For many years, I’ve had several issues that tend to come and go. As a brief summary, I grew up with my grandparents, then moved in with my mother and step-father when I was ten years old. Throughout most of high school, I was very much bullied and socially isolated. This whole story left me with a fear of rejection, coupled with a rejecting attitude myself… basically I tend to reject people before they can reject me. If I do let people close to me though, I give them everything I have and am very afraid of arguments… I am always scared they will stop liking me.
In my teens and early twenties I also felt very emotionally empty. I felt close to nothing, life was just going through the motions for me. Now and then it was punctuated by days where I was just really sad. I was at university at that time and very unhappy with my circumstances there.
Then I met a guy and we became a couple. This broke the spell of feeling ‘nothing’. Somehow it felt like I had been frozen and now was being thawed out (excuse the dramatic metaphor). I fell very deeply in love with him, but he broke up with me a year ago. I fell into quite a hole for almost a year. It got better and I met someone else, but I still can’t seem to let go… and apart from that, the old indifference seems to return now and then.
I still suffer from the fear of rejection I mentioned above, and I cannot bear to be criticised by people I like.
Lastly, another thing that has been weighing me down in the past and especially now is my absolute lack of motivation in anything. All throughout uni I did my assignments and my studying for the exams the night before, and I hardly went to lectures. I didn’t make any friends apart from those I lived with… I find it hard to approach people. I graduated a year ago (MA in psychology), had an idea what I wanted to do after, but let all application deadlines pass. I took a year out and am now working in a restaurant. I feel totally unchallenged and bored, but I don’t really think I have enough skills for a ‘real’ job’. Well, I was going to study again beginning this autumn, but again let all deadlines pass. I want to go into journalism now, but I do absolutely zero for it. I can’t even get myself to write anything and it makes me feel like a scam. It’s like I have all these grand dreams and then do nothing to achieve them. I feel like I’m selling myself short in all areas of my life, but don’t have the energy or motivation (and perhaps the self-esteem) to do something about it. I sit on my butt the whole day and browse the internet or read a book, and it has been like this for many years.
I sometimes think that I would really like to simply talk to someone, someone that helps me readjust my attitude, because I feel stuck. The reason I don’t go is because all of my problems in isolation seem totally petty, even though the sum of them really affects me, especially the total lack of motivation. I guess I’m scared of being told ‘suck it up, there’s nothing wrong with you’. The ironic part is that I’m a psychology graduate myself. I ought to know better, but I suppose I’m also afraid that I just suffer from the ‘self-diagnosis-syndrome’. The other thing is that none of my issues are constant enough. I’m not always unhappy, things are fine for days or weeks, and then one or several of these issues return… only the lack of motivation has continually been present for… oh, at least six or seven years. I know that being fine for periods of time doesn’t mean that everything is peachy, but it is what keeps me from taking action on my problems. I don’t know, I’m sorry for the long post, I’m just absolutely lost, and I could never talk about this with my family or even my friends. Are those things reason enough to see a therapist?