You know what's really easy? Avoiding. Avoiding problems, people, homework, challenges, God, the Bible, actually understanding things. You know what's easy? Pretending. Pretending that you know what you're talking about, that you understand, that you have time to do your homework, that you'll eventually get around to that one thing on your to-do list that's been there for two weeks.
I do both, to an extreme excess. I avoid just about anything that even bears a resemblance to being hard and I'm constantly pretending that I'm not avoiding anything. Initially, the purpose of this blog was to force me to stop avoiding by telling someone that it was on my list and that I had done it. But the thing is, although I was honest in that everything I wrote was something I actually did, half the things that are on my list have been there since the first week of school because they were hard or uncomfortable, so I kept putting them off, saying that I would do them later. My therapist told me that I need to stop avoiding these things. It doesn't make them any easier, and oftentimes, only makes them harder. I have more time to think about how scary and uncomfortable these things were. How they made me embarrassed or ashamed of having to ask for them.
You see, I hate asking for help. For some reason, my subconscious is fully convinced that to ask for help is to be weak, that I should be completely self-sufficient. After all, I was raised to be independent, to figure it out on my own. But with that level of independence comes a certain amount of inability to be dependent on anyone for anything. That's not to say that I'm completely independent--I still rely on my parents for money for clothes and books and food--but I'm otherwise capable of running a house. I know how to clean and cook and do laundry and make a bed and clean the toilet (although that is more theoretical knowledge than practical) and all of those things. I know people who have never folded a bottom sheet before. It's not a difficult task. It's a little bit of a puzzle, but once you know how, it's really not that hard. And yet they've never done it before and when presented with that simple task, they have to ask for help. Practical knowledge. Even I can ask for help for practical things.
It's the theoretical knowledge that gets me. Learning. Asking for help when I don't understand something. Especially when it's something that really interests me. Something that I have to understand in order to do what I want to do. So why is it so hard to ask for such help? Predominately, the thought that someone will judge me to be stupid. Not, "That's such a stupid thing to do," kind of stupid, when someone does something like, I don't know, a backflip on a treadmill. But, "I can't believe you don't know that!" kind of stupid, where someone thinks that you're retarded or incapable of learning something immediately after reading or hearing it.
I'm asking for support, for the courage to tell someone, "I honestly don't know. I do not understand this topic. What is...? How does...? I don't know what to do next. Can you help me?" Because right now, I can't. And it is screwing up a lot of things for me. I'm not learning what I need to learn because I'm so afraid that I will be judged.
And that's the most ironic thing of all. I hate being judged, I'm constantly afraid that I'm being judged. But I'm constantly judging other people. Forming opinions based on how they look and what they say. By the superficial details of their life that a casual observer can see. I categorize people before I ever get to know them. I choose the people I've judged can't hurt me in any way to be my friends. The ones that don't challenge me. That let me have control and be the leader that I don't know how to be. I seek control because I've never had it. It's not something that youngest children get.
My family had so much experience with young children that all the ploys that young children use to get attention didn't work on them unless something really was wrong. Sure, not breathing as a baby caught their attention. But that was a one time thing, subconsciously done for no obvious reason whatsoever. So I became ridiculously picky about what I would eat. Which still didn't get me any more control than I'd previously had. Thinking about it, to what point did being so picky help me at all? It's just a common technique that children use to control their environment when they can't control anything else. Maybe I should major in child development.
I like having control. I like leading, but I don't like being a leader. It comes back to being judged--I hate being in the spotlight. But I'm quite judgmental. I'm just full of contradictions. I'm only human. I'm full of imperfections. And I keep trying to do better, but I never seem to get anywhere. Why do I never get anywhere?! It's frustrating and exhausting and emotional and I hate it. I really do. Sometimes I feel like I just want to stop. Stop and give up. Stop trying to be better, to do better, to be less judgmental and less controlling.
I keep trying to give all this up to God, and I always fall short. Isn't he supposed to take what you give to him? But I almost always feel like he's too busy for me, like I can't possibly be more important than the other 6 billion people on this planet that he's trying to save. In fact, I know I'm not. I am most definitely not more important than everyone else, and yet I can't help but be incredibly selfish and want him all to myself. Supposedly, you can have a personal God. One that you know. But I feel incredibly distant from this God that I think I believe in. I think he's watching out for me, but it doesn't always feel like it. Sometimes it feels like I'm all alone, especially when things like last semester happen or my grandmother dying or my other grandmother or my sister being in a car accident. I'm searching for something that I don't know is there. Please help me. I just want to give up. I want all of these struggles to just go away.
You know something, I seem to always feel like I'm inferior to every other student here. They're all so involved and certain. And here I am, with this, "What the hell am I doing here?" always running through the back of my mind. I'm just going through the motions and pretending to be as happy as everyone else here. I want to be more involved. But where do I go? Where do I start? There are so many things I want to do in this moment that I can't possibly choose just one or two.
