#yourselffirst | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

ghostonly · 2 years ago

Text

How to Become Less Miserable

There are many things in our lives that cause us pain that are outside of our control. But, when you find yourself in a pit and wonder how you're supposed to get out, the only way to actually figure that out is to take a step back and ask yourself which things were in your control that led to you being there.

This might feel hard to read, but please bare with me.

If something that has made your life worse has been outside of your control, it’s easy to focus on it. Pointing the finger, blaming, lamenting, and feeling helpless are easy things to do. They give the world an excuse for your state. They give you an excuse for your state - and it always hurts less to think it was entirely the fault of someone or something else that you’re in pain.

But, the things that made you miserable that were outside your control... well they’re still not in your control. You can’t make your life better by trying to undo things that were never in your control to begin with.

Even if 99% of the things that made you miserable were outside of your control, you have to dig deep and find the 1% of things that you didn’t realize you had control over, because those are the things you can take control of now and in the future.

If you were kicked out as a teenager, sexually abused by an ex who you were financially dependent on, became disabled from an accident, or any other awful thing where you weren’t in control, those things might have been the foundational building blocks of your misery. you have to shift your focus away from them.

Confronting these things and healing from them in therapy is, of course, a good course of action. But, focusing on them fruitlessly when stewing in your misery is not going to change them. In fact, the longer you stew on the betrayals in your life, the more miserable you’re going to become and the harder it will be to undo the damage those other people did. If you want to become less miserable, you have to find the instances where you gave up control that you didn’t realize you had.

What Do You Have Control Over?

When I suggest that you may have played a part in your own suffering, I trust you to understand that I don’t blame you for it. I want to empower you to find the footholds you can use to prevent future misery by taking responsibility for the small things you have power over in awful circumstances.

So, here are a few of the things you can take control over, even when you’re in the shittiest situation imaginable.

1. You have control over how you talk to yourself

First and foremost, you have complete control over how you talk to yourself. An abuser in your life can call you ugly or tell you you’re worthless, but you have control over whether you say those things to yourself as well.

When you repeat the terrible things your abusers say about you, to yourself, you are doing their abusing for them. If you wouldn’t be okay with someone else saying something to you, you should not be saying it to yourself.

It’s hard to change your thought pattern. If you’re used to calling yourself ugly, or worthless, or lazy, it will not be easy, it will not feel right, and it will not feel correct to suddenly say something positive about yourself. Work your way up. Start at something neutral. Remind yourself that you tried today. Even if you can’t say you’re beautiful yet, tell yourself you’re not ugly.

It’s okay if you don’t believe those things at first. The reason you don’t believe them is because abusive language brainwashes you. It forms hardened neural connections about what is and isn’t true about you. It is within your control to fight those neural connections and build new ones - ones that reinforce your self worth.

Even if you have a hard time saying these things to yourself with any amount of sincerity, you can start by making it a joke. This is a great way to slowly remove self deprecation from your vocabulary. Jokingly saying, “lmao I’m so hot” is healthier for you than jokingly saying, “lmao I’m so ugly.” It paves the path for you to one day mean it.

2. You have control over your actions

While you may not be able to change the actions of abusive people around you, you do have control over your own actions.

This is important for two reasons: 1) It means you have more options than you realize 2) It means you have to take responsibility for some of the things you’ve done in your life that weren’t okay

Doing things that are harmful to other people because they’re hurting you in some way and you have to to survive is sometimes an unfortunate necessity.

Doing things that are harmful to other people because you’re angry at people in the past, even if the current person isn’t threatening you or hurting you in any way, is not. You may try to find excuses for your behavior, to convince yourself that an unethical, selfish act is justified but, in the end, you made the decision to do something unfair or harmful.

Not only will self-serving actions harm your relationship with someone who isn’t abusing you, it will also stay in your memory. Those flimsy justifications will turn into guilt, and that will wear on you and encourage you to think self deprecating thoughts.

When you’re tempted to use the same survival methods you’ve used on abusers in the past on people who are treating you well, remind yourself that this is not actually going to serve you well, even if it did in the past. The situations are not the same.

