Thoughts on loss of my healthy self.

Something that I’ve always prided myself on is the capacity to drop everything and be able to support someone.  I am an introvert, but one of the ways that I gain energy is from helping others.  Hence, why even though I’m introverted as all get out, I enjoy teaching.

When I was healthier (I say this because looking back I don’t know if I was ever actually healthy), I was able to do this, no matter the time or circumstance.  I guess you could say that I also had crap boundaries and was a people pleaser, but because this was something I enjoyed doing, I got something out of listening and offering advice to others, I thought it was okay.

In the last few years, as my mental health plummeted in response to being in such a toxic, unsustainable work environment, my fear at the state of the world, and now the Pandemic, I found myself, for the first time in my life, unable to be there for others.  It was a very, very hard realization.  It hurts that I cannot help others at any time.  Especially people I care about.

So, what I’ve realized is that helping others does take energy.  Not very much energy, but it does take some.  Also, over the course of the interaction, I am potentially able to gain energy back, because close, personal interactions are one way that I am able to recoup my energy.  But for the first time, I was forced to look at myself and admit that I lacked the amount of energy to start such conversations.  

It is a very hard thing to tell someone you care about that you cannot help them, even if just listening is what would help.  It is something that makes me feel bad about myself, as this skill, these kinds of interactions, are something I pride myself on.  When my friends compliment me, this is one of the things that always comes up.  To realize that I was not healthy enough to even do this, it causes grief.  

I grieve my healthier self often.  Especially the things that I know I have lost forever: my ability to run, the connections with the children in my community, my skinnier self, my mental resilience, my feeling of financial stability, my time “wasted” due to my illnesses.  Some of it is wrapped up in my own internalized ableism, and my own internalized fatphobia.  [Note, I do need to say this clearly: I am not asking for any advice or encouragement on how to be skinny.  I am specifically stating a boundary: do NOT give me any advice or encouragement on how to be skinny.  If you give me advice or encouragement on how to be skinny, it will cause me harm, it will hurt me.  I’ll talk about my weight, health, and disordered thinking about food at another time.  Please, do not cause me harm.]  Okay, that was a hard, but necessary thing to say.  I’ve lost where I was going with this paragraph.

It is a hard thing to realize what I perceive as failings about myself.  Even though I know that it is not my fault.  I am ill.  I have gotten a lot better than I was before my partial hospitalization.  But I was ill for a long time before I hit rock bottom.  I mean, I’ve been passively suicidal since roughly 2015?  I was passively suicidal for most of my teen years.  I only got through all of it because I had a path to follow.  I was doing what I was supposed to do and just moving through life because I thought that’s what I needed to do.  When that stopped working, when I started to have more actively suicidal thoughts, I thought there wasn’t anything I could do about it because I needed to keep working.  I need medication to live, that medication is paid through my insurance, my insurance comes from my job, therefore, my job is keeping me alive even though it is harming me.  Joke was on me because my job made it impossible for me to work during the Pandemic and I’ve been out of work since February 2021, right before I went through the hospitalization because yes, I was really, really sick.  

Part of my mental illness is both exacerbated by and intensified by my negative self image.  I have some pretty messed up Core Beliefs about my worth and my stability in any relationship.  Specifically, I think I’m pretty worthless and everyone will eventually figure that out and leave me.  The only people I can count to not figure this out are my cats, and they are both not people and going to live for a relatively short amount of time.  So they will leave me.  Just like my first 3 cats have.  And I still grieve their loss.  Which reinforces the belief that everyone will leave me.  It’s not a pretty cycle and something that a lot of therapy is working on.  And it’s really hard.

So yeah, those memes that make a joke out of thinking of yourself as a bad friend?  I feel those hard.  And I know that it’s both not true and internalized ableism because sometimes I literally just can’t.  And the feeling still exists.