soconfusingforalittlegirl3 - Tumblr blog

soconfusingforalittlegirl3 · 2 years

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Hi, I’m O.

I’m using this blog for venting. Please don’t follow or reblog but feel free to interact (asks, likes, comments etc).

TW: Mental health struggles, body image, emotional abuse

I struggle badly with my mental health. All the venting on here is for helping me look after myself. I’m trying very hard to be gentle with myself. I know I deserve better.

I’m too closed off emotionally to talk to anyone irl and tell them how I feel, friends or family, not even my best friend in the whole world.

A lot of my issues stem from my mother, who my whole life I have never been good enough for. She wanted a baby, not the adult that baby would grow into. No matter what I do, what I achieve, there is always something I haven’t done, or haven’t done well enough.

I first noticed how low and numb I was feeling constantly when I became 13. I am now 19 and am feeling no different. I have told my mum on many occasions how I feel, and she’s always told me that I’m “dramatic”, “miserable”, “not trying hard enough”, “lazy”. She’s told me that she “loves me but doesn’t like me.” Every day she turns on me and shouts insult after insult at me, even for minor things such as not putting my plate in the sink, or having laundry on my bedroom floor. Her and my dad don’t have a good relationship either. I listen to them argue every day. It’s what wakes me up most mornings. I’ve only ever seen them share one kiss on each other’s birthdays, valentines day, mother’s day etc. My dad is completely emotionally detached and has never expressed anything to me. He refers to my mother as “mum” even when I am not there (not that he needs to even when I am, I’m an adult and know her name.) He also treats her as such, sitting as she does his laundry, cleaning, cooking. He is openly misogynistic to both myself and my mother. He has horrible inhuman political views in which more or less he thinks no one should have rights except cis white heterosexual men. Once I move out permanently I will never speak to him again. If I bend down in front of him with a low-cut shirt he will make a comment about my breasts, tell me I shouldn’t do things like bending over in front of my dad. My own dad. He’ll tell me he thinks my breasts will be as big as my mother’s when I’m older. If I don’t wear a bra in the house, even if I’m just wearing my pyjamas, he will make eye contact with my nipples rather than my eyes as I speak to him. My 66 year old dad to his 19 year old daughter. I have run off and sobbed every time he’s commented on my breasts to me. I feel no love for him.

Last september I moved out into halls of residence at my university. I love it. I love the freedom being alone grants me. What I don’t love is that she makes me come home every weekend instead of staying there. This is because I have two dogs who can’t be left alone, so they bring me home so that they may go out together and leave me at home with the dogs. I understand that, I truly do, I’m not so pig-headed and selfish that I would confine them to the house forever with the dogs. But it really is holding me back, mostly from making friends. The odd weekend I do stay at uni (roughly 2 out of 4 weekends a month, fair enough of a deal I think) I have the time of my life. I get to sleep in, I go out on daytrips with my flatmates, I go out clubbing in the evenings, we go out for lunch together.

Although I am miles and miles away at uni, my mother rings me every single day at the very least once daily and asks about if I’ve done my work yet, tells me how lazy I am for not having done it, compares me to the one girl she knows on my course who always has her work done months in advance and gets top grades (good for her but that’s not me.) But oh how she wishes I was her. She also inquires about every last thing I’ve done while she’s not been there, what I plan on doing that day, what I’ve eaten, what I’ll be eating later. I understand this may just sound like a caring mother wanting to know what her daughter’s been doing, but it’s otherwise. She’s always been a helicopter parent since the day I was born. It’s one of the reasons I now have such crippling anxiety about doing so many things. I never got to do things for myself and now that I have to I panic and overthink absolutely everything until I work myself into a state of extreme anxiety. Anyway, she hates that she can’t control what I do when I’m not at home. I can choose to spend my day in a messy room, sleep in until after lunch time and stay up all night and she can’t do anything about it. Brilliant.

I have never had friends. I have never been popular. I have been bullied to tears day after day since before I was even a teenager. Since my age didn’t even have two digits. It’s the exact painstaking-same even now at 19. I didn’t realise bullies would be a thing at university. I don’t get along with almost all the 9 girls in my flat. Because of my anxiety, constant exhaustion, low moods, I mostly stay in my bedroom alone rather than mingling with them in the communal area/kitchen. The only place I can truly be myself and feel comfortable is in my bedroom. When I am there no one can judge me, make snide comments about my every word or action, no one can shout at me, tell me to do this or that, tell me how lazy I am, that I’m not good enough. It’s heaven.

