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Journey under the sakura-filled sky


moonie

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a tulpa is no therapist.

 

One unfortunate thing is that I have had a bad experience with trying to talk to someone. Despite being promised everything I said was in confidence, my high school counselor (who was also a pastor) decided it was prudent to call my father (who was not my legal guardian at the time) and tell him every word I said. I was a minor at the time, and suicidal feelings/thoughts were mentioned (though not in the present-tense) so I suppose I can understand the need to inform a parent/guardian, but they also knew that my parents were going through an ugly divorce and that he did not have custody of me. On top of that, their excuse was that they felt my parents should know what I was saying, and yet they didn't feel it was necessary to call my mother. The only reason my mother found out was because my father spread it around to everyone and rubbed it in my mother's face that he took out life insurance on me and that she wouldn't get a dime if I offed myself. My counselor just laughed because I was naive enough to believe in the promised confidentiality, and then all the counselors wondered why I wouldn't speak to them anymore.

 

I'm an adult now, but I'm still reluctant to talk to anyone about how I'm feeling. Trust doesn't come very easily to me. Anonymity helps to some degree and so my thoughts have peppered the internet over the years.

 

For the problem of feeling lonely, seeking out romantic relationships isn't the way to go about fixing that.

 

This is another thing I am somewhat experienced with, seeing as I have jumped in and out of a long string of relationships for all the wrong reasons. Some of the people I involved myself with were abusive, and they were each abusive in different ways. I learned a lot about myself during/after the last abusive one, and I realized I am stronger than I thought I was. My last relationship was my most serious one and was heading toward marriage, but it turned out that my fiancé didn't feel the same way and was too much of a coward to tell me. The way I found out was through a Facebook status update that he was in a relationship with someone that wasn't me. He was full of sweet words and future hopes and dreams right up until I found out, but I never heard from him again after I found that post, so I never got broken up with or so much as an explanation or a goodbye. That was two months shy of two years ago. Trying to decide how I feel about him and what happened has been difficult because I could never reconcile who he was with me and who he turned out to be (most likely a prolific pathological liar).

 

Two years is a long time to be alone when you're getting older. Being 27 means that I'm not so old that there's no possibility of finding someone to live out the rest of my days with, but it still means that I'm slowly losing the best years of my life to loneliness and a ticking biological clock that's taking away the best years of my youth. Perhaps I'm lucky that I don't have a strong desire to have children, but it often crosses my mind that my increasing age can and will soon be a problem for having a safe pregnancy and healthy baby should I ever desire to go down that path.

 

Friendships are all I have that mean anything to me, and I have a few that I treasure more than anything in this world. Our little group speaks together every single day through Skype, and we regularly play games and talk about all kinds of things both serious and lighthearted. Sometimes they get together for a weekend here and there, but I've not been able to join in because of the 4,000 mile distance. My upcoming trip in March to the UK is something I am really looking forward to both as a means of finally meeting and hanging out with my best friends, but also as a chance to fall in love with the person I feel closest to.

 

This is someone who I have been able to talk to since the very first day we met about anything and everything without fear or shame and for hours on end without getting tired of each other or bored. I don't know if it will turn into more once we can look each other in the eye and get a true sense of each other, but I'm excited to find out either way.

 

Maybe it's not healthy to not want to be alone, but I'm just at that point in my life where I am sick of it. There's never been anything I've wanted more than to have a meaningful and lasting relationship with someone that I can share my life with. My only true fear is of dying alone and never knowing what it's like to be loved more than I can comprehend.

 

You're not really living unless you're making art.

 

Your entire post was amazing, but a bit too long for quoting in its entirety and this one little line defines how I feel quite succinctly. I stopped drawing and writing not long after high school, which I flunked out of and took an extra two years to graduate from. During high school, though, there was an ugly and long confrontation on deviantART where I was accused of stealing character designs and tracing art. I received death threats, creepy anonymous messages from people who gave specific details about me that no one should have known, stalkers, and more. Along with all that, my parents had an ugly divorce which stemmed from my father's affairs and drug use, my half-brother was born from that affair, that same half-brother drowned, my grandfather died, my same-age cousin died, and we moved twice during high school alone. It's no small wonder that depression took hold, I was suicidal, started jumping into bad relationships, and flunked out of high school. My life-long creative dreams died, and I stopped drawing. Since then I've hardly felt alive, and both drawing and writing are a source of pain, frustration, and anxiety. Due to the events on deviantART, I feel that I can't even commit to any ideas for fear of being accused of stealing again. People tell me that I may come up with an idea that's been done before but that I can still tell it in my own unique way. As you can imagine, that doesn't help me cope with the feelings and push through the mental block.

 

All of your advice is sensible, but all of it is a struggle for me after so many years of apathy and inactivity. My mind realizes what I need to do, but I have yet to develop the ability to care enough to act on that knowledge.

 

Tulpa aren't a replacement for therapy or friends or real-life romantic interests, but I thought that maybe the act of meditating on Echo and discovering this new person who's me but not me might provide some sort of insight. Her image is still there in my mind, and in some small way I can feel that maybe she's waiting for me to give her a genuine chance. Thinking about her and how I've failed to follow through on yet another thing is bringing me to tears, and feeling so lonely makes my chest feel cold. Thinking about visiting my friend and hoping for more makes me smile, but I'm afraid that it won't turn out like I hope. The thought of having Echo there with me makes me less afraid, because then I won't be alone no matter what...or at least I won't feel so alone should my fear come to be.

 

Creating Echo is something I want, very much so, but like everything else it seems so difficult to get started. I love her already, but that horrible feeling that keeps me from everything else I love is there in the way and I don't know how to break through.

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My mind realizes what I need to do, but I have yet to develop the ability to care enough to act on that knowledge.

 

I know exactly what you mean. I went through years of that myself.

 

Have you ever considered fanfiction? The great thing about fanfiction is that if anyone accuses you of stealing ideas, it's like accusing water of being wet. Plus, if you write something really good, you can find-and-replace all the names and sell it as your own original work -- it's been done before! Or you can start with a work that's already in the public domain. But even if you're not trying to sell it, even if you're never even going to show it to anyone else, I think you should be creating.

"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson

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For the counselor thing, a counselor is supposed to keep things confidential, though something such as suicidal thoughts is something that they may need to tell a parent or guardian about if the patient is a minor, since that's about their safety. Still, though, if your dad wasn't even your legal guardian, then it sounds like there was a misunderstanding or you just saw a bad counselor.

 

I'd definitely recommend seeing another counselor. Just remember that, this time, there's no risk of parents being told because you are an adult now. Your trust issues with counselors is also something to bring up - tell them from the start that you may have trouble opening up to them because of past experience of your school counselor telling your parents what you'd said. They should understand.

 

Now, about "slowly losing the best years of your life to loneliness", you have to understand that's only the case if you allow it. When you have close friends but still feel lonely, that isn't just the result of not being in a relationship, it's the result of your perceived need for a romantic relationship and prioritizing romantic relationships over platonic ones. Everyone needs to be connected to others, to love and be loved, but platonic love is something that should not be undervalued. Romantic love isn't inherently better or more important than platonic love; the idea that it is is just the result of our culture's misplaced priorities.

I come out of hibernation once in a blue moon.

 

They/them pronouns, please. (I've been using this display name since 2012 and people won't recognize me if I change it.)

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