Phase I : Open Journal #3

Journal #3 : Self – Destruction
If distraction was what I was looking to do and procrastination was how I did it, than self-destruction became a side effect. I wanted to distract myself from life, so putting everything off in order to do something else, something “fun” became a main objective. I wanted to hang out with my friends, not do homework. I was busy with my family, I didn’t want to bother with explaining to my friends or worrying about school. Similarly, when I was busy with school I couldn’t bother with my family. It became this endless cycle of too much, too little. I couldn’t strike a balance between the two worlds I had created and thus consistently spent far too much time in one world and not enough in the other, alternating by interest or responsibility. When school was going good, I was heavily focused on my family. When family was going good, I focused in on school. I focused as hard as I could fearing that I would lose the concentration at any point in time. And I always did.

For me, self-destruction is not just the act of doing something harmful like cutting or hitting yourself , nor is it just drinking or doing drugs. For me, self-destruction is about doing any behavior that could potentially be harmful to you physically, mentally, emotionally or otherwise, and it’s about both temporary and long term effects. And it’s also about the mindset that accompanies these acts. For example, with “mental fixation”, if I read a book with a particular familiar character that ends up in the sort of situation I long to be in, with the sort of ideal person that I long for, I fixate on that. I fixate on their relationship and every little detail about the characters, flaws and awes, and I can’t get around it. I can’t get past the fact that it’s so on point to what I long for, that it’s so on point to exactly what I’m missing, that’s it’s just such familiar territory. And then I realize that no, as much as I want to be this character, I am not. Because in some way, this character has so much more than me. This character has been on numerous dates, whereas I have not. This character has had her share of heartbreak and deserves that, whereas I have never even been in love. This character is not ugly and fat like I am, she is beautiful and attractive to the sort of men that I’m not good enough for. You see, the more I fixate on the situation I long for, whether it’s the accomplishment of a goal, beating a certain game, or longing to fall in love in the way the characters in a book did; the more I fixate on that one thing, the more I fixate on my every flaw. It serves to highlight all that I feel is wrong with me, only because I can’t focus on anything else, I turn self-destructive and convince myself that I can’t do anything about it, I just have to accept it. Only I can’t because the longer I know what’s wrong with me, the more self-destructive I become. It’s almost as if, if I didn’t think anything was wrong with me, I’d be able to fix it all without thinking about it. And I might be happy doing it. But because I know it exists, because I know I’m not perfect, I can’t get around it. I can’t get around it and I cant see past it, can’t see through it and there is no way for me to fix it. And no way for me to accept it either.

Procrastination only seems to add to that because of the fact that the more I can convince myself that I don’t deserve something or don’t want something badly enough, the longer I can procrastinate from doing it. The more I can fixate on something, the longer I can put off having to deal with something else. And the more I can convince myself of these things, the more self-destructive I become.

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