Don't You Ever Say, Part II

Right after we sat down, the LSU Professor says, "You want and deserve a relationship..." He pauses, and then continues, "Right?"

When I was young, maybe twelve or thirteen years old, I believed already that no man would ever love me because I was ugly. I would never marry.

That's a young age to have such an idea cemented into your head. Most therapists would quickly ask where I got those ideas from, but as I've explained to psychiatric professionals before, I don't know. I don't know if the kids at school teased me--or if somehow by watching my parents fight that I absorbed such a philosophy. What was it exactly? Who planted the seed of such a horrific idea?

Of course, as I got older, that changed. It became no one would ever want me because I'm fucked up.

My last case manager was convinced that most of my interpersonal relationship problems were from these very negative thoughts that I carry around day in and day out. If only I could believe that I was worth it, then--then--the right man would fall into my lap or I would fall into his, and life would be grand. Or at the very least, I would stop waiting for a man to love me when it was obvious that he didn't.

But that day will likely never come because the hardest part about recovering from depression is turning those thoughts around. 

The LSU Professor said today that I never had the best examples to follow. That I've become numb to their insults. That I don't even view it as being abnormal.