TW: abuse mention 

I always knew there was something not right with me and the way I process emotions. At 16 I was diagnosed with OCD and in the 12 years since I have just accepted that. Even as I got older and my obsessive compulsions faded I always figured the awful thoughts in my head were just a different manifestation of those or just my personality. Assuming someone is dead because they aren’t home within 5 minutes of their usual time? I’m just a worrier. Someone being short with me feels like they just made a disgusting, vile insult? I’m just sensitive. To me those things felt normal, things that any compassionate person should just accept because I feel them and thus they are valid feelings.

So many of the things I have put other people through I can’t even imagine how confused and hurt they must have felt. I’ve been remembering things like how when my ex-fiancé would be upset, he’d become very quiet and not want to talk. And I’d get so angry at him for refusing to talk to me about what was wrong. I treated him like he was doing something horrible to me, when in reality he was just a shy person who just didn’t feel like talking sometimes. Or the love of my life who very recently left after I had a really bad episode in which I called her repeatedly when she was ignoring me and said such wonderful things as “this hurts more than beating the shit out of me.” She knew I was an abuse survivor and I can’t fathom how fucking horrible something like that was to hear. Yet that was how I felt in the moment, and I had no reason to think that I was completely incapable of processing what I was feeling like a normal human being, so it felt fair to say. She also has STPD, and it wasn’t uncommon for well-meaning things to feel like personal insults to her, so the horrible things I said to her just cut that much deeper.

The only things I have ever wanted in this life have revolved around love. I want to make the person I love so so so happy, I want to get married, I want to have kids, I want to be a stay at home mom and put everything into being the best mother I can to them. And now I’m confronted with the fact that the people I’ve wanted nothing more than to make happy, the people I’d never ever want to get hurt, have been so deeply hurt by my actions in ways I couldn’t understand before now. Maybe the hardest part is facing the possibility that the one thing I actually liked about myself, how deeply and passionately I loved, is also just another symptom. I don’t even know who I am.

All I want in the world now is to talk to the woman I love and explain everything to her. All these things I never understood about why I am the way I am. I want to work together on how to be better. I’ve started Seroquel, Ativan, and Effexor. I’m seeing both a therapist and a psychiatrist. I’m doing everything I can to be better. But life isn’t that kind. I’ve already hurt people, the pain I’ve caused is done and I can’t undo it, and I don’t know what to do from here.

Thank you to anyone who felt like listening.