I’ve always been introverted regardless. I thrive in my own company. I’m a bit of a nerd, sure. I’m super into fandom culture, always have been. At age ten I had a lord of the rings poster on my wall, marvel keychains all over my backpack, sherlock wallpaper on my phone. Sure it’s cringy I guess, but not really. Let girls enjoy things. Delving further into cringe, I have written reader insert fanfiction since I was about thirteen. Granted back then it was awful stuff such as Markiplier youtuber fanfiction on wattpad (sorry Mark, unus annus was great tho.) I, embarassingly, still write and consume fanfiction to this day. Being truthful it’s an escape mechanism. I’ve never been loved by anyone who didn’t mentally or verbally abuse me during that. I can’t even rely on my own mother to love me. So being able to read and write stories where I am so desperately loved by a fictional character, where I’m appreciated and never screamed at, never told I’m worthless but instead told how cared for I am and told how well I’m doing and how proud they are? It’s fucking fantastic. No one can hurt you when they aren’t real. I’m sometimes hit with a moment of reality when I catch myself smiling lovestruck at words on ao3, when I realise what it is im doing in that moment. And it hurts. Fuck, it hurts. Remembering that I have to search up stories of someone loving me because it’s no more than fantasy, unsurprisingly, hurts like hell.

I was bullied mercilessly in school as I’ve already said. But I had two friends. Two boys, an escape from the girls who tormented me day after day. Boy 1 and Boy 2, I’ll call them. Boy 2 didn’t join the school until about two years before GCSEs but Boy 1 was there from the very beginning. Whereas with the way the other girls bullied me for being a nerd, he openly embraced that. And god I loved that. Truthfully I loved him too, but that’s what led him away from me (I’ll get to that in a minute though, I’m getting ahead of myself.) Boy 1, like me, loved the lord of the rings, sherlock, marvel, all those things I obsessed over daily. He also, just like me, loved gaming. We spent countless hours on our favourite games like minecraft, elder scrolls online, etc., pulled all nighters while on skype calls the entire time we played. He’d always ask me to play and being wanted felt so good after all the bullying I’d endured. So, naturally, I developed a crush on this boy. Understandably, when you find someone who understands you and accepts you for who you are you feel something for them.

Unfortunately for me, the barely teen girls in my class picked up on my probably obvious nervousness around him, the way I blushed when he’d talk to me or sit next to me in class. They teased me so much, told boy 1 I loved him. It was a novelty seeing the little chubby nerdy girl with big round classes and braces in love. The other boys in the class very quickly picked up on this, and began to tease boy 1. So, as any teen boy would, he began to distance himself from the weird girl ruining his popularity, regardless of the hours we spent together as best friends.

As some stroke of luck (god knows how) a slightly-nerdy girl joined our school. But the popular girls adopted her straight away. She was gorgeous, so thin, big deep brown eyes and long eyelashes, sporty, outgoing, party girl. She was immediately in the popular group. And yet something about her slight nerdy side drew her to me. We played minecraft together, the game I used to play religiously with boy 1. When boy 1 caught wind of this, he all of a sudden got rid of that distance he’d been keeping with me. He wanted to play with me again like we used to and I was so thrilled. I was delighted that my best friend and crush was no longer to embarrased to play games with me again. What began to make itself clear was that he wasn’t doing this for me. Every time we’d log on the first thing he’d always ask me would be “text *popular girl* and ask her to come join us.” If she couldn’t play he’d say he had to go.

The boy of my teenage dreams was using me to talk to my new friend.

He was enamoured by her. Of course he was, she was beautiful, funny, popular, thin. Everything you’d want. I wasn’t what he wanted. I was just a route to getting her to like him. He never had feelings for me, I don’t think. Maybe he did, I don’t know. It was so long ago now. But in some turn of fate the popular girl moved schools and left us again. Conveniently he immediately cut me off again. At one point he messaged me for advice on asking out one of the other girls in my class. As though I was ‘one of the boys’ or something. Ouch. He didn’t talk to me for years after that.

