In recent time I feel like I haven’t had much control over my life. My mother is very controlling and hypercritical of my appearance. Even to this day for certain things I have to have my clothing, hair, and makeup approved by her before we go out together or she can bring me places. The fact I still need to be brought to places by my parents a lot of the time doesn’t help, but that’s my own fault.
While this major has worked out for me for the most part and I’ll hopefully get a good job from it, it’s a decently far cry from my dreams before. Up until I was 19 my plan, and many of the actions I took up to that point, were for a path in the performing arts, specifically in theater. So when circumstances outside of my control caused me to step away from it, I was devastated.
Then, for a cacophony of reasons that I don’t feel would be appropriate to discuss on this blog, during the pandemic, I was brought into hospital (I have been told by my psychiatrist that it is an important distinction to make given that I was not put in residency that I say that instead of hospitalized) four times for self-harm, suicidal, and homicidal ideation in less than a year. My emotions had become so intense and unmanageable and my prior coping mechanisms could no longer handle the new strength my emotions had become and the new thoughts about myself and the situations I had endured. I haven’t really been the same since.
So in short, I feel like I don’t feel like I have control of at the very least, my career, my body (at least the outer portions of it), and my mind. This has drastically impacted my sense of self, and having a general sense of not knowing what it is. So if I don’t really know myself anymore, how can I write for myself?
As someone whose had a performing arts lean in life for a massive chunk of it, and having developed people pleasing tendencies, alongside a healthy heaping of social anxiety, I feel like I’ve spent the majority of my life thinking and worrying and placating and molding myself to fit the perception and needs of others. So allowing myself to not have the assumed thoughts and opinions of others in my head while I write seems like a daunting task.
There is one thing though that I feel I have been able to keep of my sense of self that has been minimally tainted by the world around me, and has been able to develop relatively organically, which I am going to be trying to write about more going forward: My politics.
Especially given the recent election, and the fact that many from my side of the aisle failed to show up when it mattered quite a good bit to do so, I think now more than ever it’s important for me to share my own unique perspective and experience, and use the tools I have at my disposal from my living to be able to do some good.
Thoughts Of CKD 
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