Isolated, Narcissistic, Worthless, Pointless, Horrible

[GreyBalance]

Hey, I just joined this website tonight at 6am (er, this morning, I guess) after another night of sleeplessness. I was re-reading an amazing story written by an anonymous blogger and was reminded that there's other stories out there. This is mostly on a whim, but I figure I might as well put myself out there, check out the community or whatever. I haven't thought about how there are other people out there who are as experienced and jaded as myself and I want to meet them, find people with which to connect, since being the desperate, isolated loner that I am, I kind of need that.

Anyways, the main thing people need to know about me is that I lived my entire childhood, up until high school, as a military brat. My dad was in the Coast Guard, therefore we had the usual move-around-every-2-to-4-years way of living. I've lived in northern Maine, St. Louis, Kodiak Alaska, Napa California, and probably others as a small thing but those are the main ones I remember. I'm currently going to college in Worcester, Mass, at Clark University (I don't mind being un-anonymous if you also go here and want to talk or hang or something). I'm a freshman, just finishing up this semester and trying to pull together some passing grades so I don't have to deal with the shit of failing out and god I just don't want to think about that. I had enough of that with high school. More later. Because of this constant moving, I don't understand the concept of stability, hometown feelings, lifelong friends, any of that sort of thing. It also contributes to my isolation, as I only had a very small amount of time to make and have friends before they were snatched away. Anything I worked to build for myself within a very small amount of time was snatched away immediately. It hasn't all been a bad thing, though, as everything in the world is balanced. I've had great experiences of seeing what the US has to offer, many different colors of lifestyle, learned many great life skills like how to pack quickly and efficiently and how to adjust. I'm a chameleon, man. Well, I can be.

Another big thing is that I'm narcissistic, though not to the extent of the personality disorder. It means that I pretty much see myself as above everyone else. People are pretty stupid and ignorant and just can't UNDERSTAND anything. My biggest strength is understanding. People around me... Well, when it comes to women, I see people I can manipulate. When it comes to men, I see people I can possibly use a little and tease and enjoy (don't take that as sexually as it sounds.). That's stating it a bit blunt and extremely... I do enjoy people's company and generally don't go after those sorts of things, but that seems to be pretty much how it is underneath it all. I value people, but I am above them all. It's kind of hard to explain. But, what I do know for sure is, if I'm above everyone, then I am apart from everyone, therefore I am worthless to everyone. My aunt, a therapist, mentioned that being narcissistic explains swings of being kind of haughty and sneery and such, but then just being yeah. You get it. I'm also intelligent, artistic, and just kind of awesome, so at least I have SOME basis for why I am awesome...but worthless...I keep confusingly being contradictory with my traits.