Enter ‘boy 2.’ He became friends with boy 1 because of their shared interests. They were their own friend group. He also became friends with me. We were the only two people who picked the art GCSE over PE, so we took that together while everyone else did sports. Just the two of us being there, we quickly became best friends and bonded over our exactly-the-same interests. I loved him so much- as a friend. Nothing more. I never felt so much as the slightest spark of romantic interest in him. None at all. I was perfectly happy being best friends. He felt the opposite. Boy 2 fell overwhelmingly in love with me, and professed his love to me on many occasions. On all of these, I very politely declined his affections and told him I didn’t like him in that way, that I saw him as a friend and that was all. He ignored this, didn’t respect my blatant “no” and continued to pursue me. This made me wildly uncomfortable, to the extent where I asked my art teacher if I could work in a different classrom every week, to which she responded that she knew exactly why I felt that way because she watched him make me uncomfortable every week and instantly approved my request (thank god for her.) He would text me and tell me about his porn habits, about his masturbation and penis size. It got to the point where one day, I had to publicly reject boy 2 in front of other people because I was so insanely uncomfortable with his advances. He then ran off and cried in the locker rooms (not sorry at all, I said no so many times and he ignored them all.) Anyway, as you can imagine, the popular group who witnessed this found it hysterical, telling me how cruel I was for rejecting him, and how horrible I am. Boy two went on to later call me a slut (as I found out through boy 1) and never talk to me again (thank god.) I have now blocked him on everything and feel peace from that.

I have also blocked boy 1. Why you ask? That would be because, after three years of not talking to me because I ruined his reputation, he messaged me, right after we finished school and our GCSES, and asked me to take his virginity so he could have fun in college without worrying about virginity. I, horrifically, being the shy-people pleaser who physically couldn’t fathom saying no to people, even those who had been so cruel to me, replied with “yeah maybe.” God. I’m better than that now. I was 16 when this happened. If he’d asked me that now at 19 I’d have told him to go fuck himself and more. But back then the prospect of doing anything but agreeing seemed terrifying. Although even at 16 I was repulsed by this and spent many nights crying that he thought so low of me. My once best friend and crush wanted to use me so that he could have fun at college. Maybe a few years before I’d have swooned at the thought of him wanting me. But he didn’t want me. He wanted my body, my virginity. I was an object to him. Thank god I never went through with it, I never let him defile me like that and I’m proud of my younger self for knowing her worth.

I think this experience of being sexualised and objectified by the people I trusted most and considered my best friends has given me a permanent distrust of men. They didn’t want to be my friend. They wanted to fuck me. I was their one female friend and that was how they both saw me. As for boy 2, the fact that he wouldn’t accept just my friendship no matter how many times I told him I didn’t want more, the fact that he dumped me when he finally accepted the rejection of being his girlfriend and sleeping with him, it’s showed me how men don’t want friendship, how they’ll never respect a female friend like their male friends. Boy 2 would often share with me extremely misogynistic memes his other friends had sent him as though I too would find them as hilarious as him. I shut him down every time and told him how offensive they were. That was my very first red flag for him. I should have blocked him way back then. More the fool me. Anyway, I’ve never had a boyfriend. I’m still a virgin at 19. I’ve never had my first kiss. Never been the one boys want in a healthy way. Never had anyone hold my hand. I’m lonely. I want love. It’s hard to trust men, I think.

I am a people pleaser. This stems from my mother’s tendency to snap at me for the slightest mistake. It doesn’t even have to be a mistake, it could just be something that she doesn’t approve of. If a teacher tells me I’m making too much noise I will remember that forever. I think it comes from how mum wants everything I do to be perfect. Can’t be bothered to elaborate on this one, you get the idea though. If someone doesn’t like me it pains me.