3. You have control over your attempts to communicate with people

Maybe, in the past, you have tried reasoning with people or communicating with them about your needs or feelings. Maybe they responded very poorly. If this is true, you may find yourself reluctant to bring up your needs or thoughts with new people.

Unfortunately, this can cause a lot of problems in relationships with non-toxic individuals, because well-adjusted people enjoy and appreciate communication.

If you have a discomfort, a boundary, a need, or a plan that you want people to understand and respect, you need to communicate those things with them. Refusing to even attempt communication may have helped you in the past when dealing with someone who expected you to bend to their discomforts, boundaries, needs, and plans, but, if your relationships are healthy, this information about you would be welcomed with open arms.

If you refuse to tell someone your needs or plans, then get upset at them when they step on your toes, you are pinning the blame on them for your own lack of communication. If this person cares about your feelings - especially if they have their own history of being abused - this will lead them to feel guilty and ignore their own needs in order to assuage your upset. They will blame themselves for not reading your mind or not asking every possible question in order to sus out your needs by themselves.

Thus, you have just taken on the exact role of the person who abused you into having communication issues to begin with, even if you don’t intend to abuse anyone - even if the idea is horrifying to you. This will hurt other people and ensure you maintain only constantly unstable relationships where both people are miserable, including you.

With little steps, push yourself hard to learn to trust the people in your life with the things you want and need. Give them time to put in the effort and adjust to your needs. Express faith that they will treat you well - or at least don’t express the opposite. Eventually, with enough healthy relationships and enough practice communicating your needs, you will learn that you are in control of how you communicate with people and that communicating with them strengthens your relationship (or, at the very least, exposes its toxicity and gives you a window to walk away).

4. You have control over how you treat or change your body

No matter what the people in your life say, you are the one with control over what you do with your body. Your partner or your parent may tell you they would hate the way you look if you cut your hair short, but they can’t stop you from cutting it short.

Even if they refuse to drive you to the hair salon, you have the power to find a pair of scissors and cut your hair. It may end up looking like a mess, but it will have been something you did. You will have reclaimed that power for yourself and it will feel fucking amazing, even if it ends up looking kind of shitty. Hair grows back.

Plus, if they don’t want your hair to look bad (which they may not, if they don’t want to explain to everyone you both interact with why your hair looks that way) you may end up getting a trip to the salon anyway in order to fix any parts you messed up on. And they will have learned a valuable lesson about respecting your autonomy (or not, but at least you won this one).

The same goes for things like starting HRT, getting a tattoo, piecing your lip, dying your hair, having an IUD put in, taking birth control, getting an abortion, or cutting the sleeves off that shirt you hate but they love to make it enjoyable to wear.

And, as an important postscript, you also have control over how you treat your body. Even when things are desolate and you feel like there’s no hope, sometimes forcing yourself to go wash your hair or brush your teeth can be the difference between a shitty night and a good one.

5. You have the ability to search for happiness

Even if your life is in shambles and every memory you have is tainted with misery, you have the ability to search for happiness. You have the power to look back at all the bad shit that’s happened and say, “No, fuck that, my life is going to be good. I’m going to make it through this and into something better,” and then seek out something better.

Sometimes, searching for happiness is something big, like breaking up with someone you know you won’t have a happy future with. Sometimes it’s cutting contact with a family member who brings you nothing but sadness.

However, it can also be the small things. It can be finding a hobby you can do when you’re depressed in order to break up the misery with small sparks of joy.

When I was at my very lowest and wanted to die, I cared so little about everything that my fear of failure dwindled in some regards. Without caring if the results were great, I pulled out my paints and painted landscapes. They weren’t necessarily very good, and some of them were on the cardboard backs from my spiral notebooks because I didn’t have anymore canvas, but it was something. It gave me something to do other than lying in bed. It felt nice to get some paint on my hands and be upright on the couch. It gave me an outlet to express my feelings. It brought me a small measure of joy and pride that made getting through the day easier.

When you’re miserable, find the things that make you happy and cling to them. Fight for them. Push yourself to do them. Even when you’re depression-fatigued and feel worthless, go through your list of things that bring joy and, out loud, verbally command yourself to do it. Speak to yourself with kindness, even if a bit like a toddler.