Okay, so, my story.
My parents were not abusive. No one in my family was. Except me to my sister, but let's start with my parents. My parents got married two years before they had me. I have no f****** clue why. They are complete opposites in every. single. way. you. can. think. of. Except that they both love my sister and me. No matter what I've ever said about my parents, I have never believed that they didn't love me. And I do love them, but there's more to that. Anyways, they got married and had us two, but they were never really like together. They were not a team. There was just nothing really between them. Sure, they liked each other okay in general, but they just didn't go together. Dad was actually pretty boring, while mom was more complicated and awesome. He was negative and has always been, according to my mom, depressed but has been really too boring for it to manifest much. He has his guns, which he just kind of has as a sort-of collection, which he cleans and occasionally shoots at a range, but doesn't hunt or anything. He was Coast Guard, who only had guns when they went to New Orleans to help keep people from raiding the food (yeah, that is something cool he did some time back before he got retired a few years ago. I always forget.) He was very safe about them. I always knew they were around, but had no interest in doing anything with them except be somewhat interested when he had them out in pieces as he cleaned and oiled them. Okay, I'm going off on tangents. Anyways, he's boring. Just...boring. And negative. A nice enough guy and supportive and stuff when there's occasion to, but boring. He just reacted to stuff as it came along. The big flaw he had was when he used corporal punishment when we misbehaved, as he was brought up to do while living on a ranch in Montana. Mom generally sort of knew about it, but wasn't really around or anything. It just happened. I look back and get spiteful, but I've forgiven him in general since it's really pointless to feel much towards him at all. Once, he smacked me in the back of the head as I was walking/storming/something away and I fell forward into the stairs and hit my head against the wooden railing and it bled. I'm just using this as a transition to my mom. I bring this up when we talk about my dad and how he was when I was living with them, or I did a couple times, because I was wondering why she didn't do anything and she says she didn't even know that had happened. But, whatever. I've dealt with all this stuff with a psychiatrist's help, and my dad has apologized for taking out the stress of the divorce and stuff on me, so I don't care so much anymore. It's just still important when it comes to the makeup of me. Okay, back to mom. She has had bipolar disorder from a pretty young age and was only diagnosed a few years ago. *sigh* You can imagine how fun it was growing up with a severely-mentally-ill mother. I can't even think of what it entailed, actually, since I have nothing to compare it to, but yeah. The thing is, my mother was trapped within her own mind and this life she didn't want, so was never truly happy in all the time I've known her. She loves us absolutely, more than anything, because we are the only good things in her life, really. She's doing much better lately, is on meds, living by herself, has a pretty good job, is...oh yeah, she's remarried. That's still freaking weird, since they just eloped like LAST WEEK (I'm glad she's happy and I'm not against it or anything, it's just kinda weird, yano?) but yeah, the point is, she's doing better. 21 years after entering a life not meant for her.

Of course, I blame myself. I know this sounds totally unreasonable, but honestly, I truly believe it. She's said that she had actually realized that she and my father didn't work out WHEN SHE WAS PREGNANT WITH ME. She wasn't implying ANYTHING, at all, trust me, I know my mother, but STILL. She didn't divorce him then because she hadn't wanted to be a single mother. I can understand that, but jeez, mom. No. I don't really feel anything like that. I just feel like my life is pointless and was just the chains that kept her from divorcing him, finding a better life, finding her freedom from her mind and social restraints (her family puts pressure on her, like any family, and she feels that they expect her to be something that isn't her and it's hard to make them happy by just being herself, that sort of thing). Whenever I'm lying in my bed, feeling down and unable to sleep because my mind will NOT shut down and relax and stop zipping around in misery, I usually don't cry. Until it hits me, again, like a javelin to the abdomen, that the person I love more than anything ever, the person I am devoted to til my last breath, my mother, had to postpone her true life happiness until her mid-40s because I was born. I will never forgive myself for it.

Oh, and know what amazing things I've done with my life?

