6AM thoughts
Can't sleep. Went to bed at 11pm for comfort because I was spiraling from rejection sensitivity but then sleep just didn't come. Overheating, etc. I have to meet a friend tomorrow so I'm sure all of this will be like. For naught. Thinking of a lot of things I want to do and get done again. Nonsensically dreaming about actually locking in and studying Japanese seriously again and to try passing stuff like the JLPT to officially certify myself as N3 or N2 (this one is a long shot). Thinking about studying Taiwanese again. This won't last in the morning. I don't have enough hours in the day to make any of these commitments. I think I'm just feeling woefully inadequate again. You're not supposed to compare yourself but old habits die hard. It's hard when you know that you'll never reach where you'd like to be.
Just thinking about how basically most of my problems come down to the fact that I can't seem to heal from the trauma of selective mutism as an elementary schooler. Though "heal" is probably the wrong word also since it's not like I ever had a state before the fears selective mutism stemmed from that I can reach again.
But people can converse in languages they aren't even particularly good at by relying on other social cues and having the courage to put themselves out there and accepting that the main point is to be understood and not to necessarily be amazing at it. But mistakes I make feel so life or death for some reason. There's two mistakes that have been particularly haunting me lately.
I also am feeling weary of people and wondering whether I should just turn off my Discord for select days of the week. And not check Twitter or Tumblr. I'm feeling that deep urge again to just leave everyone I know online so I can reset expectations entirely and meet new people who won't expect a damn thing from me. Only, I know that it doesn't really work like that because social anxiety. If I stand up and walk away I probably will talk to no one, which is probably worse for me in the long-term. It's hard to know what the balance is.
I straight up am wishing my current friends would just decide that they're sick of me and break up with me already. I cannot help but think patronizingly that they're only talking to me because they have nothing better going on in their life so they just haven't woken up to the fact that there's far better people out there who don't make the mistakes I do and who are better at taking care of their feelings. I guess even when you don't have social anxiety there's all sorts of other reasons why you don't or can't meet the right people. I'm just tired of feeling put up with and likewise putting up with people by always trying to find the right words to say. I'm tired of being a stopgap measure, or more like I'm tired of waiting for years for the other side to come so I can end my role and then it doesn't come. I feel so (probably overly) beleaguered by basically nothing, to the point where I'm sending vent emails to a friend about my sister's milquetoast media takes.
It just always feel like everyone gets to express what they want, but I don't get to. But I also know this is partly a prison of my own making so it feels kind of dumb to complain anyway. And then when I do randomly express myself it's over things that don't matter like Precure or Animal Crossing or something inane and safe enough feeling. But I'm not having the hard conversations. Though I'm not having them because I also know that they have a very low chance of going over well anyway, and being the one to blow a relationship up is against my policy.
Thinking again about that one friend who I had a not-quite-breakup with. Extremely unsatisfying because it just felt like I was the problem and the one who couldn't communicate and I'm the reason why the relationship couldn't continue. So unsatisfying. When people dump me they should do it in a way that's extremely clear that they just don't want to talk to me anymore. (This person did not dump me, exactly, hence why it's unsatisfying.)
Generally when you're feeling resentful over anything that's a sign you should scale back. So yeah maybe social media and Discord detox. Might as well start with one day a week and see. The problem is just like, what am I going to do otherwise when I'm cyberloafing, though? I guess just read a bunch of random comics. Maybe if I open a bunch of ones in Japanese I'll trick myself into practicing extremely low stakes reading where it doesn't even matter if I get it all right because IDC about the mid content.
Someday I want to actually cultivate relationships where I can say what I'm thinking and trust that the other person can work out the kinks with me without all of this dancing around feelings and then lying for each other's benefit hullabaloo. It's actually extraordinarily rare for this to be the case. I wonder if that just means not talking to people who are undergoing traumatic events, though. That seems incredibly short-sighted since you don't know what life is going to throw at someone. No, that doesn't seem quite right. I think it's more of, there are people who are really good about their boundaries most of the time and then there are people who are incredibly erratic with them and then blow up on you when they can't take it anymore. The latter is more of a trauma way of communicating.
I don't know also if part of this is that I need to build better tolerance to being hated in the moment by friends. The thought of someone who I have to continue a relationship with hating me gives me rejection sensitivity spirals but, honestly, does it even matter? Sometimes people are reactive in the moment but come around in the future, for instance. If they really hate me that often and then stick around that's really just them being bad at boundaries again. And some people just have very little emotional permanence. But that bothers me because it just reminds me of my mom. I want to know what to expect with people but it's very hard.
Is the answer that I'm just the wrong person to get along with these people because I have trauma from my mom, or is the answer that I need to just build better tolerance?
Is there some number of friends you have to make before you feel satisfied that you've mostly seen it all, and the greener grass syndrome dissipates? I recall some TED Talk that mentioned a specific number of first dates that people go on before they decide the person in front of them is good enough. (Though who knows about the longevity of those relationships.) I cannot tell whether I am longing for different friends I am too afraid to make because I genuinely need something different or whether I'm just looking for an escape because I don't want to deal with my own self-hatred and the friends I have are already good enough and I can deal with their flaws (and maybe they can deal with mine).
Is the problem the situation, or my orientation? How does one ever figure that out?
Though, for an extreme example, some people have managed to survive prison and isolation (which is a form of torture) with relative tranquility by cultivating something in themselves, dare we say, mindfulness, which I am notoriously bad at. Obviously, not a lot of people achieve this, and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't. A friend of mine would probably say that it's a both/and situation, but that's kind of unsatisfying too because it doesn't answer the fundamental desire for wanting to know if the control is mine or not.
Presumably one could test this by slowly making new friends and also working on "friends being upset at you" tolerance. I guess most people just experiment and figure things out that way rather than writing hundreds of words just to muse over the problem that they are probably not even going to fix because the fixes prescribed run against their distress tolerance levels. Or at least what they believe the tolerance level to be.
Bah. Humbug.