“Sort your fucking life out, mate!”

I’m scared.

There, I said wrote it.

There’s that saying that the first step to overcoming a problem is admitting you have one. I’m told that frequently. I suppose it’s true, but what people fail to mention is that huge gap between admitting something’s wrong and actually taking steps to fix it.

I want to get my life back together. I want to function properly. I want independence.

Yet I keep stalling.

Ever since my therapy session this past weekend, I’ve just felt guilty. I’ve realized that I live my life more through other people than I do for myself. It’s difficult for me to find my own motivation unless I’m working with another person. I manage my time better if I feel someone else is expecting something of me than I do when I’m the only person I have to answer to. I procrastinate like a motherfucker. Even if it’s doing something that will only serve to improve my life, I can still find an excuse why it would be better to put it off until tomorrow.

To go with the Freudian cliché, I think most of these feelings stem from my relationship with my mother. As I mentioned in my post yesterday, she babies me constantly. I had a pretty violent relationship with her as a kid, and while it’s now not the same as it was then (thank God), she still seems to exert this desire to control everything, especially anything to do with me. She’ll tell me that I need to learn responsibility, yet she takes all responsibility away from me. If I’m ever doing anything in front of her (setting up the coffee machine, washing dishes, etc.) she’ll inevitably find something I’m doing “wrong” and point it out to me. She tends to tell me to take care of my own stuff, but then she’ll do things like pick up dirty plates and cups and wash all the dishes anyway. She used to clean my room if I were out of the house somewhere for a few hours, and she still sometimes does. If I ever tell her to cut it out and leave my things for me to handle, she’ll say that I never do anything I say I’ll do and then … usually does it for me again before I have a chance to do it myself.

She denies ever acting like this if the subject is brought up among other people, therapists especially. She’s been told that by doing what she does, she’s ill-equipping me of skills I need to function as an adult, and constantly giving me the message that nothing I ever do myself is good enough.

I’m not saying this is all her fault. She’s definitely a reason for my anxiety, but I’m entirely able to make my own choices in my life. Right now, it’s me who needs to fix things. My mom’s never going to change. But I can change.

So why is it so goddamn motherfucking hard to do?!

I told my therapist that I would get my shit together this week. I’m supposed to start going back to the gym, finish up the paperwork needed to do volunteer work there, and generally doing stuff instead of hiding from the world all the time. And this is all stuff I want to do! But over the past few days, I’ve realized that on some level, I’m petrified of responsibility.

For the past ten years, I haven’t had a very good record of finishing anything, mostly due to issues with my mental health and/or my self-esteem in general. Most of it had to do with bouts of depression when I’d give up whatever I’d been working on and just quit. I dropped out of high school at the advice of a therapist after my first hospitalization. I’ve been working on college off and on for quite a while. Basically, I have nothing I feel that I’ve really accomplished, and it builds up over time and makes the whole “giving up” thing seem like it’s the only option I have for everything. Pile on top of that my fear of going crazy again and you’ve got yourself  a party.

What a bunch of bullshit.

I’ve become more determined than ever to prove my own worth to myself ever since I was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder last year. To myself and those around me, it felt like the real underlying problem through the years had FINALLY been found out and could be treated so that I could function well again and pick up the pieces of my life. It’s just that the whole “bouncing back” thing is taking longer than I, and possibly others, expected. I guess if you look back at my pattern of giving up, though, a decade compared to a year is pretty off-balance.  I don’t want to use that as an excuse for why I can’t get my shit together though because it’s pathetic.

I really just have to suck it up and get to work. I know that if I take that first step in the right direction, everything will fall into place and become easy. I just need to stop being afraid of success … and I wish I knew how to do that. I know I’m capable of setting goals for myself and doing things on my own without anyone else’s support, because I used that formula many times in order to be self-destructive. I just have to re-wire that thought process to work towards something good instead. I need to somehow push the negative voices (sometimes “real” voices [to me], sometimes an inner voice like everyone has) away and learn to ignore them the way I ignore the rest of my symptoms that interfere with daily life.

The way this is being written makes me sound much more optimistic than how I actually feel or what’s going on in my head right now. I keep making excuses the more I write here and listing reasons why I’m a bad, crazy person who’s never going to sort her life out. This fucking blows.