Oh Mylanta

I’m trying to stop overthinking things so much. It causes me to be stuck and never make a decision.

I’m going to call this diary Oh Mylanta because it’s the very first thing that popped into my head and so I’m rolling with it.

Otherwise I would sit there for an hour thinking of a name that was cool and had meaning, was funny, but not too funny, and reflects who I am but not so much that people might know who I am and so on and so forth. Then I would finally pick a name just to talk myself out of it, and then the diary would never get started.

This is something I do to myself all the time. All the time.

I know why I do this. I do it because my mother is a narcissistic abuser, and every time I did anything, she found something wrong with it. Not just a little bit wrong, but something devastatingly wrong. I’ll do it better next time. I’ll do it better next time.

“Better next time” translates into how she likes it. It took me years to realize there was no way to ever achieve that, because my mother is very sick. An example of this is cleaning. Mom used to cry all the time because the house was so dirty. So I, a child, would try to clean it up. But inevitably, because I was a child, I did something wrong. I threw away important papers. One time she yelled at me for tossing a cup filled with vodka down the sink. When I told her through tears that I thought it was water, she screamed SMELL IT NEXT TIME and stormed off crying.

I’ve learned through therapy and books about CPTSD that growing up this way trained my brain in a backwards way. Because completing tasks often ended in negative emotions, my brain now does whatever it can to protect me from that, by paralyzing me from making decisions. If I don’t make a decision, then I can’t make the wrong one and get yelled at.

So, here I am!

My name is OhMylanta.

I’m a 35 year old wife and new mother in Southern California.

I love my life and I’m very happy. I love my home. I love my husband. I love my son. I love myself.

I’m going to allow myself to use this diary to write whatever I want whenever I want to. I’ve been scared to start a diary because any time that I have, it’s been used against me somehow. But, at the suggestion of my therapist, and literally everyone all the time, I’ve started journaling. My journals are scattered. I use googleDocs sometimes, and sometimes I write in a notebook, and sometimes I use VoiceMemo on my phone. I do this because I’m scared to put it all in one place, because I’m scared people will judge me.

Because of the abuse I’ve endured my entire life, I have emotional struggles. Some of them are very ugly. Sometimes I have really angry, mean thoughts–even rage. I’m scared to put my angry thoughts next to my happy thoughts. I’m scared that if anyone ever reads it, they will think I’m a bad person for feeling so angry. This programming is from my mother. Whenever I was angry at her for neglecting and abusing me, I was punished. I was not allowed to express anger in any way, ever. Also, my thoughts are quite scattered sometimes, and I’m scared if anyone reads my scattered thoughts they will think I’m crazy.

I know that anger is healthy, now. And I know that I’m not crazy.

Being angry and fragmented is all a part of being a survivor. It’s okay, and writing down my angry and/or scattered thoughts next to my healthy and happy ones is okay, too. When I get the crazy/angry thoughts out of my head, they don’t plague my mind anymore and I can function so much better. When I don’t, they go round and round and round in my head for days and days and even wake me up sometimes, so it’s imperative that I release them.

Having one place for all my thoughts will be so much easier. I realized that by having multiple places to write, I end up not doing it sometimes because I can’t decide where to do it. This is a self-sabotaging thing I do to myself to keep myself paralyzed. If I commit to writing here, no matter what, I can’t get in my own way anymore.

So, congratulations to me on my new diary!

Here’s to the future, and to the past, and everything in between.

I encourage anyone who wants to, to follow me on this journey! I encourage anyone who wants to, to comment so we can have fun and healthy discussion, and potentially grow together! 🙂

 

Until next time,

OhMylanta