Stuck

It surely is saddening to watch yourself slowly be transformed into a new person with traits completely different to what you were, thought you were or thought you would be one day.

I blame it some of it on the lockdown we had because of Covid-19 back in March 2020.

As I have already mentioned in a previous blog “The rise of a new ideology, is that girl, that good”: “As for me personally, that urge and desire to be more in control grew bigger during and after the pandemic, a state of absence of control with the lockdown and as we were obliged to do things out of our desire and everything was not under our personal control, it is no coincidence that the “that girl” aesthetic has seen life after the pandemic.”

The lockdown made me more conscious of some feelings and made me develop new ones I am not proud of, coping with and trying hard to get rid of.

Although I blame most of those “new habits” on the lockdown, I must blame some on some old interactions and relationships I had with some people. Which also reminds me of a line a wrote in my first blog “I knew love”: “You quit what you thought was love, still not knowing exactly what it was but at least you know what it wasn’t, but the sad part about it is that even when you left it, it did not leave you, sequels of it still haunt you, your trust issues, your over-thinking, your anxiety that you never had but is now a constant part of your life, the need to justify yourself all the time to others, your codependency, etc.”

Have you ever felt like your life consists of a perpetual nostalgia of the past and a yearning, longing desire to the future?

A total dissatisfaction and discontent with where you are right now and with what you are doing, as if you should be doing more, as if every day you should be hustling, making the most of your day, every day should be an attempt of creating new opportunities, going to work, to the gym, reading books, writing tons of pages. Now that it’s summer, it feels like you should be at the beach every other day, shopping, enjoying the nature, going for a “hot girl walk”. As if every night, you should be clubbing. As if every past week where you haven’t hit the road for that spontaneous road trip is another lost week where your life now is total absurd and wasteful existence. The only form of acceptable summer is the one you would spend in Italy or in the South of France, the one in which you go swim in empty unknown beaches.

The guilt you feel after a day in which you only attended to your internship (or maybe you have not because you decided to skip it in the last minute because you know you are going to struggle to find a taxi back home), took a long nap that consumed your whole afternoon, the hard realization that you did nothing of your day. The harder realization that you did nothing of all your past days while you see the hot girl summer all over Tiktok. And as Emma Chamberlain have said, you feel “so burned out with life, that nothing literally makes me excited for life. I feel like I have used every hobby that I have as a distraction so much to the point where I’m now numb to the excitement about it.”

And though you ask yourself the same question other people ask you “What is stopping you from doing the things you want to do and living the life you want to live”, you still cannot know or figure out what is wrong. Why are you feeling lazy every day, why are you shutting yourself from the rest of the world, why can’t you save yourself from this repetitive pattern you cursed yourself with, why do you continue waking up with the same fear of wasting the day instead of acting to change it, why are you not doing anything, what is stopping you, why do make yourself go through the same thing every day while you can be doing more, why are you reading your book in your room instead of reading it in the beach or in a park? Why aren’t you reading your book? Why aren’t you watching your favorite series right now instead of complaining about how there is nothing for you to do or pass time with?

The hard time of getting out of bed every day, you knew you only had to get up and out of bed, but you still could not do it. You were not depressed or going through a hard time or a life crisis, just anxious of how you were going to make this day, especially when there’s that sound inside of your head saying “you must break the pattern today or the loop will repeat tomorrow.”

And the nostalgia to the past hits you, you miss an old self that used to enjoy reading in her room, an old self that didn’t ask you all those questions and torture you every night to find answers for them.

The longing to a future self haunts you, a future self of a person who breaks the cycle.

Time is passing and you are always reminiscing the past, burning for the future, but you are never content or satisfied in the present. You are always missing an old self or dreaming about a future self while you are just sitting there in the middle of both, too far from both of them. And it feels life everyone’s life is advancing, with music in the background like a Tiktok video or a scene in a movie, but yours is unchanging, quite, sometimes rowdy and disturbed with the sound of car traffics. It feels like that Taylor Swift song where she says “Friends break up, friends get married, strangers get born, strangers get buried. Trends change, rumors fly through new skies, but I’m right where you left me// Did you ever hear about the girl who got frozen? Time went on for everybody else, she won’t know it, she is still 23 inside her fantasy, how it was supposed to be. Did you hear about the girl who lives in delusion?”

The whole song feels like it was written for you, but in a non romantic way. Or may be in a romantic way in which you have lost your old self that you loved and that you still can’t move on from, you still live in a delusional reality, a fantasy in which you always imagine that you are still that person, that nothing has changed in you, that you are still that person whose days were either black or white, not always gray.

