I feel compelled to write these end of year blogs as a way to process the year. But it's not like I have much new, interesting, or cheerful to say. The reality is that I haven't been in a place for a long time to be inspired to write unless it's to get things off my mind. I am hoping that in the near future I can get some enjoyment from writing for pleasure (not that my usual sketch writing isn't pleasurable), but just that I miss writing as a fun, inspiring activity, as opposed to "I must write things off my mind so my head doesn't explode." Maybe the trick is to write something that fulfills both those needs as a way to transition from one to the other.
I sit upon the ending edge of 2024 pretty disappointed. Here's the thing - I have had a LOT of positive, fun memories with amazing people that have brought a lot of joy and meaning to my year. So I don't wish to downplay or not give credit to that. If anything, it's all of those things that have helped keep me afloat during a year that has otherwise been pretty all over the place and filled with big, hard emotions. I wanted to do so much - I wanted to hopefully do a bunch of dating to finally find a boyfriend, I wanted to add new activities to my life that had longer running potential, I wanted to feel very solidly in a better place mentally after all the work I've been doing. But at the end of 2024, I feel mostly unaccomplished.
I started the year off poorly. To understand the start of the year, it helps to understand how I came into 2024. I basically spent from the end of March 2022 through early November 2023 in a constant state of stress. My resting state was agitation. I went back to therapy only to uncover abuse, trauma and mistreatment over my, up to then, lifespan, and spent the time since uncovering, reevaluating, and healing from all of it. And it's not just individual people or situations, but realizing how patterns and core beliefs about myself set as a child have impacted all of the relationships of my life. And having to unlearn or relearn lessons because of this work, sometimes realizing lessons I thought I learned from situations were the wrong lessons, like how I was always focusing on how I could be a better person when things went wrong, but realizing the lesson I kept missing is it's not always on me, and I'm allowed to say the other person isn't meeting me in a mature place and things went wrong because I showed up the best I could under the circumstances and things failed because they didn't try. Not everything is on me. I can't always make things go right or be fair on my own.
It wasn't until early November 2023 that I was finally able to just be at rest in my quiet alone time. Not that I was ALWAYS okay, but generally speaking agitation was something that swelled instead of stayed around all the time. I still struggle with days or even weeks of waking up angry and/or anxious, but that's been mostly better (as long as nothing else happens to stir the pot!). January 2024 started the year off exhausted. Having spent so many months in such a heightened state, my body needed rest once it got used to being more at ease. I probably slept the most in January than any other month because my body and mind were tired in a way I had never experienced before.
February was one of the hardest months. I thought that after getting some rest in January that things would be looking up. But instead my self esteem was in the gutter. I struggled so hard during this time. I knew I needed to get back into therapy, and getting encouragement from my main source of emotional support helped get me there. See, the therapist I started seeing in April 2022 basically disappeared on me in October of 2023. She just didn't show up from my October appointment, despite responding to my check in message from the week before that she'll talk to me then. Hopefully she didn't die or get seriously hurt, and it was just some issue with working through BetterHelp. So I went a few months without a therapist. I didn't want to get a new one through BetterHelp because the special price through a deal from my work had ended so I was paying more out of pocket. And finding a new therapist that took my insurance was going to take time and mental energy, so I figured take a break and see what happened.
What happened was I sunk into a really low place. I hated so much about myself and my mood was really low. It doesn't help that when my mood dips too low, I get really self negative, so then I think horrible things about myself and am very unkind to myself. I start to think about all the negatives people have put on my and how people made me feel. Sometimes it gets like well society says this or that is wrong with me, and these things happened that seem in line with that, so I must be shitty or worthless. Or I think like here are the handful of people that really damaged me mentally that I loved and thought they cared about me, but if they could make me feel so shitty about myself and treat me so unkind, then maybe they are right because how could people important to me that get to be significant parts of my life treat me that way if I didn't deserve it. And if those people could treat me that way or leave me, then why can't anyone else?
