Dear Nick, I couldn’t understand what you’ve meant and I’m eager to learn!

Dear Anita, thanks for this comprehensive message which again, fed me a lot. Merry Christmas to you too!

All the things you wrote make sense. I’ll be sharing this with the psychiatrist I’m seeing, which will be 2 months later. In the meantime, I felt like I can work on these key points myself. I’m realizing everyday that I can get better at some subjects. It made sense when you also used the same key points, like confidence. I can see how insecure I can get in my relationships and how much of a compromise I am able to give in order to avoid conflict or maybe in order to avoid another abandonment. And I’m simply afraid of attracting too much attention by wearing the stuff I want or doing make up. I tend to not step ahead to feel better, and wear better, and look better. Of course I always take care of the basic stuff, maybe more than lots of people. I care about that a lot, in a weird way maybe. I never go out with unplucked brows, I always have them ready, even though I have to pluck them like two times a week. But when it comes to make-up, maybe I never feel like I have the confidence for it. Slowly trying to get over that these days, maybe it has been a lot, like two years, but it’s a slow process. Although I like those stuff on other people, this problem is just about having them myself.

Other treatment goals: “regaining an adaptive equilibrium, alleviating symptoms, restoring lost skills, and fostering improved adaptive capacity”- (1) learning skills such as choosing and asserting oneself, (2) changing maladaptive/harmful thinking and behaviors into adaptive/ helpful thinking and behavior, and (3) feeling better, stable- as a result.

I’m not really sure if this is what I have, but I clearly have lots of symptoms of it. Therefore, working on myself for two months till my next appointment and talking about this at that appointment seems logical. I don’t want to live a life which I mostly fear of things, and fall behind just because I’m scared of attention or more specifically, the wrong type of attention since I mostly fear of physical attention rather than a mental one. Although it sometimes prevents me from expressing myself further as well. I wouldn’t say that I’m shy, or insecure to share. But I would say that it has effects on me. Sometimes I find myself listening and feeling bad when somebody is speaking about something that they don’t know and I don’t really interrupt. Rarely, I do that, in a weird way, or not. But then, I question my ego.

Especially these last weeks, I stumbled upon some circumstances where the person I’m talking with has this attitude that I can destroy in just one second. Sometimes, I just didn’t do that. And the other times, I felt my ego a lot, rising. I just obeyed that, and gave some kind of an answer where I put myself ahead. But then, I realized that wasn’t the right thing to do, immediately. I really like feeding my ego, though. However, it’s like, I would like to be able to do it the right way. I would prefer to be in a good position when I do that, I would rather have people saw my knowledge or skills naturally instead of me expressing them. Maybe I’m that much of an egoist! Kidding. But maybe I am! But that can be another type of confrontation, confronting people about the stuff you do, and maybe I am also avoiding that.