Dinner: baguette slices topped with cream cheese, peach slices (tossed in honey, lemon and black salt) and mint leaves.
I'm so tired. This is the strongest feeling I have most of the time. Time and again, in therapy, when my therapy asks "what would this sensation say? What would this feeling say if it could have a voice?" I just come back to being tired. I think of that Langston Hughes poem "I'm so tired of waiting" and even though the poem is a hopeful one about making a change in the world, all I can think of is that line "I'm so tired of waiting".
Life has been exhausting. I'm 35F, and unfortunately am the eldest daughter in a south Asian family in a south Asian country. Unfortunately because this role is the worst.
My parents had a messed up marriage of 25 years where my mum parentified me emotionally and used me as a mini therapist and confidant for most of my life (well into my mid twenties). My dad was a toxic emotionally unsafe and manipulative man. Both parents had rage issues. The whole thing was a harmful mess. The extended family were nasty gossips, and then eventually my parents divorced as toxically and as acrimoniously as possible using my siblings and me as go betweens for communicating (all older adults behaved like children and there was no legal protection).
I made the mistake of moving home after uni because I was so brainwashed by my parentified role that I felt i had to look after my mum. This led to years of misery and depression for me. Got stuck in my country of origin with no ability to move abroad.
Despite this, started therapy when I started earning enough to afford it. Kept working hard at my job hoping to be financially self sufficient (lol. What a joke). Gained experience to apply to funded doctorates. Got into 4 programmes over the course of 6 years. Each time = funding denied.
Tried to accept that I'll only ever live here, in this dump of a country, where as a single never-married woman I can't live independently and am stuck living with my mother with very little privacy and bring treated as a child no matter how many times i try to establish a boundary. Tried to accept that its ok not be financially self sufficient in my culture, even though that severely limits what i can do in life because you need money for nearly everything.
Opened myself up to the possibility of an arranged marriage because I wanted companionship and a life of my own outside my parents and their drama. After meeting a bunch of incompatible people via the arranged process, finally met a guy I liked and wanted to get to know better. He claimed to want the same. Then he ghosted me and texted months later that he wasn't ready for any kind of relationship and didn't want anything with me.
That just broke me. Even though I'd struggled with body image, being shy and socially anxious and fearing relationships because of my childhood, I had always believed that I had so much love to give. That even if I was average looking, someone would choose me for who I am, that being kind and genuine would matter. That it was ok to risk hoping for a romantic partner because who wouldn't want someone with so much love to give. And this incident just shattered that delusion.
It was the last straw in a series of romantic rejections from people I'd liked over the course of my life (literally no man ever said he liked me or asked me out or reciprocated my interest and part of that might be my stupid conservative culture, although I move in open minded and progressive social circles where men do ask women out).
So inevitably = years of depression. Then professional burnout. Then a physical illness/injury which means that I now have to be mindful of not over exerting myself for life.
I'm so tired. I don't have the capacity for hope, and especially unrealistic hope. I don't have the capacity to give. I'm exhausted.
And I know there's probably nothing any one can say or do to help. I guess I'm just venting. I don't have much faith, and praying doesn't help me, but if do you please pray for me or send kind thoughts my way.