Of course logically I know that's not true. And it's amazing how one day I can be feeling so negative and feel really stuck, and then like the next day or the day after that, with enough rest and time, I can feel fine again. I've spent a lot of time not only reflecting on and healing from the bad behaviors, but also appreciating and feeling gratitude for the positive people in my life, which thankfully far out number the bad. I don't think we as people always take intentional effort to analyze and appreciate what positive, supportive behaviors look like. It's amazing how when I started really doing the comparison how stark of a contrast things were between the people and behaviors that made me feel safe, loved, seen, and supported, versus unsafe, judged, invalidated, unworthy, etc. Doing this work really helps serve as a life raft during the times when my head can get really dark.
The hard fact of this year is that I've had a handful of days this year where basically I knew all I could do was live through the day so that I could go to sleep and wake up to another day. Like the weight and pain of everything I've worked through and how I was feeling, and things that kept happening in the present while healing the past, sometimes got too much. I had most of these days in February of this year, with more sprinkled throughout the year, although more since I got Covid in September than during the spring or summer. I did read that Covid could cause mental health stuff as another of it's too many shitty side effects. Or maybe it's just because the fatigued lingered for weeks after what was otherwise a super mild illness, and being fatigued made it harder to stay strong mentally and emotionally.
The last time I had one of these days I really focused on how it felt in my body, as opposed to just my head, to maybe help me or other people understand how this kind of distress can be physical as well as mental. There were the racing negative thoughts in my head. Also, it felt like this big knot in my chest like some kind of uncomfortable mass settled there and created a lot of tension. Elsewhere all over my body it felt like just under my skin some kind of staticky, metallic fibers were trying to push there way out through my skin. Everything inside feels like it's about to explode from so much tension and pressure.
I was thinking about how hard it is now just sitting with and trying to get through these days with these kind of sensations with all the things that I've learned and worked on, and having a lot of empathy and understanding for my late teen/early 20s self who coped with these feeling through self harm, having no understanding of why it feels like that. I have learned these past 3 years that as a child I was wrongfully taught not to speak up for myself or express my negative emotions because best case scenario no one cared and got annoyed that I expressed myself, or worse case scenario now someone knows what bothers or scares me, and will do it more because they know it bothers me. And I also was put under so much pressure to achieve in school while also being compared to others who were doing things I was not, so I never felt good enough no matter how well I did. Plus, dealing with all the other b.s. that came from having an emotionally immature, emotionally neglectful, emotionally and mildly physically abusive, alcoholic father. So of course a girl fresh into adulthood, on her own for the first time, having been put under all that pressure while being molded into someone that didn't feel safe or heard to the point of keeping her feelings to herself, would need some kind of release to all that b.s. that she didn't even understand had happened to her.
I started in therapy with my current therapist in April. I like her a lot. When I told her about my last therapist suddenly disappearing on me, she said she was sorry that happened and mentioned how difficult that could be. I hadn't really thought of it that way. There were definitely issues with being dropped suddenly like that, but I wasn't too bothered. Besides, I think my therapist now is a much better fit. I think she offers more useful suggestions and things to help me do better. I felt like the activities I was suggested by my old therapist didn't really jive well with me. I appreciated the old therapist listening, labeling things I went through to help me understand my trauma, and validating my actions when I was over thinking things. But I didn't feel like I was getting the right practical things to do that helped. My now therapist will have me tell her about upcoming events and any concerns I have. Then we'll talk out what I can do during those times to work on my anxiety and deal with things. And we check in on events from the previous week to see how they went. And also I do the talking about things that my mind may be working through or processing about more distant past stuff. I also appreciate how she notices and validates the things that I have learned and how far I have come. It's nice, especially when I feel in the thick of some negative feelings, to have her remind me of the growth I've made.
I found catching a new therapist up on all the trauma I had been through and learned about, and all the work I had done over a year and a half felt kind of akin to trying to pull someone onto a moving train. But she got her bearings pretty quickly. The main theme of the work I've been doing this year is taking my power back - advocating for myself, not letting fear make decisions for me, reclaiming things I love. One of the very first points she made to me was why do I have to be the one to tiptoe around places out of fear when the problems were caused by someone else not dealing with their issues. I have a pattern of other people putting their trauma and issues onto me, and then me feeling like I'm the problem for speaking up, or wanting boundaries, or even having fucking wants and needs as an individual. But I am not responsible for other people's behaviors, and when they choose to mistreat me, it's not my responsibility to make things comfortable for them if they cannot meet me in the middle to fix things together. If someone else's actions and my reasonable responses to them taking their trauma out on me make them uncomfortable, that's on them.
