Love Is Not Always Enough

Why it keeps linking words from my posts to other sites, I don't know. I'm not doing that part, so it's getting annoying. If I want to cite another site, I will do it myself. But anyway around the time I hit college, I found myself in this long standing thread of trying to please everybody else by spending my life the way they wanted instead of doing what I needed to and should've done for myself. I went to a state college instead of standing up for myself and going to the college I really wanted to, the college I applied to for that reason, one of a number of good colleges like Penn State, NYU, Columbia, Stanford, UCLA, and oddly enough with UCLA, I was told afterward by other applicants that the whole Asian thing actually worked against me. So I really should've gone. But I went to a state college in another city to be with a boy, and I simultaneously attended another state college, because as my mom put it, it was a mistake and I wasn't smart enough to go there(referring to the state school I had chosen). I got a full ride scholarship, I had a 4.0 GPA, and I scored higher than most seniors in high school on the SAT in 8th grade. When I took it again my junior year, in addition to the ACT, you can imagine I got a pretty descent score. So why wouldn't they want me. But apparently my mother was the Asian mother to the point of criticizing everything you do and pushing you to do bigger and better things, but when you actually got there, it turned into you're not good enough. So that boy ended up deciding that after it all, he was going to marry someone else. I understood it, because love was simply not enough. It was a hard concept for me to get, because I thought that love could conquer all. In a way, I never believed myself lovable, because if your own mother can't stand the sight of you, then what hope do you really have. But with him, he seemed to really love me, for me, not because I changed myself to be what he wanted. In fact, he was the only person that I was ever really myself with. He was Christian, and I really tried getting back into it. But in the end, he knew that I would be doing it for him and not for myself. I was okay with it, because between choosing my own religion and being with someone I love, I would choose love, and it wouldn't feel like a sacrifice to me. But for him, he felt like it wouldn't be right. So love wasn't enough then.

So a while after that, I had always suffered from depression. But it really got unbearable at some point, and I was so caught up in trying to be strong, trying to put on a happy face so he would never know how hurt I was, never know how much I loved him, smile, etc, that I passed it over to some degree. Then suddenly, I found myself unable to get up in the morning many mornings, partly because of a severe pain in my stomach and partly because I just didn't have the energy or stamina to get up. I would think about getting up and it was so hopeless. After 3 months of possibly making it to the bathroom to pee a couple times a day, barely being able to eat anything, barely being able to drag myself anywhere, and so on, I finally went to a doctor, who told me concerning the stomach pain that it must just be stress. They later diagnosed it as IBS, and the medications worked for a while, when they removed some of the complications that would stop the medications from working. And then they diagnosed me as lactose intolerant, only later to figure out that I was actually allergic to milk, and finally they diagnosed me with GERD. Mentally speaking, I went to see a therapist, and I never told her about the things that happened when I was younger, as I will never really tell anyone. And then they put me on zoloft, which just dummed everything down. Then I had a breakdown again about a month later, and I got to the point where I realized that feeling sad all the time wasn't nearly as bad as feeling nothing. When you get to that point, you aren't even sure you're alive, except for the fact that when you cut yourself, you still bleed. So you begin to wonder if you're already dead and your body just hasn't caught on yet. We went up to the maximum dose of zoloft, at which point I developed a severe allergy, and inbetween suffered a few breakdowns. We tried Paxil, which was a living nightmare. And this is just for the depression. For the anxiety and OCD which consequently became so severe that I couldn't leave my house because I kept worrying I had left my keys among other things. The keys thing was enough to keep me in for hours all by itself. But there were many more problems than that. So I had some pretty powerful anti anxiety drugs, sleeping pills, etc. I went through ambien, lunesta, and all the tamer ones, they either didn't work in the first place or stopped working shortly thereafter. I also tried a couple that apparently knock most people flat back with about 50mg. I took 200mg, and it knocked me out for maybe 6 hours at a time. And right now, I'm down to a drug called lamictal. Counseling hasn't worked, God hasn't worked, other medications haven't worked. But this one seems to be working out alright, so there's always hope for the future right?

Anyway, I ended up dropping college, because after my reason for being at that college instead of say UCLA negated himself, I really reassessed what in the world I was doing. Obviously, I wasn't happy doing it, and I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out what I actually want, recovering, and slowly finding things that I had forgotten, that I had lost. One thing I found is that I don't believe in God, because he's never been there, and it's to the point where I either have to assume that God hates me, which is a horrible thing nobody should think, or that he doesn't exist. It's not really logical to think that God would spend his time hating one person if he existed. So I take the logical answer, and some would say the easier answer. So I dumped church and all surrounding it. I stilll have friends there, they just accept things the way they are now. I realized that I had no reason to stay in college and continue wasting my money. After all, you don't have to go to college to be a writer, and you don't have to go to college to be a dog groomer. To be a writer, you have to have natural talent, and you have to understand basic English grammar. My grammar skills are superior, and I've always had a talent for writing when I feel like applying it. Oddly enough, I turn it on and off.

So after that, it took me a while. It takes a while to reverse things you've done all your life, to completely change the way things work and the way people work around you. Some people have not adjusted, and they have either fallen away of their own volition, or I have left them, because they could not accept me trying to find myself. They were so used to the me that would always do what everybody else wanted, what everybody else thought they needed, someone who never thought to pay attention to herself. And now that I'm asserting my needs, even though I still take care of a lot of the people around me to an extreme point, they somehow feel that I have done something wrong. In answer to those who would wonder why I would sacrifice my time and energy for other people when I obviously have problems of my own and all that, because it is still something that I need. When people around me are miserable, it rubs off on me, and I cannot stand it. So doing little things that do not really compromise myself, it's not such a big deal. It maintains my sanity, because I feel a little too much empathy for everyone around me. I am just careful to take care of myself, more than I used to.