“Come on, get up and open the paints drawer. You have to go to the bathroom anyway and it’s right by the bedroom door.”

“I don’t wanna bother.”

“Well, you didn’t want to bother any of the other times either, but it made you feel better.”

Even if it takes you all day and 7 separate tries to get the things you need, eventually you’ll have a piece of paper and some paints and a cup of water in front of you and starting will be possible.

Maybe painting isn’t your thing. That’s okay. Find the things that work and use them to your advantage. Fight the misery and gift yourself a moment of happiness. It will help to carry you until things get better.

6. You have the ability to say, “No.”

If you’ve been around people for a long time where your only value was being useful, this one will be hard for you. You do not have to agree to everything asked or commanded of you. You have the power to say, “No.”

When someone asks you to make them dinner for the 5th day in a row but they never make you anything, you can say, “No.”

When someone asks you to lend them money because they need or want something, even if you have enough money that you could technically send them some, you can say, “No.”

When someone tells you they need a ride to the next town over but your car is damaged and likely to get you ticketed, you can say, “No.”

When someone wants you to drink with them but you’re not comfortable doing so, you can say, “No.”

When someone asks if they can live with you because they don’t have a place to stay, you can say, “No.”

There are a ton of things that may be asked of you in your life. A lot of them will be easier to say, “No,” to than others. Sometimes someone may ask you for help when they’re in dire straits. If your gut tells you not to help them, but your guilt tells you that you have to - that you have no choice because saying, “No,” is mean and will ruin the relationship - listen to your gut. The things you do for people cannot be the foundation of your relationship. Sometimes helping someone over and over again is actually what destroys the relationship. Sometimes helping someone isn’t actually helping them, but enabling them. Sometimes helping someone is actually lighting yourself on fire to keep them warm.

In any case, if you don’t want to do something, you have the power to say, “No,” even if the outcome isn’t what you hope for. If you want to say, “No,” and don’t, that outcome won’t be what you wanted either, and it will encourage the other person to keep asking, because you’ll keep saying, “Yes.”

7. You have the ability to stop a vicious cycle

Vicious cycles are named extremely accurately. They’re vicious. These cycles are often easy to get into and almost always extremely hard to get out of. It could be a cycle of abusive relationships, a cycle of betrayal, a cycle of losing your jobs or ending up homeless. They’re painful and it’s hard to fix them and get back up on your feet. But, it isn’t necessarily impossible.

If you continually end up in relationships that turn toxic, take some time and analyze why they’re turning toxic. Does it start with arguing where you always apologize regardless of whose fault it is? Make a point to stop doing that. You may end up losing relationships faster, but you’ll be able to skip past the long and painful part and skip right to finding someone better.

A lot of the reason a vicious cycle of abusive relationships happens is because people are afraid of being alone. But, do you really want to be not-alone with someone who makes you feel like shit? The key to finding a partner or a friend who doesn’t abuse you is to continually push back against abuse and instill boundaries until you more or less scare off or piss off all the people who won’t respect them. Then you’re left with only people who respect them.

The same analysis goes into stopping other cycles. You have to find where the issues are starting and, when you sense that cycle starting again, take a different approach to it.

Do you keep feeling like your friends are betraying you and then abandoning you even when they said they wouldn’t? What was the final straw for them? Was it the same kind of straw for every relationship? Is there any chance that rather than a betrayal, it was a misunderstanding of terms? Did they give you any clues as to why they did what they did?

With some sleuthing, you may find the culprit of your problem and learn something from it - if not something for you to change, then a trait in others that you can actively avoid.

In situations that involve more than socializing, like repeatedly couch surfing with no stable home, sometimes the only way to break the cycle is to shake things up. That can be researching social programs and asking for help you didn’t think would work and never attempted to ask for before. It could be taking a drastically different approach to employment. It could even be moving somewhere else entirely in order to get a fresh start and reach new opportunities.