The progress with this work I will say is primarily positive. I had some really early wins. My guiding philosophy is when in potentially difficult situations, I am going to do what I want to do as if the stressor was not there. I am no longer going to let my fear direct my decisions. Instead, I am going to recognize that the fear exists and then calm myself so that I may carry on doing what I want to do. There was something about knowing my therapist was going to ask about how I did that made me really want to do a good job early on. It also helped talking out events beforehand so I had already verbalized what I would do, so when it came time to participate in events, I already had a plan in my head.
I did have a couple somethings that happened in recent months that shook my confidence in my progress. I ended up having an anxiety attack triggered over a minor thing. It really sucked because I felt like I was making so much progress, but even something small in the right (wrong?) form could still trigger the panic/fear/flight response my brain as been conditioned into. It made me think about how I just have to accept that a part of my brain is still affected by everything and may stay that way indefinitely, especially if there's no healing from the source of the damage. I don't know if the thing was accidental or intentional, and if it was a one time deal or if I should expect anything again in the future. Either way, I hate that my brain made the decision for me of how I was going to respond. I have no idea what I would have said or done (or not said or not done) if given the choice, but the anxiety attack took that from me because my brain decided I needed to get out of there! I just have to accept that healing trauma isn't about completely removing the trauma from my brain. I have no way of knowing when and if the trauma is truly gone, and I don't have direct control over how my brain responds to trauma triggers. What I can do though is heal what I can so as to lessen the frequency and intensity of the triggers, and development ways to manage the stress when I am triggered so I can return to whatever I was doing faster after being triggered.
It's hard knowing the fear is still there. All of the progress I've made isn't because the fear is gone, but because I am afraid sometimes but I do things anyway. It's hard too because facing and healing trauma sometimes means becoming more afraid (or sad or angry) than I was before I understood what happened to me. I had a thing happen in early summer 2023 that not only terrified me, but also made me realize I had a bunch of fear that I hadn't even acknowledged, let alone processed. It's scary realizing that I was in some small, ever increasing ways, afraid of someone for pretty much the entire time I knew them. And that a lot of the excuses I made - they didn't mean it like that, or that's just trauma behavior and not about me, or that's not a big enough deal to make a fuss over and I don't want to be overly sensitive - were partly because I was afraid to speak up for myself. It's a pattern in my life having people I'm close to take their own shit out on me, whether they realize it or not, because they are only thinking about themselves, or they see me as an opportunity to be what they couldn't, or because they see their own insecurities in me, or because I happened to do a similar thing or occupy a similar space to someone who was shitty. I'm tired of other people looking at me and not seeing ME. I didn't do anything to deserve any of that! And so often I shut down my feelings, even hid parts of myself, because other people couldn't see ME for my talents and my kindness and how I loved them and deserved love in return. I never want to feel that way again. I am not going to let anyone else put anything on me that wasn't mine, because I'm always willing to take accountability when it's fair, but too often take accountability that doesn't belong to me. I am so grateful to have people that make me feel safe and seen, that I don't have room for those that don't anymore. And I've realized that when put in a situation that feels unsafe or unseen, the way to fix it is not by pretending it didn't happen, but by showing it's safe now and the other person is seen again.
Unraveling the patterns and bad lessons I learned as a child is not fun. Once I saw them, I could not unsee them, which in part is good because that means I won't fall into old ruts in the future because I can identify the bad behaviors in others and myself to prevent situations in the first place. But it's hard examining the entirety of my life to see what causes me to fall into those patterns. Having experienced a lot of invalidation and mistreatment for speaking up about how things negatively make me feel, I learned too young to hide what I was feeling from others. It only ever felt safe to cry when I was alone. As I got older I learned it's so much easier to intellectualize what I was feeling instead of actually feeling it. Because it felt shitty to feel hard feelings that I wasn't "allowed" to express, so if I just didn't feel my feelings and just thought about them instead, it hurt less. Of course that just meant the feelings were repressed more and then hurt a lot more when it finally came time to feel them. But in bad situations it was safer.