In elementary school, I was the awkward outsider (This was Napa, in a place with 98% Mexicans, and I'm lily white, blonde, and blue-eyed. who had no social skills and made friends with the lowest of the low, other outsiders who were weird and freaks and awkward and stuff. What was worse was I didn't have the social skills to realize what was going on. Hell, I made friends with the girl everyone said had lice, and this was among first to third grade. So, when I moved on to middle school, I pretty much just shut down and had absolutely no friends whatsoever. My aura darkened, I would actually hiss at people who annoyingly tried to get my attention, and I can barely remember any of it. I luckily did meet a friend who helped wake me up, and we remain close friends to this day, which is amazing. (Keep in mind, grades 1-3 were in Napa, 4-6 were in Alaska, which was the best time of my life, and snatched away :3, and middle school was in St.L, then high school in Maine). And then there was Presque Isle. I hated living there. I hated the people, who I saw as ignorant and stupid, I hated how there was nothing in that little, rural, farming town, and I hated being trapped in the house of stress. Presque Isle was not only the sort of place I least wanted to live, it was also where things exploded. My mom was going through a lot, since she was finally diagnosed for BPD and was sometimes even so bad as to be suicidal at the time, though she was careful about my sister and I not really being privy to that sort of thing. She was getting help and being totally healthy, but it was still stressful. Anyways, these were the years of my real teenagerhood, when I realized just what was wrong with my parents. My poor sister, who I'd abused mentally, emotionally, and physically forever without really understanding it or anything (I still don't really understand it), got lashed out at much more, as well as my parents. Something was wrong and I didn't like it, but had no idea what to do. I attached myself to the internet every moment I wasn't at school, as soon as I got home until late when I had to go to bed. This caused problems with my parents, no, my dad, who was still trying to cling to control over me. He tried everything to limit it. He freaked when he caught me looking at online ----- (puberty. COME ON.), which was fairly often since, yeah, puberty and curiosity about my developing adulthood. And, you know, hormones. Good thing it was never actual masturbation he caught me at ANYWAYS, so it was about three or four years of constant battling with my dad. I hated him. I really, really did. Mom was also working again (she'd mostly been a stay-at-home for my life), which was great but also meant that she was more disconnected, so couldn't do much, even though she's always believed in much more healthful views when it came to puberty and such, and raising children *grumble*. I refused to sit at the dinner table for dinner, preferring to go back to the chatrooms (where I mostly was, since I had friends there and could share in fandoms I was using to distract myself from life) instead of sit at the dinner table and feel the grating tension. When the divorce happened, I understood everything and was relieved about it, but mom still had to live in the house because of financial struggles (lots of debt on her part after years of impulse-shopping, a very common aspect of BPD). It sucked. Since things were pretty much cool, nothing really changed, and that bothered me a lot. Still eating together at the dinner table, as the main thing. I loathed how dad would bark at me and force me to sit with them, seeming to pretend that we were still a family. We were not a family. We were a bunch of chunks, each able to be called a family. My mom and I were a family. My mom and sister and I were a family. Now, but not then, my dad and my sister and I are a family. The FOUR of us were not and I didn't want the facade to go on. I just wanted things to become as they should, us all not trying to live together so closely. Now that we all live separately, with me at college, my sister living with our grandparents and aunt and uncle because she prefers the school there to up in PI, dad still in dirtville, and mom in New Jersey, everything is going so much better.

I've been a monster twice in my life. The first time happened maybe only a few months after we moved to PI, and the second was only about last yearish (I was still 17 but almost 18, so definitely more than a year ago, actually). Long before I went to the wonderful psychiatrist who helped me come to terms with my family and talk to them, my sister and I were still enemies. She could grate on my nerves so easily and push me into blind rages, and she always hated me. We started fighting over the remote one day. Seriously, FIGHTING over it. We were always cold fighters, sort of attacking but not rushing at each other or pure wrestling or anything. I don't quite recall what happened between general fightingness and her doing this, but she picked up a pair of scissors and brandished them and started backing up to where the remote had been eventually flung and giving me the look of "I'm going to get it and you can't try anything, so there." So, I, who was in the kitchen (which was right up against the living room), grabbed a knife reactionarily. She freaked out and pretty much ran to dad's room. The next part was a rush, but I know I put the knife back and ran outside and into the garage, which is shaped like a barn and has a sort of attic in which I'd put a blow-up mattress and a portable DVD player and had sort of set up a cool little base (didn't sleep there or anything, just hung out). I curled up on the mattress and sobbed into the comforter, but fell totally silent as I heard my dad come outside. I was terrified because I felt like a monster, and was probably also terrified of what would happen, but I don't remember very well. He called up that he would protect his family and would even call the police on me. Stuff like that. I don't really remember how it was resolved or anything with him, but he didn't call the police or anything. When mom got home, she was, as usual, much more understanding and got that I had been provoked, as usual, and it was just the usual anger problems and, apparently, Tourettes.

