Dear anita,

happy new year! I hope it will be a good one for you.

Regarding starting a new thread, I still feel undecided…

My therapist also told me, that the relationship between a therapist and a client is different. That unlike in other relationships, her interest is to help me without her having so much of her own agenda like in other relationships. That it is a room to try out things. In general, I had a good impression of her. She seems to truly care and I also like that she tells me more of what she thinks, unlike with my former therapist, who seemed more cold or distanced.

Just during or after the last session I felt confused. Like she was not happy how the therapy is going? Maybe I should ask her about that. I see her in about a week.

In the last week I was visiting my parents. I would have rather had more time for myself and to work for my classes. Now that I’m back, it’s hard to get started again. I did something, but I feel it’s not enough. And it’s also too much stuff to do, so I feel overwhelmed and I’m disappointed in myself.

At least I managed to cut down my internet consumption a little bit. But I found other ways of procrastinating, like reading in bed after I wake up. But maybe that’s o.K., because it’s the holidays and I felt stressed before. Now I’m a little bit more relaxed.

Recently I read a book about GDR history. And the things said about the people that lived there sounded similar to the way my family communicates. After all, my parents grew up in this system. Not openly talking about things, doing things in secret… it seems familiar.

For example, it was not allowed to watch west-German television. But most people still did it. They even had a campaign to remove the antennas from the roofs, but people just hid the antennas. Do you know what I mean?

We were at a family dinner with my grandmother. My sister made the observation that in my family, we don’t really talk to another, we talk more past each other. So I also thought more about our way of communication. My sister told my grandmother, that she has found a job. It is her first real job, it is related to the field she studied, it really seems to suit her and she can now live independently of my parents. But my grandmother only asked how much she was earning and that she also has to think about the future. She also brought up my cousins, who were earning the same amount while they were still in college, working part time. No encouraging word at all. My sister is clearly making progress, so why only focus on the negative??

O.K. I’m probably rambling and I don’t know if this all makes sense. I guess I’m still trying to understand what it means myself…

But maybe it has something to do why it is so hard for me to express what I want or to openly say what I feel? My family is so strange… My sister said that she finds it depressing to go visit our parents. She is also in therapy and her therapist said, that it seems to her that my parents just didn’t know how to be parents.

Sometimes I feel just like I want to go to sleep and not wake up again. I don’t know how to improve my life. I try to make little steps, but some days it works and on others it doesn’t. But maybe this is o.K. for now.

I made some goals for the new year.

– I want to finish my studies by at least February 2020

– I want to work towards getting a job to support myself

– I want to inform myself more about how to get jobs as an illustrator

– I want to spend less time online and spend more time reading, doing sports, meeting friends, drawing

– I want to eat healthier (I eat pretty healthy, except that I eat too much sweets), exercise more, read more

The career goals seem especially hard to achieve… It was always important to me, but I’m not making much progress there. Maybe I wanted too much. Or didn’t really know what I want. And I always felt like I was not good enough. But it would be such a relieve to finally make progress there, to be more settled.

But I guess it all starts in my mind? I was thinking that my career problems are the root of the problem, the root of my lack of confidence. But now I realize, it was already there before. Even when I graduated from school (with average marks) I thought that I wouldn’t be successful, even when I was still in school I thought that. And it became a self – fulfilling prophecy….

Sorry for the long text… I feel confused… I would like to change something, but it’s not going to be easy!