here we go round the mulberry bush

I do not write here often as I have been mostly coping well and using different techniques to maintain my well being.  I attend a support group for people with depression, anxiety and mood disorders, I do not take on too many things at once, I rest when I need it, I stay away from toxic people, I track my mood on moodscope, I take the medicine prescribed to me, I get up and go to work , I plan ahead and do the best I can financially.  I have never been good at managing money and that is one of the things I am working on right now.  All that said I spent yesterday in bed and today my moodscope score is 33%; the lowest it has been in ages.  I thought back to the things I do to improve my wellbeing and writing was one of the key factors in my recovery.  Since I last posted here I ended a two year relationship, I moved away from toxic friends and I learnt to take better care of myself by saying NO to many things and many people.  I have been looking forward to a few weekends where I have no commitments and can relax but I found when I have nothing planned I cannot really relax at all.  There are things that bother me.  I have been doing my best to refrain from speaking my mind, I work on expressing myself in a way that the other person can understand and that saves me from future embarrassment and shame of having an emotionally charged outburst but recently I have wanted to shout and scream at a few people about how selfish they are and how stupid they are.  I was very badly left down by a number of people I trusted over the last year.  Were I not speaking my mind I would have said I felt very badly left down but in truth what they did to me was far from acceptable to me.  Is it so bad to say that someones behaviour is just plain wrong.  That what they are doing is just plain wrong. I can now recognise that their behaviour does not align with my core values but I sometimes think that it is just a fancy way of saying you are wrong what you are doing is wrong and I don't want you to do that to me ever again.  I have been cast as the villain of the piece by one of them and I felt that I should appease her all the time.  In reality I have recently learnt that she never liked me and just put up with me to gain access to someone I spent time with.  Similarly someone else said the same thing to me I used you to get to him , she said she encouraged me to build a friendship so she could get closer to him.  Now I am confused by it all, I feel so used by them all.  I feel like I was a silly fool to trust them.  Perhaps I am a bad judge of character.  I know that we re deceived by what we are hungry for, I was hungry for people who accept me as I am but they didn't really.  One of them has taken pleasure from repeating things back to me that someone else said and I feel like the happiness I felt was built on a total lie.  I had an expectation that my relationship was a long term one, I felt secure.  I had someone to be there for me and I no longer felt the burden of making all my life decisions myself.  I loved and admired him and he lied to me.  I allowed myself to believe it all.  People can be very devious and it has come to me that I do not really understand the nature of friendship.  I have very fixed ideas of loyalty trust and honesty.  Am I in a minority? Should I be more accepting of breaches of trust.. I have repaired a few of the friendships. I wonder if I started to question the motivation of everyone when I realised I could not trust the one person I trusted implicitly.  I am a capable person and i suffer with crippling anxiety if I allow myself to dwell on things.  I work on dealing with the basics of life.  I am often flattered by peoples attention and when they ask me to help them with things I usually do.  I find it hard to stop doing that.  I spent some time with one of the people who left me down this weekend.  I listened with new ears and I realised that the person is of the its alright for you , you are better able to do things than I am.  I heard the litany of excuses, the blame of others, the twisting of words, the cruelty of the things that were said to me.  I suppose I thought that I was mistaken in my judgement and I wanted to see if that was the case.  I was not.  It is time for me to move on, to learn to be alone but not lonely.  To learn that I need no approval to do as I see fit, to learn that I can trust the one person who will always be with me and not to have to get the approval of anyone to be ok with who I am.  the nursery rhyme of here we go round the mulberry bush came into my hear when I started to write and now I understand why.

 I am going around and around the same things perhaps.  but this time I am paying attention to the basics : this is the way I brush my teeth, wash my hair etc!!!

It is all about the basics. I have moved on from the type of friends I was comfortable with.  I only want people who accept me as I am.  I change, they change, we travel down different paths in life.  I have my goals and I need to stay fixed on them.  Its my life.    They can all feck off.  The problem is that they have been living in my head for quite too long now.  I am just about getting back to myself and I meet one of them or see them and its back to square one.  I need to cut myself some slack and realise that this is just a normal part of life and learning to cope with other people and their expectations is just an new phase of my recovery.  So today I will express myself fully and not accept anything that does not serve my mental well being.  33 % is a warning I need to take heed of and I have decided that is exactly what I will do.  I will banish those people out of my head and fill it full of lovely empty space where I can unwind and relax.  I must remember that I am way too hard on myself and not hard enough on other people.  So I think I will take myself off to walk the dogs and enjoy the things I like to do.  I may be alone today but I am no longer suffering from that awful feeling of loneliness that comes with abandoning myself, for it is when I abandon myself that I feel the most lonely.