for the rest of my life.  I absolutely love it!

  My impulses to self-harm have been non-existent lately.  Ever since my scare with trying scarification, I haven’t had any strong impulses to cut at all.  I’ve had a few down moments but have found some unexplainable inner strength to push through and move on.  I’m hoping I can keep this up.  I really want to be done with these impulses.  I don’t want to bring harm to my body anymore.

  Well I think I’ve satisfy my urge to purge feelings out onto an electronic device.  I finally feel tired which means my mission was a success.  Thank you for reading!

P.S.  I can’t get the horrible earthquake and tsunami in Japan out of my head.  I’ve been hovering over my phone to get constant updates on what’s going on over there and am completely devastated as I learn something new.  It has woken up the urge to get out there and help.  Every time a disaster strikes, I want to get off my butt and help any way that I can.  So when this happened I got completely sick of being obsessed with small crap in my life when this pain is going on in the world.  I want to give back.  I want to do something for the world around me.  I looked into joining the Peace Corps and seeing what other volunteer work I can do in the community around me.  I’ll keep writing updates about how my search is going.  In the meantime, if you can donate to the American Red Cross or other legit organizations to help Japan, PLEASE do.  They need all the help they can get right now.

Picture:

Hahaha.  Yes.  Found on google.

Tattoo:

This was taken right after it was done so it looks all puffy and such.