It's interesting how as I got older I worked really hard unlearning the bad lessons, but then realizing I never understood the underlying cause of the lessons, so while I was able to make some real personal growth in my adulthood, there were still some booby traps that I tripped without realizing it. In my adult years I've been able to identify people as safe to open up to about how I feel, and over time doing that while I'm feelings things instead of after I've already felt them. I've learned that when someone is safe, I do not fall into the really bad patterns because those people don't make me feel like I have to. It's only when mistreatment happened that I would fall into those patterns, and not even really realize it. I am grateful in the present for people who are safe so I don't use my patterns. And I am grateful for the healing I've done so that when someone is unsafe, I can just get away from them instead of using my coping mechanisms to stay safe in an unsafe space.
In early summer this year, I learned that a former close friend of mine had died of Covid, on my 40th birthday no less. It was a really painful thing to hear. I have so much sympathy for her family having to lose someone like that at a relatively young age. It hit me in a weird way. Several years ago I had to exit the friendship because of the way this person treated me (it was something happening to the friend group in general, but I seemed to get more of the behavior than the others). It was hard because at the time we were both going through difficult stress, so it was too much for me to deal with my stress, trying to be a supportive friend for everyone in the group, and then having this mistreatment as another stressor in a space that should have been a relief from stress. I still really cared so much about her and hoped that she could work her stuff out to get in a better place. (Any one who I've ever cared about but things ended badly, I am probably always going to care about and always hope they find the healing they need to allow them to live a happier life.) And I think she did work things out from little snippets I could make out on social media. I had always hoped that one day we'd find ourselves in the same space so I could see how she was doing and tell her I was happy she was doing well. Now I will never get that chance.
This made me think a lot about how my patterns of intellectualizing my feelings and not realizing I was being mistreated had affected this, and other, relationships. I found myself wondering that if I had healed those patterns and been capable of recognizing the need to speak up for myself and then doing so, could I have stopped things from getting as bad as they did. Could I have saved myself hurt and trauma, and potentially saved relationships if I had worked these things out sooner? If I can given someone the opportunity to stop hurtful behavior, would they have really listened and made correction early enough to create a safe space so I didn't have to be out of their life? It's probably just as if not more likely they would either say they will change and then not change, or flat out invalidate and redirect the issue into making me the problem, thus putting me in a situation to leave or put up with continued mistreatment, if they hadn't already left on their own account. The truth is I'll never know. And it's been a struggle trying to balance the truths of (1) other people chose to behave like that even if I didn't push back at all, and I am not responsible for their behavior, and (2) I have a responsibility to myself to to keep myself as safe as possible. I have learned to give myself grace for sometimes failing or being too slow on the uptake with #2, especially where so much mental and emotionally abusive behaviors are meant to make people feel like they are the problem and lucky to be put up with, that it can be hard to see through that smoke.
