Where has all the insecurity gone? in Mental Health

For pretty much all of my life, I have been plagued by those negative, intrusive thoughts that I mentioned in the previous entry. I recognize that the intrusive thoughts are a symptom of OCD and I recognize where my particular intrusive thoughts originate - in insecurity.

I used to believe that all love was conditional and… controllable. I thought love was a choice, or… like a light switch, it could be turned on or off at will. I don’t mean love within myself, but the love gifted to me by others. I thought that people who said they loved me could, at any moment, decided they did not love me, that they could turn it off, or that it could just stop.

I believed this because I felt like I had experienced it over and over again, since childhood. My parents loved me so much… until they didn’t. Then they loved me again… until they didn’t. It was like love/hit/love/yell/love/name-calling… When I got a little older and started feeling… you know… the puberty things, the crushes-on-classmates things (which I really, really did not understand and no one explained it to me and no one ever, ever mentioned that I should/could like girls, too, so why did I have a certain kind of dream about girls at least as often as about boys?), it was already a given in my mind that anyone who seemed to like me probably didn’t really.

Into adulthood, I carried this belief, this idea that I was only worthy of love if I was just this or just that, and I was equally worthy of abuse, possibly even more worthy of abuse because isn’t that what I was taught as a child? That love is conditional and love hurts and, sometimes (always), love leaves.

I’ve only just realized in the last few weeks how much I was still holding on to this harmful, toxic idea. I have noticed several times over the last couple of years that I dread seeing an email notification because, in my mind, one day, it will be an email from a person I love, a person who says they love me, telling me that… they just don’t love me anymore, that they can’t be with me or around me, that they are cutting me from their life completely.

For so long, that felt like a valid fear. I fully believed that this was a thing that could happen at any time, from anyone. This was a thing that I was holding so tightly that I have literally held my body tense and ready, at almost all times.

I feel like this is the root of like 98% of my anxiety and the tension it has created in my body that causes what feels like an inappropriate amount of pain for someone who hasn’t actually done any sort of heavy lifting. Fear, insecurity, self-doubt - these things were ingrained in me from my earliest memories.

Now, today, this minute… “this” feels like a tremendous weight lifted from me. Just another thing I’ve noticed with new meds, that I’m not holding myself tense and ready all the time, and there is absolutely no doubt in my rational, conscious mind that the people who love me really do love me and aren’t going to just decide not to one day.

For what is possibly the first time in my entire life, I feel genuine love and acceptance for myself. I feel stable, balanced, rational, and not afraid.

After all that I have been through, what on earth do I have to be afraid of now?