Dear...

5.31.11

 

I wish I could really talk to you. I wish you could really understand. But I know you can’t and never will. I wish I could just get you to see how the way you treat me affects me.  

 

I know you are going to say that this is all me and that I need to stop feeling this way. I am working on that. I know only I can make myself feel a certain way. I am predispositioned to feel this way…but for some reason I have had so many people in my life that constantly take every bad thought about myself and reaffirm them over and over again.  

 

You make me feel like I am nothing. You treat me like I am stupid and can’t do anything right. You have called me ridiculous on several occasions.  Why do you do this? Do you think it will make me a better worker? It actually makes me worse.

 

Yes, you actually make me worse. All those panic attacks that I have, all the times I’ve gotten upset…you always say come to you first. I don’t want to have anything to do with you. Every time we talk you just end up making me feel worse.

 

I can’t be around you anymore.  You scare me. Your whole attitude towards me, and maybe to everyone else, is that I am not good enough. I can always do more, better more, do better. How do you think that makes me feel?

 

Do you realize that all my life I have never been told that I am good enough? From childhood people from my mother to my friends to by coworkers to my bosses and teachers have never told me that I am enough. I have always been made to feel like there is more that I can do.

 

Now I know what you are thinking. You are thinking that, well yes of course, there is always more you can do. Nothing is ever done. You can always improve. You need to strive for excellence. But what you don’t realize is that I do my best. You don’t see it or appreciate it, but I give you everything I have. I work and worry so much about everything that I do that it kills me. And the parts that I mess up on or the things that I am not able to do, those are the things that I obsess over and hurt myself over.

 

I already feel like I am not good enough. That has been ingrained in me since childhood. I am trying so hard to overcome this feeling. I need to be able to feel like I am good enough even when no one is telling me that I am. But don’t you realize how damaging you are to me? Day after day, picking and picking at everything little thing I do, critizing me, badgering me for taking a second to breath and collect my thoughts.

 

Did someone treat you like that? Do you expect that out of yourself? Is that where this is coming from? Do you always feel like you can never do enough? I am sorry if you feel that way. Maybe you don’t even know that you feel that way or know that it is not healthy to feel that way. Maybe that is why you don’t see that you do it to me.

 

 

Why am I never good enough? Why can’t you cut me just a little slack? I am not asking you to praise me. I just want you to say ok. I just want you to stop acting like I am so useless and incompetent. Can’t you just leave me alone? Why is every little mistake made to be like it is the worst mistake in the world?

 

You think I am being dramatic. I can’t pretty much hear your side of the conversation as I write this letter. Because I have tried to talk to you before…you know before I realized that you will never understand you will only make things worse. You would tell me that you don’t treat me this way. I am imaging it. I am being dramatic and exaggerating. I need to just buck it up and get over it. This is not something I can just get over. This took 30 years to seep in me. It is going to take awhile to get over it.

 

I am angry with you for treating me this way. I am angry at you for making me feel this way. How dare you treat me this way after you know what I have been through. You may not understand, but you know that I ended up in the hospital because I was so bad. I can’t go back there again. Stop pointing me down that road. Stop being the devil’s mouthpiece. He is not welcome here anymore. I wish I could say that to you. I wish you would stop living rent free in my brain 24 hours a day. But the things you say, the things you do….they haunt me. That roll around in my brain when I am taking a shower, eating dinner, working out, going to sleep, watching tv, the things that you say haunt me in my dreams.    

 

I am not the only one who feels like you treat them this way. I know several that feel the same way I do. So it is a comfort to know that you don’t single me out. But unlike them, I have not learned not care what others think. I am desperate for your approval. And when you constantly put me down it makes it a whole lot harder to tell myself that I am ok, that I am enough.