Obviously if there was an easy or guaranteed solution to any of these things, no one would be having these problems. But, it’s worth it to take a second look and try to find some holes in the hopeless situation where you can wiggle your way out. While a lot of people end up in shitty situations, not all of them stay in them. Sometimes getting out does involve some luck, but that luck is often found happenstance while putting in some legwork and encountering more opportunities than you do by giving up.

8. You have the ability to create and attempt to enforce boundaries

A lot of people struggle with enforcing boundaries because they’ve spent their whole life not having any. They don’t know what it looks like to have boundaries. They’re told by abusers that any boundaries they attempted to have are selfish or abusive in and of itself. It’s not true though. If someone feels that your boundaries are abusive, they are free to see themselves out.

So, how do you set and enforce boundaries?

Step 1) Make a list of things that make you unhappy. It could be the way someone talks about your appearance or the way your friends often bail on plans last minute.

Step 2) Turn the things on your list into demands. The previous examples could be turned into, “Don’t comment on my weight,” “Don’t tell me what you think of my outfit unless I ask,” “Please warn me 24 hours ahead if you can’t see our plans through,” or, “Don’t cancel plans with me unless it’s an emergency or health-related.”

Step 3) Write a consequence for each demand. As the first one is a pretty serious issue for any relationship, it could have a consequence as dire as breaking up with someone or refusing to see a family member in person. It could also mean restricting a person’s access to your social media so that they’re not able to see new photos, or blocking them altogether. The second could be refusing to make plans ahead of time with someone and telling them that if they want to hang out with you, they’ll have to invite you to do something spontaneously and you’ll join them if you’re able, but that you can’t trust them to plan things ahead of time with you because they cancel too frequently.

Step 4) Enforce your boundaries. This one is the hardest step, because it can cause serious turmoil in your current relationships. If people are used to being toxic or abusive to you, they will not take kindly to you suddenly making demands. Here’s the kicker: it isn’t up to them. It’s up to you. You are in control of your boundaries. If people refuse to respect them, you have the power to remove that person from your life or restrict their access to it.

And, if this hurts or ends the relationship, that is on them, not you. They had the ability to respect your boundaries and chose not to. Them disrespecting your boundary is what broke the relationship, not your refusal to accept their abuse.

In a lot of cases, this won’t feel like a triumph. It will feel like a devastating failure, because your life up to now has consisted of relationships where your value to your friends or family has been entirely based on how well you listen to them and act how they desire you to. But, you’re not an object. You deserve to have your needs met and interact with people in a way that’s not damaging to you. And, if people who refuse to respect your boundaries leave your life, you may find later that you don’t actually regret it. It hurts a lot in the moment, but the continual future relief from the pain they cause is worth the temporary agony of losing someone.

9. You have the ability to leave

This is a hard one for a lot of people, and for good reason. If you live with someone who’s abusing you, you have the ability to leave. If you don’t have the money to afford somewhere by yourself, reach out to domestic abuse resources and shelters. Find roommates who can split rent with you. Move back in temporarily with family that isn’t also abusive. If all else fails, buy a tent and go camping for a while.

The idea of being homeless is what keeps a lot of people from leaving abusive situations. The way people talk about homelessness makes it pretty believable that it’s the worst thing that can happen to someone. However, not all homelessness is owning one change of clothes and sleeping on cardboard under an overpass. If you make a plan of escape, temporary homelessness may actually be a catalyst to a happier life. After all, you’re not happy now anyway, are you?

If you need to get out of an abusive situation and can’t afford to get an apartment for yourself, here is a list of things you can do to escape your situation:

1) Reach out to programs for domestic abuse survivors. There are a lot of them. There are programs for kids being abused by their parents, there are programs for people with abusive partners. Not all of them will be the same or of the same quality, but they’re all worth looking into. It will mean a lot of research, but it might be your way out. Check into programs in other states as well, if you’re in the US. If there’s no program in yours that works for your situation, moving states might be the best solution. Plus, it doesn’t have to be a permanent move.

Remember to use a private tab and a new email address when researching and contacting resources if your abuser has access to your phone or computer.

