Dear miyoid:

I am trying to understand your recent posts in light of what you shared earlier this year:

Jan 14: “I sometimes feel superior to my peers…  I feel superior intellectually or ethically, I can feel like I deserved better than somebody who is not as intellectual or as ethical… And when that person has more than I do… I… suffer… I feel worthless”.

March 29: “I sometimes also feel like my own problems cannot be solved by my friends, at least the closest ones. Maybe because I give insight to them, maybe because I see their struggle, I feel like my struggles are superior, I’m not sure. I kind of see them as luckier than I am, and maybe that’s why they cannot understand each other fully and they come to me for that… I’m kind of fed up with helping some people in my life… I always set aside some money for harder times… There are so many details I think and act accordingly that my friends don’t think about. And when they need something, they just ask me… my flat mate just asked me if she can use my milk, because she forgot. I don’t like to share my stuff and I keep extra, so I had to open up the milk just for her… those people end up asking for more and more and then I feel used. And in the times of need, you cannot ask them to be careful, you feel like helping them. I don’t really know why I get this much uncomfortable”.

April 26 and today, April 28: “I feel like I don’t have the good friends that a person needs. I realize that all that matters to them can be their own current agenda, and I feel neglected… When I’m not okay, I don’t think that they can make me feel all better, or I don’t think that they have the answers… I would prefer being helped, but I don’t want to ask for it unless I really have to… when I see somebody being selfish or being ignorant at something, I cannot be carefree. Instead, I feel unlucky cause I don’t have a sister like that or a friend like that. I feel like I’m surrounded by selfish people”.

I am trying to understand and please correct me if I am misunderstanding in regard to each of the following items:

(1) You feel ethically superior to your peers (being self-sufficient, careful and detailed, ex. seeing to it that your phone is charged at all times and buying extra milk). When your ethically inferior peers have more than you, more material success perhaps, more (what?), you feel angry at them because it is unfair that they will be rewarded for their carelessness. You also get angry when they ask you personally to make up for their carelessness/ reward them for their carelessness (ex., asking you to charge their phones and use your milk).

(2) You feel intellectually superior to your peers. You give them your insight into their problems, but you don’t ask for their insight because their insight is inferior to yours.

(3) You feel that your inferior peers are lucky because they are selfish, but you are not selfish, therefore you are unlucky. (I don’t understand this part, can you explain to me the connection between selfishness and luck, and what makes you unlucky?)

anita

Dear miyoid:

If I knew that you were distressed (regarding calling your boyfriend by your ex’s name, and about the holiday/ your sad relationship with your sister), I would have answered you sooner. Just in case my words could be of any help.

I need to be more focused to answer you more thoroughly, but for now: I wish that you can bring yourself somehow to not have any more contact with your sister. You can’t get the love you needed for so long from the same people who didn’t give it to you: your parents, and your sister, your family of origin. Love is elsewhere, and it seems that this elsewhere is your current boyfriend. You said it yourself: “he is someone I can now count on, feel good with“.

Calling a boyfriend by another man’s name (or calling a girlfriend by another woman’s name) is common. It’s awkward and unpleasant but it is not disastrous, it’s not a big deal really… most often, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a glitch. Definition of glitch: “a sudden, usually temporary malfunction or irregularity of equipment”, the equipment in this case, being your brain under the influence of playing a game.

anita

I hope that you are okay these days, miyoid,, even better than okay!

anita

Dear miyoid:

“I actually feel weird by posting this, as I feel like there are lots of people that need more help than me… Maybe you do see why I felt a bit weird posting this, this is not the biggest problem I suppose. Something big enough to make me feel sad” –

– people with very big physical problems like being under attack in a war zone or being in a natural disaster area while a tornado is in progress, or where there is famine… they will not think about posting here, nor will they be able to do so. Therefore,  you are not taking their space!

Otherwise, when it comes to people posting about their sadness, anxieties etc., you are no less valuable than any other person: your sadness matters no less than anyone’s. And so, please try to be okay with posting here any time, any day or night, about anything.

“I remember last year here… Now pretty much everything changed for the better” – I feel very good reading this. There has been progress!

“I was mostly an alone kid, and I know how to spend time alone… I don’t get bored easily” – as a kid you did an excellent job surviving and adapting to being so very alone. But you were still alone and very thirsty for human attention and connection.

“But for the last month, I was kind of alone again. My bf had his sister and mom around, he couldn’t visit much.. And I got bored” – your boyfriend sort of… quenched your thirst for some time, just enough to make you feel significantly better, but when he got busy with other people, it’s like he took your water supply away.

“I feel like I don’t value myself enough, maybe that’s the common problem” – I think that the problem is that a kid cannot value herself enough to make up for being so alone. A kid has to have social attention and connection so to be healthy. Fast forward, the kid that you were- she is still YOU. She still needs social attention and connection and most recently she has less of it than before.

“I will never have anything like a sibling relationship… something I can never have… maybe I just have to learn to live with this” – like I had done, you too will have to grieve the lonely childhood you endured, to grieve the fact that there is no redo, no second childhood. The one you had is the only one you will ever have. Many people chase a second childhood, and it is a futile chase. (I believe that the invention of heaven is all about the hope for a second.. heavenly childhood).

When we stop hoping for and chasing a second childhood (being aware that we are doing so, or not), we set ourselves free from being stuck waiting and hoping  for what will never happen. Do you know what I mean?

anita

Dear miyoid:

“I don’t think of my past… I mostly think about today and the future. I mostly think about how lonely I will get when I lose my mother” – when you think about the future, about when you will lose your mother, you don’t realize that you already lost her: not the physical person (she is still alive), but what a mother is supposed to be for her daughter: attentively loving in a predictable, reliable, dependable way. This is why when you are presently in her company, your thirst for loving attention is not quenched. The physical mother is there, what she is supposed to be- is not there.

Personally, I lost what my mother was supposed to be so long ago, that I don’t remember how it felt, if it was (if it happened) to have a dependable, lovingly attentive mother. I don’t have any memory of being care-free around her, of feeling comfortable, safe and happy in her company.

Except for the one time in my early 20s when I got drunk, she came home, I put her hands in mine, and sort of danced with her for a little while, and another time, in my early 40s, when I ingested an opioid and then talked to her on the phone.

We think that we worry about the future, but we worry about the past, projecting it into the future.

“I’m not sure how I should provide that water supply for myself. I’ll have to do that” – if you realize, if you thoroughly understand that your thirst is not yet to happen in the future (when you physically lose your mother, or when/ if you lose your boyfriend), but that it already happened a long time ago, you will stop being so afraid and you will be able to get unstuck from the past (and the past fears), and move on to a different life experience.

I think that it is hard to grasp what I am saying, but it’s true nonetheless. Personally, I know that what I feared most in my life, in the past (my mother’s death), already happened when what-a-mother-should-be died to me. It happened when I was five perhaps, maybe earlier.

anita