At college I was excluded by a group of popular girls in my english class. They didn’t want me at their table, and when I was there they bullied me. That took me from age 16-18 with no escape from bullying. Cut to now at uni. My flatmates bully me now. I live in a single-sex flat of 9 girls. Because I spend almost all my time in my room outside of lectures I have been dubbed anti-social, weird, a loner. My friend in the flat who talks to me tells me all the horrible things those girls say about me in the kitchen. The names they call me all because I prefer to mind my business and feel comfortable in my own company. I almost wish she wouldn’t tell me. I then have to wake up the next day and go to lectures with the girl who calls me names and talks about me the most. I have never been anything but nice to her. What have I done to deserve being treated like that? She will never sit next to me. Every time my friend tells me of something the girls have said about me in the kitchen it makes me spend that same day/night crying myself to sleep. Yay. I got so close to emailing my GP and telling them the state of my mental health, that I wanted help. But my mum would find out if I did that and I’d never hear the end of it.

Mum whispers the named of mental illnessess as though they are slurs. She’ll tell me a colleague has depression, while saying it under her breath and with a wide-eyed look that suggests it’s shameful and her fault, that she’s not right in the head. How could I ever get a mental-health diagnosis and keep my mother’s approval. But, god, I want a diagnosis so bad. I think it would be a brilliant first step in healing myself, looking after myself. Maybe even medication that could help me feel better. But no.

A doctor once told me, while my mother was by my side, that my heart condition was caused by anxiety. A HEART CONDITION which I still have to this day and which prevents me from sleeping at night. And yet she acts as if it never happened. If I mention I have anxiety to my mum she’ll say “no you don’t,” and if I remind her of what the doctor said she’ll say “no she didn’t.” It’s as if she thinks that if she ignores it, if she pretends it never happens, it will go away. For her, maybe it will. But not for me. I lie awake every night feeling my completely-off heartbeat, how its doing me damage. She doesn’t care.

With all this said, I love my mum. I love her so much. You only get one mother and she’s mine. She looks after me, she provides for me, she spends so much money on me. I love going out with her, even if it’s just to the supermarket, I love having girly days out with her, going shopping, I love baking for her. I love her. And god do I appreciate her. But all the good things she’s done for me don’t un-traumatise me. Every name she’s ever called me, every insult she’s thrown my way, I remember them all as though they were branded into my skin. I feel guilt for this. I feel guilt for the resentment I so strongly hold for a mother who takes care of me and prioritizes me over herself. But she switches so quickly. Never apologizes. One minute she’ll be screaming how much she hates me and five minutes later she’ll be calling me ‘darling’, ‘my gorgeous girl.’ It hurts so badly. I often feel like I’m unworthy of feeling the way I do for her because at least she looks after me, right?

I remember how I wanted to die so desperately between the ages of 15 and 19. I no longer want to die, I just want to LIVE. Something I’m trying to achieve. But I remember how painful that feeling of wanting to be dead was. No child should want that, but I did. Every day I’d wake up, wouldn’t want to ever get up again, would be screamed at for it, would cry myself to sleep, would beg and cry to not be made to go to school every day. The only reason I never went through with it was because I would imagine my mum finding me dead, the hurt she’d feel at her only child taking her own life. And I’m glad of that because I’m so glad I survived that. I want a life. I want children, a husband who loves me unconditionally.

I know this sounds stereotypical but another huge contributor to my feelings is capitalist society. I was shoved into the education system age 4 and I’ll now work until I’m old enough to retire by which point I’ll be living with all the burdens of age like pains, immobility etc. I want to live while I’m young but I can’t. I have to study, pay bills, get a job, pay tax etc etc. It’s depressing. I just want to enjoy life. I want to be free.

In about a month and a half I finish uni for the year. That means moving out of my first year halls so I will have to be at home with no escape until the end of september. Don’t know how I’ll cope but I’ve got no choice. I’m learning to drive at the moment. Once I have a lisence I’ll have my freedom and I’ll go out all the time but for now I’ve just got to cope.

Anyway. This took me about an hour to write. I feel better now I think. At least it’s out there somewhere even if no-one ever reads it. On the other hand it’s a bad feeling to know I have all of this built up and I’ll never get any help for it. Maybe I’ll be brave enough one day to talk to my GP and get some help. Not today though.

I understand lots of this may read as me being in danger. I am not even remotely in danger. I am okay. The point in this venting blog is to help myself heal. I am looking after myself and hopefully on a journey of getting better. I have friends and family who care about me, and even though I’d never tell them any of the things I’ve written about here, they still look after me too. Every little helps.

Signing off for now,

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