2) If no programs cater to your situation or if you’re denied by them or they seem to only provide dead-end housing with pest issues, it might be a better bet to make a plan for temporary homelessness. Here are some things you should plan for if this is your best bet for escape:

3) Look into storage units. If you’re going to be homeless and you don’t want to lose things, don’t try and take everything with you. Pack the important things up and put them in a storage unit. The cost is cheaper than rent and you may be able to pay for it with donations or savings. Small storage rentals can be as little as $40/mo, which isn’t bad if you aren’t paying rent.

4) Find a suitable location to move. If you’re going to be homeless, you don’t want to do it just anywhere. Find somewhere with public transit, businesses that are open overnight, and enough of the other resources listed.

5) Make a list of locations with free wifi. That could be a cafe, a bookstore, a doctor’s office, a laundromat, etc.

6) Make a list of places where you could get away with sleeping if you don’t have a car to sleep in. 24-hour laundromats are a good option. So are places where you could pitch a tent without getting arrested. If you have forested areas nearby, putting up a tent a quarter mile past the treeline is likely to go unnoticed, and it’s less dangerous than sleeping on a sidewalk where someone else can easily spot you or where police can harass you.

7) Apply for jobs anywhere you can possibly get transportation to. I don’t mean locally, I mean nationally. If you have a few hundred bucks in the bank, you have enough money to afford a Greyhound bus pass from California all the way to New York. Apply to jobs you know you can do or that you can figure out, and skip the low-end customer services ones unless you can find those locally. Look outside the box. Don’t just check Ziprecruiter or Indeed. Those are great for bulk applications, but they’re also the easiest ones to find which means hundreds of other applicants. Go on google and search for places that are hiring in various cities you wouldn’t mind living in. If you get an interview, let them know you’re long distance and would like to do a video interview. If you get the job, you have a very good reason to move to the location. If you can’t find housing there, make the Planned Homelessness lists for the area the job is in.

8) Look into gym memberships to gain access to a bathroom with a shower. Places like the YMCA have a sliding scale price and you could get a membership for extremely cheap if you have no income. Even if you do have an income, paying $50 for a month of shower access is much cheaper than rent and will give you time to save up your income. You can also get a cheap motel room once in a while to have a more private bathroom experience and get a better night’s sleep on a regular bed.

9) Look into communal housing solutions posted by roommates online. Even if you can’t afford them right now, getting into contact with people and building networking relationships with them could mean they hold a room for you for a month or contact you if they get another opening in the future. A bedroom in a communal house or apartment is usually priced between $300-$700 per month depending on location and room/building size, which is much more affordable than getting somewhere yourself. do not contact actual communes as these are often cults. I’m talking about collectives that share a house or apartment.

10) Look into getting government assistance before you ever leave your current situation. If you have food stamps or medicaid lined up for you before you leave, you can guarantee you don’t struggle to find food for weeks after leaving. If other people in your house are the ones retrieving the mail, contact social services to help you with applying for these programs under the radar. You may also be able to change your mailing address to a friend’s house in the same state even if you aren’t physically able to move there.

Obviously none of this would be fun to do, but if there’s no other safe alternative for you to escape an abusive home, at least having a plan of escape can make leaving possible. And remember, tons of people are homeless every day and survive. It’s not fun but, with precautions and a plan, you may be able to maintain some control while going houseless.

10. You have control over your future

The situation you’re in right now may feel out of your control. But, in fact, it’s not. Even in situations where people think they’re without any control, there are things you can do to help yourself.

If you’re a minor living in an abusive family, you can reach out to a social worker and see about getting moved to a foster home or gaining emancipation (legal independence from parents). “But kids who are being abused don’t call social workers. I’m only being spoiled for thinking I need that help.” Yeah, my parents told me that too. A lot of abusive parents say that to children who threaten to call CPS on them. It’s their way of ensuring you don’t and to gaslight you into believing there’s nothing wrong with the way they treat you. You can call for help and may very well receive it, even if you’re not being abused physically.

No matter what hardships you’re facing right now, as an adult or minor, you have a lot more life left to live and your future isn’t set in stone. Take the reins and change the things that need changing.

Change is terrifying, but if you want to stop being miserable, you have to stop doing and allowing the same things that have done nothing but bring you misery.

You have control. You are not helpless. I promise.

45 notes · View notes