Pain - 44 - Sociopath Community

I struggle with feeling the need to organize everything and make things perfect.

It started as a deadly eating disorder where I couldn’t trust food and then I learned as a mechanism of survival after it nearly killed me to focus all the obsession on other things, and I could escape it in a sense or control it.

So I started wearing this bracelet all the time, it was actually a headband I wrapped around my wrist twice. And it became an obsession, as long as I wear this bracelet I can be good. I can eat. If I do not wear the bracelet I cannot eat, because I won’t be in control of something I have to revert back to unhealthy control and obsession with food.

But of course it wasn’t just a bracelet, it became, a persona I could put on to distract from the reality of my life. As long as I wear this, I can be like them. And when I’m like them, bad things don’t happen.

It was an unhealthy obsession with keeping up appearances and living this almost alternate life, where I made every effort to be someone’s idea of perfect, to feel, like I was doing something right, to be worth something, to not beat myself up or be depressed. But it was a mask for the depression and, in private I still was.

It didn’t work for me though, the life I built for myself looked good on paper but it was empty and shallow and thin. Meaningless, to me.

I was heading toward burn out because of how hard I worked myself but I just “didn’t think it would happen to me.” As if, I were immune to that sort of thing. But there did come a time when it all became too much. And much of it was circumstantial.

I think I wouldn’t of been able to recover from my true problems had I not been broken down to nothing in the first place. It just took a total spiraling out of control, a rock bottom, etc.

And though I’ve gotten “better on paper” again- this is an old habit, and I find myself re-doing the same, old patterns- I used to live in.

I still have perfectionism and obsession as an issue. It comes from an innate belief being instilled in you from young childhood that, you are just not good enough, and it’s *you* that is the problem. Nothing you add or take away to that will, ever be enough.

And it’s relentless, the patterns I get lost in. It’s all the same, as I was all those years ago really. And because of that I feel, just as stuck, and trapped as I did then. Recreating that traumatic time for myself, all over again.

Why? I don’t know. Unresolved issues I guess.