I really wanted to date in 2024, but that barely happened. My last date was in February. Since my self esteem was really bad, I wasn't in the mood to date. I only went on the last date that I did because literally right before I was about to delete the app, some guy who hadn't messaged me in like a couple weeks suddenly responded. So I told him I was about to delete the app, but sure, let's go on a date. It was fine but he was definitely not what I was looking for. So I took a break. And haven't been back on the apps since. Maybe I'll go back, but I need to be prepared to play the algorithms and message a lot of duds to "prove" myself engaged enough to "earn" the good profiles. App programming these days can do straight to hell!! I did practice my dating/flirting/man acquiring skills IRL though, a bit. The thing is, I am not flirty. And I cannot tell when someone is hitting on me or interested. I need to be told to my literal face, and even then I may have my doubts. So instead I just try to show up as my authentic self and get to know people. I've done it in the past where I've liked someone and got into my head and tried to say or do things that weren't natural, and it made things awkward and uncomfortable. I'm way more enjoyable when I'm just myself, and if I need to be some forward flirty, touchy feely person to get a man, than he's not my kind of man. To be fair, I worry no man is my type of man. I am not the kind of woman a man sees across the room and just has to talk to. And I don't seem to be the type guys get to know and really grow into liking. I can literally only think of one guy who expressed interest in me in a way that was respectful and who is a genuinely good person. And since dating is a numbers game, it's worrying that there was only one. I just have to hope that I defy the odds and can soon meet someone else like that who also happens to be compatible with me. Or I suddenly date 5000 men so I can up my numbers. ;^)
But honestly I don't know if or when I even want to get back out there. Like I am totally ready to find someone and date one person. But I am NOT ready to sort through refuse that are people on dating apps or going to dating events. I don't know if it's Sacramento or just dating culture in general, but there just seems to be a lot more stress and less datable guys than is worth the effort. It doesn't help that I engage with too much online content with women sharing stories of shitty men. Makes it hard to believe there are even enough good ones left that I have a chance at getting one. I'm not exactly prime attractive goods over here. And as amazing of a caring, kind, attentive, insightful, funny, entertaining girlfriend as I would be, I'm not looking to just have a boyfriend. Years ago my focus was only on finding someone because I have a lot of love to give and I really wanted to love someone. But recent years and work has made me realize I also need to understand and focus on what I need from a relationship, and to make sure I'm receiving as much as I give, if not in kind but at least in volume. I fully believe when it comes to finding (and having) a relationship, people need to both consider what they have to give and be a good partner, and what they need to receive and make sure their needs are met. If you focus too much on what you have to give (something I've done), you risk doing all the work and then not getting your needs met. And if you focus too much on what you need, you risk taking advantage of your partner.
Maybe I'll put myself back out there. Or maybe I won't. Maybe someone will fall into my lap. Maybe I'll just live my life out in the world and stumble across someone. I just know that the fears still crop up. I remember earlier in the year talking to this guy, and as I'm walking away after a great conversation, I smile one of those giddy smiles I haven't done in a long time. And then a tidal wave of dread washes over me. I feel the weight of it heavy on my mind. I haven't gotten closer to anyone new since I've started my healing journey. And I'm really afraid to let someone in. I'm afraid I'll miss red flags, or see the red flags but make excuses for them like I have in the past. It's taken me some work to overcome those kinds of fears to tell myself that the present isn't like the past, and that those fears are my trauma talking. Because while I don't want to get hurt again, I also don't want to be someone who hurts someone else because I was hurt by someone who was hurt by someone else. I want to see the new people coming into my life for themselves, not for the people I've left behind me.
So, what are my big goals from 2025? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I am just going to live each day one at a time. I'm going to keep doing what I've been doing, for the most part. I may start some new things, stop some old things. But I'm not putting any pressure or goals on anything. If nothing happens, fine. If something mid happens, cool. If something big and amazing happens, I'm dreaming so wake me up. Fine. I am just going to keep on this healing journey and just do me. The biggest thing I accomplished in 2024 was working on myself. And while I may not feel the progress every day, I know it's there. Just a few weeks ago I literally pushed a stranger off me and said "I don't hug strangers" when they hugged me suddenly w/o my consent. Past Dayna would have just let it happen quietly. But not any more!! So for 2025, I just want to keep working on me and piecing together more who this current version of me is. I don't care that I didn't do anything huge or important or impressive (but to be fair, I did complete the 1st phase of the largest project of my career in 2024), I kept going and kept growing and slogged through some hard stuff. I am benefiting from all the hard work even if I don't often feel it yet, and sometimes it makes things feel harder. But I am much farther along the path than it feels and it will all pay off. *knocks on wood* Or we'll devolve into some kind of apocalypse and all my personal issues of my life up until then will seem quaint. I feel like either way works for me. I'd love to be happy and have good things come my way, but I'm also kind of curious what post-apocalypse Dayna would become. So, you know, 2025 is happening.
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