As a quick aside, I do have a fairly minor case of Tourettes, wherein I have tics that aren't all that bad, such as wiggling my toes and sometimes chewing on things, though the worst one is picking at my acne, so my face is horrible :p. It does explain the jolts of excitement, I've come to find, which also helps sort of explain the flares of rage, along with years of self-repression and the grinding tension. So, yeah.

So, that happened. I don't even remember how/if I was punished. I just remember feeling like such a monster. But, that doesn't begin to match the second time.
It was actually probably more like about two years ago, just before I saw the psychiatrist I've mentioned. It was Harvest Break, I remember now, which meant 3 weeks off from the last week of October to two in November (a bit of a perk of a rural town). For the first two, I was busy with my girlfriend or something and stuff, so I was kind of tired and not well vacationed by the last one. So, I requested very reasonably to stay home while the others went to visit my grandparents and aunt and uncle here in Mass. for a few days. My mother has this flaw of loving to assume that we ALWAYS have our minds synced up, which isn't always untrue since we're fairly similar and are really quite connected, but unfortunately that leads her to assume I'll continue to just blindly follow her or immediately change my mind and THEN follow her when we disagree. We disagreed. I explained all my points of why I should stay, like how I was 17 and soon to be 18, it was a small town and we never even locked our doors, I wouldn't really have a problem feeding myself if we had some ramen, mac n' cheese, and some other things around (I'm also a pretty good cook when it comes to real food), and I was home alone all the time since I rarely ever went with them when they went out to eat. But nope, mom was paranoid about leaving me home alone while they were a couple states away, so she blew off my argument and the next morning even started to PACK for me while I desperately tried to keep my cool and still be rational, which I'm proud to say I was, asking for actual rhetoric so she'd have a chance to actually change my mind instead of continue to grate on me and be horrifically unfair, and dad didn't make it easy by threatening to drag me out to the car by my hair even though I was only wearing a bathrobe that morning. So, I snapped in the end, of course. I ran upstairs like a bullet, grabbed the knife (the same knife, oddly enough, as before), and stood like a cornered animal in the upstairs hallway, snarling that they needed to NOT TOUCH ME. I had a knife pointed right at my mother, because she came up the stairs first. I didn't move. I don't remember what she said, but I know she was calm, so she was probably trying to get me to calm down while also telling dad that she knew I wouldn't do anything (of course he had SUCH GREAT belief in me, jerk). I finally turned and ran down the short hall and into dad's room and closed the door. I didn't want to hurt anyone, I just wanted everyone to step the heck off. I completely believed dad would drag me out and mom would let him. Because I was 17 and not to be listened to when it came to stuff like this. I put the knife in the little bathroom in his room, not really needing it then and being wholly disgusted with myself, and sat on the floor two feet from the closed door and just waited. Dad yelled at me, threatened to call the cops (I really, really, really didn't care about anything right then, I was so completely in a crater of downness), did call, decided that would be "too easy," hung up on 911, and was called back, of course. Two policemen came to our house and talked to me and them. They were very nice. I hyperventilated out a bit of a rambling explanation, and they were pretty understanding and believed me when I said I didn't actually want to hurt anyone. They asked my family if they believed I was going to do anything, if they ever felt in danger, because that's the big legal problem thing, but of course my mom backed me up. I didn't hear that conversation, and now that I think about it, don't want to know what my dad said. Finally, they left, leaving us pretty much back to where we were, but at least I was a bit more listened to. What's funny is that mom saying she wasn't comfortable leaving me alone with her in another state didn't move me, it was the fact that they decided to leave dad with me. At this point, my sister was living with GP&AU, and he and she are really close but didn't see each other much. I went along, saying that I wasn't THAT selfish.

I was just a monster. Yeah, such a great person to have wasted the gift of life upon. All this and probably some more, just so mom could live around 20 years of awfulness before finally finding her happiness and life at 45ish.

