hello, im back. its been a very long while, almost three years, and ive rode an emotional rollercoaster with ecstatic highs and dreadful lows. it is currently one of those dreadful lows, but the feeling has kept coming back over the past couple days instead of fading away into the background so i felt i had to post.
following up from my last post, i went back to school after taking a gap year (since i didnt finish that academic year i had to start over as a first year) but because of something involving a pre-college program that i didnt attend but my roommate and several other people did attend, i started off in a large friend group. of these people, i began hanging out with a girl named e (pseudonym) and by second semester we were dating.
all of this sounds fantastic, because it was at the moment. the problem is that i am an extremely flawed person. im forgetful, clumsy, and oblivious, and that led me to make way too many mistakes repeatedly. it doesnt help that e is prone to anger and im prone to crying, which she has told me a lot that it makes me the victim and her feel like a bad person. and i get that, but every time it happens i just cant help spiralling in my mind about how dumb i am to repeat these mistakes. currently shes mad at me and talking very little to me because i failed to communicate with her regarding my parents coming over (more on that later).
i think that e is a very good person. she works hard with little support from her family, shes smart, shes funny, she gives me thoughtful gifts, she helps me when i feel stressed, and overall shes done more for my mental health than either of my parents have. because of that im terrified to lose her. i was the weird kid before college and even now ive drifted away from all the friends i had in first year just because i feel i can’t relate to them. i feel like i dont deserve her, but then how will i ever find someone else who understands me (or at least in the case of e, someone who found my eccentric self interesting)? i want to salvage the relationship, but even if/when i do so we only have until december when we graduate and i probably never see her again. how do i become someone she can rely on, with self confidence and critical thinking to not keep making the same mistakes? i just feel horribly incompetent and i hate myself for not being able to meaningfully improve myself.
ig my vents done, time to nap and see if these feelings disappear for the moment
I feel like a common fallacy especially with younger people (like me too) is that conflict is inherently bad and should be avoided. As long as you have good intentions, conflict is natural with human relationships since no two people are exactly the same. I have a girlfriend and we've probably gotten mad at each other many times because sometimes we just don't agree on an issue and that's okay, but what matters is what you do to try and resolve it. Coming back from conflict strengthens a relationship and the strongest of relationships have been through hell and back. So in a strong relationship it could look like "I'm pissed at you right now because you did x y and z, but I love you anyways" and I see that in a lot of strong couples and friendships.
People tend to look inwards to judge themselves compared to other people. However the truth is that everyone is extremely fucking flawed in one way or another once you get to know them and have issues. I have a bad habit of idealizing others but once I get to know them better, I see that they are no different than me and have unlikeable traits too. There's a saying that goes "a person who appears weird has nothing to hide because you know they're showing everything about themselves, while people who appear normal probably are hiding something weird about themselves". My manager who knows how to do everything at work told me that she struggles with anxiety and depression, my brother who got into one of the best schools into the nation is dealing with a breakup, and my therapist told me that he struggled with anger issues when he was younger. It's really all about perception and the side you see of them.
Not sure if you've seen the Lego movie, but there's
this scene that I feel describes what it means to be unique well. For context Emmet tries to fit in with all of his "friends" at work by being "normal", but when the bad guys question his friends about what they know about Emmet they just describe him as boring and unassuming. All of his "friends" at work are people who accept their uniqueness for what it is while Emmet tries to fit in by copying their personality traits, leading for him to be seen as boring because all of his traits, despite being seen as "commonly good", are not
his and any "weird" traits of his own have been pushed away. He tries to pretend like he has no problems, when in reality all of his problems stem from the fact that there is no
him.
So I guess the main thing I wanted to say was that I feel like you should note is that humans are not black and white. You say that your girlfriend has anger issues and you are prone to crying, but then you list all these good traits that she has in comparison to your negative traits. What makes her so much better than you which places her on another level than you? She has anger issues which is not good, but does that make her a
bad person? If you really think about it, you aren't completely bad the same way your girlfriend isn't completely good- humanity doesn't make any sense whatsoever and we as human beings are strange creatures. Instead of viewing it like "My girlfriend is so amazing and I'm so flawed", try to view it like "My girlfriend and I both have issues but I want to be better for the person I love so our relationship can be better".
Another thing you should note is that everyone makes mistakes. There's a saying that goes
"I fear the man that practices one kick 1000 times more than the man that practices 1000 kicks 1 time." and that basically translates to if you want to be good at something,
you have to face failure. Get to know the taste of failure, do not be afraid of it, dance with it, and face it with everything you've got. The people who succeed are the ones who learn from their mistakes, there are no doubts about it- even if you look at the top Pokemon players on Smogon, all of them have had games where they've been completely dismantled and destroyed but that does not necessarily mean they're bad players. The first thing I feel like you should do to improve is to tap within yourself. Find out the type of person you are and the reasons why you get up every morning and live as them. It sounds weird, but a lot of adverse life happenings can leave us feeling disconnected from within. In order to love your girlfriend correctly, you first have to love yourself. Understand that even though she's an amazing girlfriend and you love her very much, the most important person in your life is ultimately you and that's who she's with. Ask yourself what it means to be you and act within those values.
From personal experience, not having self confidence makes life in general really hard so I would say the first thing to start with is that. I've had a really weird past with an adverse childhood stemming from intergenerational trauma and neurodivergency and it's put my self confidence to the ground. Not believing in yourself makes it
really hard to succeed as you instead look for ways to not fail and be "just average" or sustainable. Therapy is really helpful in having more self confidence since it teaches you to be more attuned with your authentic self and tackle common cognitive distortions that feed the shame that low self confidence stems from. Feeling your feelings are really important as that's what makes you human. Try to be kind to yourself the same way you are kind to other people, and I think that's a good starting point. You say you are really clumsy and oblivious and you view that as a bad thing, but how would you talk to a friend who has those same traits? You may tell them that those traits aren't even inherently bad to begin with and give them character or reassure them that they have other good traits too! Also from my personal experience, self confidence is really sexy, especially in relationships.
Be strong and believe in yourself, because it does get better :)
