the struggle to fake sociablity

Since leaving my marriage, i have not had much time for anything outside of school and work tasks. I rarely spend time with other people, and i spend even less time talking to other grown ups, so it becomes very isolating at times. I have never been a very sociable person, but as i get older i find myself wanting to spend more time with someone other than myself.

Recently, i have pushed myself to become more involved with my school district, which i

both work for and have attended with my child now also attending; in doing so i have noticed myself become much more comfortable in what i am capable of. I have always had an incredibly difficult relationship with who i think i am and how other people perceive me, and i was consistently battling imposter syndrome with every task or accomplishment i made. It used to really weigh on me internally when i was given a task that i felt i was not ready for, i trusted the person’s faith in me more than i trusted myself. One day, i had finished something that i had honestly been putting off for so long, it wasn’t a task i was given by another person, but i had thought so much about it and gotten too deep in my head that i literally ignored it for months. When i finally forced myself to complete it, i felt so fucking stupid, i literally hated myself for like hours after i had finished because it had made my life so much harder and it made my mental space a living hell. I spent so much time beating myself over not completing it and thinking it would take so much longer and spend so much of my energy, and instead it took significantly less time and energy than i had allotted for.

After i had finished hating myself over such a minuscule task that i had made into a monument and feeling incredibly dumb, i kind of just stopped procrastinating. Well, not entirely, i am still procrastinating a bunch of other tasks that aren’t as ‘important’ to what i want to do and be, but in my daily tasks and activities i have found it much easier to tell my brain to shut the fuck up so i can do what it is i need to do. Ive found that it has greatly improved my mental health.

When i began to do this more frequently, i noticed it was much easier to get through the day, and that made me feel even more insanely stupid and dumb. There was just so much improvement to my life and my mental state that i was now battling that annoying feeling where you want to absolutely hate yourself because you could have been doing so much more and having so much more than you had been, but not wanting to be too hard on yourself because it really does take time before youre ready.

I left my marriage and was diagnosed with PTSD, general depression, and anxiety. There were days where i could not gather the energy to do something unless i absolutely had to, and it was so incredibly miserable. It made me feel even worse because i knew things that needed to be done, i would want to do them, and i couldn’t and it wouldn’t get done. I would slowly get better, but then my co parent and i would fall back into unhealthy communication, and i would regress, it kept happening until i finally had enough of doing better and feeling better and going back immediately to feeling awful and incredibly miserable. There were also consequential events from the divorce that leaked to our son, and while i was going through the bulk of my healing he was sort of unaware of what was really happening. It wasn’t until the divorce had been in place for over a year that he began to start talking about it, and how everything that happened in that marriage was for him, and obviously not at all to my surprise, he remembered more than most people would assume. Even though i knew we would have to discuss this at some point, i also found myself surprised about how intense some of his feelings about the marriage were, especially because he cant necessarily remember events as clearly as i can, but from our discussions i know he vividly remembers his feelings in those moments that i can see so clearly. For a short amount of time i feel that we were aligned on healing, but when i transitioned into the period of telling my mind to be quiet, i became guilty about how my son would still struggle at times, especially with the cycle of progressing and regressing. Now, there is a quiet comfortability in our current lifestyle and the presence of my ex.

Navigating divorce and how it impacts children from the marriage is a complicated journey. My son was in therapy within a year of separation, and before the divorce was actually even finalized, really it was mostly for me, but this past year and a half, he has been working one on one without me present, beginning his own journey of healing and unpacking the events he’s experienced. Early intervention is something i strongly and heavily believe in, i have been devoted to the idea of ‘better safe than sorry’ when it comes to any aspect of my child and their health, especially wanting to focus on mental health. I knew growing up that my children would be predisposed to some mental health conditions, that predisposition increased with my choice of partner, and i have always been comfortable with the idea of therapy and seeking mental health support more than most of my family, but especially since i have a B.S in psychology and will be completing my masters program in December. I have also regularly sought therapy and psychiatric help on and off since i have been sixteen, with my combined knowledge and experience, it could never really be an argument with my ex, who has never been as open to the idea of support due to various reasons that i think are fairly common in most of the population. I heavily credit my early interventions and my conversations with my son about therapy to be the reason he is so well adjusted given the traumatic experiences we have both been through. I heavily support the idea that it is healthy for him to have feelings about the marriage and divorce that he may not feel comfortable talking to me about, and it is important he have someone outside of his family to talk about things within his family. It has always been really important to me that my child can feel comfortable enough to tell me about the things i do and how it impacts them, and i always get shocked faces when i tell people i don’t mind when he calls me out. Our relationship has really been for the better since i have explained these ideas to him, and as the months pass us by, i find him more and more comfortable telling me he does not want to discuss a topic with me and would rather discuss it with his behavioral health team, as he currently has three different providers helping him work through both his school and home behaviors and feelings.

