Okay kids, today’s blog topic is real (maybe a little too real) so gather round the campfire and get comfy. It’s all about the joys of toxic situations.
If you go back and read the first post on this blog (I’m not linking it because please don’t actually), you’ll notice that I was very sad – and listening to a lot of Brand New – and that I was looking to make changes to fix how sad I was all the time. Honestly, I could have been fine with it but I felt horrible for bringing down the people around me by constantly being such a drain on their energy.
That was September 28th. That was 76 days ago. My whole life was a toxic situation. I was crying all the time, I wasn’t sleeping for more than a couple hours per night, I was irritable and aggressive…I was not the best version of myself. As much as it was on me to figure things out and get it together, it is awfully hard to just pretend all the things around me didn’t bother me when they really, really did.
A really super fun fact about me (*sarcasm*) is that I have an endless loop in my head of every embarrassing moment in my life and every hurtful thing anyone has ever said to me. As soon as I don’t have an active thought in my mind, the loop starts playing. It’s been looping since I was about 6 years old and I’ve never figured out how to stop it, so you can imagine that pretending it wasn’t there bringing me down was uh…. not easy? To say the least? But I was too scared to walk away from the situation because it still had its good moments and I worried I’d just spiral off into the abyss and spend the rest of my life doing literally nothing.
16 days after that, the situation and I were no longer connected. It’s complicated, we won’t get into any of it. The point is that it was gone. GONE. And I felt sad for maybe an hour while I processed what was happening…and then I felt the weight just lift right off my chest. Just like that. Obviously there was still other stress there, but all of the anxiety I’d felt while deciding how to handle the situation dissipated. The situation was handled and gone from my life forever. I could move on from it and find new stressors and new experiences.
Over the next few weeks, I’d feel really good and then something would remind me of my toxic situations and I would quickly spiral, crying and yelling about how things aren’t fair, blah blah blah. I was sad. To be honest, when you’re sad for so long without a break from it… you kind of forget how not to be sad. It just comes so naturally, you fall back into it like when you see your best friend for the first time in a while and everything is exactly how it was. But the moment would pass, and I would find more and more that my baseline emotion was neutral/happy as opposed to “if you speak a single word to me, I will absolutely burst into tears I am not joking”.
Now here we are, two months to the day the toxicity in my life decreased exponentially…and I don’t think I’ve felt this good in years. Maybe even in the last decade, if we’re being dramatic and honest. I still get mad once in a while just because the whole situation I was in was definitely infuriating, but it’s no longer consuming my life. I’ve met up with old friends that I lost contact with. My family no longer cringes when I walk into the house, waiting to see what will trigger my crying fit this time. I’ve started multiple creative endeavours with friends (and have dedicated tons of time and effort to my blog, which I’m pretty pleased about). And I don’t feel like such a waste of a perfectly good skeleton.
So why am I telling you this?
Because after going through this and seeing what life is like on the other side, I have to tell you that getting the hell out of your toxic situation is vital. If you have something that you feel is bringing you down and seriously damaging your mental health (or anything else), do whatever possible to remove yourself from it. If that’s not possible for you right now, do your very best to either start planning to make it possible in the future or find something you love in the meantime that can help balance the scales a bit.
I love y’all and I want you to be happy. I know it’s a hard journey, but someone’s gotta give it a try and it’s gotta be you. Either that or you wait for the situation to remove itself from you because HEY that seemed to work for me, I guess. But remember that no one’s going to look out for your best interests the way that you will look out for your own. Don’t let anyone make you feel bad for taking care of yourself first. You deserve it. And I am always here to lend an ear and a suggestion of “maybe we should eat some fries” if you need it.