For a moment again, you think about the old you, the one who was not anxious all the time, who let things go with the flow, who didn’t have to be in control all the time. Your old self that was serene and calm, who used to do things all by herself and not wait for anyone to do them with her.

What have you done with her? How did you manage to make her anxious all the time, make her over think everything, make her think she cannot do things alone, that she needed company. How did the girl who used to just do it, put her life on hold, waiting for someone or something.

How did you make your old self who used to not care about anything (not in a screw the world type of way but more like a stoic unstressed way in which you avoid dramatic extreme situations and questions with a calm state of mind) think now that she was getting harder to maintain, to love, to be around, long enough that only those feelings were familiar to you and the idea that you were wrong about those feelings seemed to be uncomfortable and weird, as Diane Nguyen would say “even when I was above ground I wasn’t satisfied, I am the problem. Why can’t I be happy? Am I busted?” or “When you’re Diane, you can live your whole life like it’s a puzzle, put together from the pieces of different sets. Your whole life is full of these pieces that don’t quite fit. Sounds like a hard puzzle. But at some point, you start to think it’s you. You’re the piece that doesn’t quite fit. And you spend so long with that feeling that the feeling becomes your home.”

Sometimes, it feels like you are dramatizing your life, you tell yourself that you should not be feeling this way, that you don’t have the right to think or feel like you are having it hard, and you agree, mainly because when you think about it for a moment, you cannot find a reason that is reasonable enough to justify how you feel and for a moment it gets better but then you fall into that pit again, the next day.

You think about your old self again, how she never thought or cared about “being enough”, she just lived.

You ask yourself the same questions again, how did you go from a 17 years old person who didn’t care to a 21 years old person who constantly feels like she is not enough of a daughter, of a sister, of a friend or of a girlfriend, no matter what you did, no matter what you were told by others, repetitively. You just tend to believe that you are never enough; you were, again, never enough of a daughter, of a sister, of a friend or a girlfriend. May be that is why you are scared of getting to know new people, of making new acquaintances. You do not want to worry about that “something” more that you should have thought about or done, about how you should have been a little more of “something”, about how awful you made them feel when you had a severe reaction to one of their actions because them being upset mattered more to you than you being upset, about that mad thought you had about them in a moment of anger.

You think about how you hate how unpredictable you are, which is something you don’t quite fancy about yourself although you already wrote a blog about how you should accept your contentious tendencies in life. You have always wanted to know what type of reaction would you have to some situations, any typical situation that is likely to happen, you hate that you know that when it comes to sentiments like anger for example, you could literally make tables turn, or you could just keep it to yourself and be hurt while the person concerned thinks everything is all right while you are there, bottling up those feelings for days or weeks until you decide that it is enough, it is time to move on. Or you could cry about a simple joke that you say hurt you, and laugh hysterically about something that is supposed to make you feel bad. And there is just no in between in your reactions, no equilibrium, no predictions about your feedbacks to different situations.

When you get to bed at night, you keep thinking about your whole day, your heart aches for the old heartbreaking things you have experienced or have caused to others, not to “fetishize your sadness” as Bojack would say, not to jeopardize your own happiness and make your sadness have a meaning and make it to have a purpose as Diane would do, but it just happens and you keep over thinking useless details of your life and other people’s lives, their body language, the tone they replied with, the message they sent you was a bit off, you stay awake thinking about all of this and more until it is physically impossible for you to keep your eyes open.

You think about what Taylor Swift said “I never was a natural all I do is try try try” and you ask yourself why are you the way you are, why do you feel like you have to do more than anyone, be more, in order to be liked, why did it matter for you to be liked from the first place? Why did you have to try instead of being a natural?

You think again about how there is so much pressure on living your best life, how your young years are supposed to be filled with travels and fun, you think about it so much and see it everywhere, it ends up ruining you. You want to match everyone’s vision about having fun because social media has made you think that there is no fun in having your own company and that preferring to spend time by yourself reading a book or writing a blog is waste of a time you will never get back. And you feel guilty for doing the things you love although you know that “you are not missing out for not doing something you did not want to do in the first place.” And it does make you feel better, only for a moment, because the fear of missing out, the unchanged constant emotional belief that people out there are “doing the most” while you are drowning in dissatisfaction visits you again and cripples your inner tranquility. It is stronger than you, than your consciousness about it, it eats you from the inside and you feel stuck. And though it is really hard for you to process all those feelings, you cannot help but think and feel bad for the people around you who have to tolerate you for who you are.