So now, I see myself as worthless. The only thing that really gives me much pleasure is helping people, and I'm going for a Bachelor's majoring in psychology so I can become a psychologist (therapist, psychoanalyst, that sort of thing) and help people like all of you get better psychologically. I've always focused on other people's problems and never my own, but on February 4th, 2011, I had a breakdown and realized just how I feel about myself. I even wrote it down. I realized I ruined my mother's life. My first truly great relationship and my first semester of college, was all just some glittering illusion. Winter break came, my boyfriend wasn't there for me when I needed him even though I put so much work into the relationship and helped him whenever he needed, he was realized to be emotionally weak and unable to solve his own problems, or really seem to care about mine, and I ended the relationship, the best one I've ever had. I just can't deal with his s*** as well as my own, all by myself on both sides it seems. I'm not even enjoying college, and am, again, struggling a bit to be sure that I'll get through classes. I have horrible insomnia, like I said before, and can't get to sleep until 5-6 am, and my classes are midmorning or around noon, so I've missed a LOT of them. Luckily, my professors are understanding and willing to work with me, so hopefully I'll get through, but I don't want to keep relying on their sympathy. My appetite is even very much gone, so even though I go to my one or two meals a day with an empty stomach, I barely really eat anything. I never eat dessert, even though I used to love chocolate and had a huuge sweet tooth, because I'm just not interested. I'm distracted and used to being sort of generally depressed all these years, so I can enjoy being around my friends enough, but this depression is just...amazingly horrible. I've never lost my appetite before, and even used to binge eat for many years (hence I'm somewhat overweight, but not so much that I mind at all, since I'm fairly satisfied with my body, though I'm proooobably losing weight now. I don't know, I don't have a scale). I used to be able to sleep okay, though would from time to time have trouble getting to sleep for maybe a night if I had a lot on my mind, and even then I managed to fall asleep at least before 4. I just pretty much hate myself now. I'm even starting to get a bit suicidal, which is different than I used to think it would be, back when I wasn't even close to being it. I'm not making any plans to try it, at least, but I keep mulling it over in my mind. What's keeping me from doing anything is the fact that my sister and I are my mom's greeeatest treasures, and that's not even a strong enough way to put it. I know she'd fall into the center of the earth in lowness if one of us died, not to mention died from SUICIDE. I can't do that to her. I really, really can't. But, I keep trying to think of ways around that, like if I were murdered instead or something. I don't know. Oh, and I meant it's different because I used to expect that the feelings would be more...strong, um, impressive...like...arg, word is...significant? I mean, I don't feel much except general lowness when I think about it. I guess I used to expect to feel... I don't remember anymore. More angry and sad at the same time? I guess. But, yeah, I'm not going to do anything, but I've definitely entered the layer of low that will let me seriously contemplate it. I'm so low, I'm not even afraid of the notion that I'm thinking about it anymore. I've lost a lot of fear, it seems, replaced by just the thought that it doesn't matter what happens to me because I'm worthless.

As for help, about two weeks after my breakdown on Feb 4th, I spoke to the college counselor (there's no actual psychiatrists on staff at a psychology-based college. WHAAAAI?!!) and she said I definitely need help, which was a start. And now, so long after, I still haven't made an appointment at the psychiatry clinic a little ways away, since I have to figure out cab fare (grar) and stuff, but at least my insurance is kind of awesome and covers enough appointments to definitely get the ball rolling. I really just need treatment, if any can be given. I know it'll be difficult to try to get me to change when it comes to my views about how I ruined my mother and the narcissism and stuff... I know this is going to take a looong time...or something...gah.

So, yeah, now it's 8am and I'd like to be able to say that writing this all down and putting it out there made me feel a bit better, but I don't really feel anything right now. Still pretty down, I think, but that's pretty much normal now. So, no change. I'll check out the chatrooms and stuff, see what happens. I'm pretty much hopeless, but really have nothing to lose by trying everything, since why not? Underneath all these issues, I'm pretty hardworking and proactive, though that hasn't manifested itself much throughout the years, so yeah. We'll see what happens.

Thanks for reading.