It has been an incredibly bittersweet feeling and i find myself becoming more and more comfortable in that sweet feeling as he slowly begins to express more independence and separation from me, and taking control over his own decisions. I know that this is a natural occurrence as he gets older, but i am somehow so surprised at how early a child can begin to voice their own opinions when they are given the opportunity. I force myself to not stay stagnant in the bitter feeling of my child growing up, especially because it genuinely does make me happy that he is comfortable enough to speak so freely to me, even when it negative in the sense where he is cussing or saying out of pocket shit for no reason, but that is also annoyingly comforting as well. I regularly feel as though i am a ‘failure’ as a parent, and it is harder as he gets older to not feel resentful about no longer having a partner, someone who supports you when you feel like you cant provide as much, and someone to share in the milestones with. There are moments where it really gets me down that he doesn’t have both parents present, but a part of me feels that deep down, if i had chosen for him to have both parents, he wouldn’t be the vibrant individual with such strong opinions that he is and will continue to grow into.

I am still struggling with getting out and being more sociable, but it is becoming something i am more comfortable with as the days go by. However i have noticed that the perception i have of myself has greatly improved, and is much more heavily aligned with what i believe is the perceptions other people hold of me, and has made me comfortable enough to take some of the riskier choices i would have previously been too unsure of myself to take. As my son finds his own comfort in his independence and his voice, it has also made things significantly less stressful for me, i think it is important to note to parents that you are not solely responsible for the mental health and wellbeing of your child; it is so important for them to learn to navigate coping mechanisms and skills to regulate their own emotional behaviors. A few months ago, in an appointment together, one of his providers told me that i needed to stop helping him work out his feelings, and i understood what she was saying even though it was a really hard statement to take. He had become dependent on me managing his emotions and it was creating resentment between the both of us, if im being completely honest, we both felt as though i wasn’t doing enough, and it wasn’t until she had said that to me that i realized how much of a disservice i had been putting on him. Children need to also learn to accept that there are things that you cannot change, especially when it comes to another person and their actions, it is more practical to focus on how you can manage your emotions when dealing with a person who can have such a negative impact on your emotions, even more so when the individual shows no desire or initiative to develop or change the impacting behavior. As we focused more on working on what he could do on his own, there was even more ease in completing daily tasks and activities for the both of us, there were less outburst on both sides, and while there were still moments of struggle, those instances become both shorter in length and a less frequent occurrence.

Consequentially, it has been significantly easier for me to get out of the same cyclical negative thinking that had made it so difficult to even want to be a social person. I am noticing that in the last year or so that even though i haven’t been as intentional as a want about certain things, there have been much more frequent opportunities made available for me to engage in what i had been intending to. it has created such a different mindset for myself as well, i no longer feel so negatively about myself as i had previously. I have always really struggled to maintain a positive perception about myself, and now that it has significantly improved it has lifted an immense feeling of weight that would always make managing my day so difficult and feeling like it was a struggle to complete such mundane tasks. While there are still days where i cant find a way out of my negative thought process, there has been a shift in my thinking that makes those days much more manageable, and not in the way they had been ‘managable’ in the past. I don’t feel like i ‘have’ to feel this way, it no longer feels like my constant and normal. It has become much more easier to manage those negative processes and actually feel as though i can acknowledge them as a ‘part’ of life and not my constant.