[invisible silence]

This has become a very difficult ride. What undoubtedly turned out to be the best month I've had in years seems to have been followed up by the worst. I don't know how to get into it without going into a big long spiel, but let me just say that no matter how much I try to do the right thing, how hard I work to make my life something worthwhile, the more I feel like life itself is on a mission to bring me down. Things have been so hard. They have been both great and amazing and wonderful while at the same time horrifying, devastating and intensely painful. I often feel selfish and guilty for my feelings. When I'm happy I feel guilty for being happier than the people around me - my family - and when I'm sad or angry I feel selfish for thinking somebody should care. I basically learned growing up that having feelings of any kind is a selfish thing that I should be ashamed of. So I learned to pack them away. Hide them and close them off and detach from them so that no one else had the burden of having to deal with my silly and ridiculous emotions.

Over the past couple of years, however, I took a perilous dive into the territory of forcing myself to deal with these emotions I have bottled up for so long. It's been an amazing journey so far, as I have learned things about myself and found new strengths and new joys within myself that I never thought existed. But on the flip side, it's also been incredibly difficult to deal with. The negative emotions are almost too hard to handle sometimes. I have learned to try to let these feelings flow through me instead of trying to block them off, and constructive, healthy activities to do to help myself feel better, but sometimes no matter how hard I try I can't calm the negative emotions whirring around inside me.

I tend to be a pretty passive person. I have never really been very good at outwardly expressing myself, even if deep down inside I really just wanted to scream or cry or break something. I tend to feel like it's my responsibility to keep the peace when others are being hostile or verbally attacking someone or even myself. Then when I do actually stand up for myself, I feel bad because then I feel like *I* was the mean one and the one who was wrong and I feel guilty and blame myself that I let myself lose control and couldn't stay unnaturally calm. Or, more accurately, feel like everyone else see's it that way.

And I am oh, so sick of it. For the first time in my life I finally have a sense of self respect, of self worth, and even self love. And there is a part of me now that actually does feel like I have identity and value. I actually like myself and care about myself, and it makes me very angry. Angry because for the first time in my life I'm realizing that I deserved better. I deserved better than what others have given me and better than what I have given myself. But even writing that paragraph, I feel guilty. That voice in the back of my mind pops up and laughs and says, 'How on earth can you think you are important enough to even say any of this to anyone? What makes you think anyone cares about you? What makes you think you matter, to actually talk about your feelings? What make you, YOU, think you could POSSIBLY deserve anything than exactly what you got. You, after all, wouldn't had gotten it if you mattered and were worthy of something, anything, let alone human empathy.'

I am trying to stay level, trying to be positive, but I feel like there is a conflict with my every thought. The tiny little voices of my inner self and my therapist trying to whisper that I am a good person who has a lot to offer this world, vs the storm of screaming negativity and worthlessness that suffocates whatever hope it touches. I often feel unwelcome in this world. I stay away from people because I feel like I don't belong here and that my touching their life in any way is bound to have bad consequences for them. I have always felt like a burden. That the people I was around didn't really want me there, or that my only purpose was to be someone they could take their anger out on. It's hard to look back on my life and realize that I have always lived in a home with an abuser. Whether it be my parents, my ex, or my siblings or other family members, it feels like everyone has either been abusive or completely apathetic - or both.

That's what hurts the most, though. Is the apathy. The complete apparent lack of feeling I am constantly surrounded with. And I get apathy. I have experienced it myself much of my life as what I can only describe as a defense mechanism so that the feelings I would have felt didn't destroy me, yet I always seemed to know when I *should* feel a certain way and act accordingly. Like if someone needed help, or were having a rough time, I would always try to do the best to help them feel better or help them get through what they were going through, just because I knew it was the right thing to do, and all the while tending to hide my own problems. But now, over the years as my life has taken more and more harsh turns and have become more and more difficult, and as I have reached out to these people for help and support whom I have always helped and supported before, I am finding that the relationship was not mutual. For in my time of dire and need, no one ever took the hand I was so desperately reaching out. Everyone either turned their back on me, or worse, mocked and shamed me for having these problems at all. Problems that I had kept hidden and bottled away for so long for this very fear. Problems that I had convinced myself I could get help with if only I could reach out to others and share my feelings and pain. But, no. It seemed that no one, no matter how much they claimed they cared, where there when I really needed them and it's something I still can't believe. Had I been a weaker person, I could have ended it right then and there. If for nothing else, to prove to them how serious my situation was, and to make them feel remorse and guilt for turning their backs on me.

But somehow I found the strength to pull myself back up from the ledge, alone, and now I don't know what to feel anymore. Most of all, I feel angry. I try to push it down and not think about it, but when I do I really feel angry. Angry that in what was truly the darkest place in my life that nobody cared enough to even try to help, empathize, or even listen for that matter. That I could not be here right now because I had no one to lift me out of that abyss. Truly, there are only 3 things that kept me from going down that road, but I understand why people do it. Perhaps I was lucky to have a few precious things to hold on to, but had I not had those, the people in my life certainly wouldn't have prevented it. But even now, no one seems to care or notice how hard I've worked, how much I've fought, and how far I've come. I suppose a lot of it would have to do with me still holding in things most of the time, but even when I did express my hardships, no one seemed to care. In fact, it seemed to have pushed some away. No one wants to hear about the elephant in the room, the thing that everyone knows about and realizes it's consequences, but refuses to look at them long enough for them to accept it into reality. The thing that has shamed me and my family, that ostracized us and turned us into pariahs of the rest of the family. The abuse and the neglect and the alcoholism. To the outside world it seems, and especially to my non-immediate family, I cannot help but feel like we are viewed as nothing more than the pathetic, useless spawn of our dead beat, drug addicted parents. That we are a product of their mistakes, and nothing unto ourselves. And I so desperately want to prove that wrong.

But it is so difficult. When the most supportive person you know is your therapist and everyone else either wants to tear you down, ignore you, or laugh at your misfortune, it is so difficult. I keep trying to tell myself that there are good people out there, that most of the world is good. But it's a belief that I was not brought up with, and deep down have a very hard time truly believing. I try to keep hope that things will get better if I keep working hard and stay on a positive route, but it often seems almost impossible not to veer off back down the path of self destruction. I fear people greatly. After everyone else in my life has let me down or hurt me in some way, I find it hard to rationalize that any other time I try would be any different, that it would end any other way, that it was worth the risk or, that I could even open myself up to that possibility without self sabotaging it without even realizing it.

I'm in a dip in my rollercoaster, a very, very deep dip. It's dark. The gravity is bringing me down and it hurts. I am waiting for it to go back up again, but I sometimes I really wish I could just be level again. Not feel anything. Be numb, as I have been most of my life, so that I don't have to ride this ride. So I don't have to deal with these emotions.

On the other hand, these strong emotions I am just learning how to deal with after a lifetime of hiding from them, no matter how awful, no matter how painful, are the first thing in my life that has truly made me start to feel human.

And I desperately want to feel human.

(Sorry, this seems to have turned into a long spiel anyway. Not sure why this always happens... But thank you for letting me rant.)

[Thunder Bow]

I assume you are in Therapy, so you can work on the negative stuff imprinted on you when you were growing up. That imprinted stuff has nothing to do with you personally. With time and dedication your own healing, the negative intrusive thoughts will fade away.