Just another diary

Wow, I didn't expect this to be so long. Not sure if anyone's going to read this wall of text, but here goes nothing.

I started ready Recovery by Russell Brand a few weeks ago. I am not an addict and, admittedly, my life and my issues have been pretty tame compared to what he talks about in his book. However, I keep going back and forth steps 4 and 5 because in step 5 he asks the reader to share the results of step 4 with a sponsor or someone they trust.

But I'm not an addict, so I'm not in a program, so I don't have a sponsor. I tried online therapy and let's just say it was a waste of money. I tried finding a long term listener here and never heard back from anyone and I don't really have friends or someone I trust, so I suppose this diary will have to do.

In step 4, Brand asks you to make an inventory of all the people who you think or feel have wronged you. It doesn't matter if it wasn't their fault, it doesn't matter if it was your mother or that guy who cut the line at the supermarket the other day. Just make a list of all the people you hold grudges against or are angry with or feel that at any point in your life have hurt you and disapointed you. Then, he asks you to examine that resentment. How did it affect you? How did you let it make you affect other people?

He goes on and on giving examples and it's rather long to explain, but I am currently in the process of making that inventory.

The first thing that stands out is how angry I actually am at my maternal grandmother. She used to look after me after school until she died when I was 15. And she was not a bad person. She was just doing her best. But. She hated my father. Boy, she fucking hated him with a passion. It's not unheard of for older women to hate their sons-in-law, but my grandmother made damn sure my brother and I knew how much she hated him.

Mind you, my father is not a bad man. True, he is flawed like any other person, but despite growing up with an emotionally and physically abusive mother, he was determined to break that cycle in his own family. He is a dedicated family man and I have no memory of him ever being violent. However, I am a bit angry at him, too. For being finantially irresponsible. We always lived above our means, which on the one hand meant my brother and I went to excellent schools (so it's a bit unfair of me being angry at him for this), but on the other hand money was a constant concern at home. As an adult, I went to the opposite direction. I hoard every penny I make and am very reluctant to spend on things, but I am also reluctant to do things like learn more about finances or invest.

Anyway, my grandmother hated him. You know what else she used to say? That I was just like him. Proud and unloving, just like him. She used to tease me saying I didn't love her enough, that my brother loved her more than me. And I remember really fucking hating her saying that. It made me feel terrible.

And I think I started internalising all of that. I am my father's daughter, proud and unloving and mean.

Enter primary school. I was not great at social skills, and my teachers made damn sure I knew when I was messing up socially. Not by talking to me in private. Not by talking to my parents about my issues with social interactions. By yelling at me and telling me off in front of the whole class. This, in turn, made a lot of my classmates reject me.

Of course I'm angry at my primary school teachers. They could've helped me, and they didn't. They made things worse for me at school. I felt awkward, rejected, and terrified of saying the wrong thing and being told off again. I am convinced that's where my social anxiety comes from. Something I've been dealing with even today.

I am also angry at my classmates, for rejecting me, for talking about me behind my back. Although my attitude as I got older didn't help. By the time I was 14 or 15 I came to the conclussion that I didn't need friends. They could all just go fuck themselves. I had my books and my writing and my studying and didn't need anyone ever again.

And it seems I was angry at my ex-boyfriend, too, even though it was absolutely not his fault he got sick. His illness was incredibly difficult for him and has turned his life upside down, and although I did so much to understand and be supportive, I do admit I wasn't always selfless. After all, if I wanted to have a life with him and he refused to comply with his treatment or to even talk about the future with me, he was not just going through something incredibly difficult and painful, he was messing up MY carefully charted 5 year plan that of course, included him. Is it wrong for me to think about myself? I don't think it is. But I can't pretend it's selfless.

At the core of all this anger lie a couple of fears: that I'm going to be not just alone, but that I won't be able to look after myself. The financial insecurity from my dad's overspending habits, the social anxiety from my bad experiences at home and school that now gets in the way of my work, my newly single status after five years of envisioning a future with someone who I thought would be a source of love and support. Funily enough, I deal with this by pushing people away. I have no friends. Well, I did have friends at one point, but then I moved halfway around the world a year ago and have failed to make a single new friend in my new country. My friends back home, well, they're nice, but again, I push people away. So I was the kind of friend who disappears for six months and then shows up out of nowhere asking about your work and the last season of Game of Thrones, or whatever.

Because all of this anger and resentment didn't just affect me. In turn, I became unreliable, a bad friend and coworker, affecting people around me who either had the misfortune of depending on me or who loved me and wanted love and support from me. I even abandoned someone who needed me partly because I got panicky about my plans being disrupted.

Deep down, I thought what the people on my list said about me was right. I was rude. I was proud. I was unlikeable. I was ugly. I was mean. So I suppose I didn't want anyone to see that. I kept to myself and kept other people at arm's length. To protect myself from the fear of having these beliefs confirmed once more and reassuring myself that I could take care of myself, I told myself I didn't need other people, anyway.

Anyway, this is already too long and I still have a lot left to read and disentangle.