My progress means the world to me.

I was once in a place were every time I made progress to getting better, I fell backwards and hit the ground harder than I did before. My highs were definitely some of the greatest moments and memories of my life, but my lows were even more dangerous and vicious, and whenever I was at rock bottom, I found myself not being able to get out of them for long periods of time.

Hi, my name is Liz and this past year I’ve made tremendous progress in my mental health and self-discovery, and I will not let anyone mess it up.

The other day, I nearly had an anxiety attack because a part of my past resurfaced into my present and it nearly scared me. It wasn’t anything serious or anything alarming, but it mentally took me back to the place I once was; the very sad, confused and depressed person that nearly wanted to hurt yourself just so that someone would understand the mental health issues I was dealing with. I was in this weird space that I was trying to take care of everything and everyone else before I took care of myself, yet I was self-aware of the destructive behavior I was tolerating from both myself and those around me and my soul simply was growing tired of how I kept treating myself.

At the end of the day, I needed to learn how to be alone, learn who I was after being tied to someone else for a decade, and discover the things that bring me unconditional happiness.

When I discovered those things like having coworkers who were now my friends or communicating with new people I found interesting, I realized just how lonely I was before this chapter of my life and how much of my happiness strives from being social. I was able to build friendships that allowed me to be completely myself; I was able to share my demiromanticism with my coworkers and moots, I was able to show parts of my humor to them without feeling judged; too long didn’t read, I just felt like people are actually liking me for me, even when my anxiety sometimes tells me they don’t.

So as I was battling the past resurfacing into my present, I instantly started to cry because it was overwhelming. I was angry, I was upset, I was heartbroken, but I also felt so proud of my progress. Talking to my sibling and mother about my progress during this time, all I kept on blurring out in tears was “I am so much more happy now like I have friends now and I have people I can turn to for support like I’m doing so much better.”

And I think anyone who’s still in my life and that was around for the past version of myself can say they see the progress I’ve made.

I have three different Instagram accounts for the various sides of my creativity; I have my personal, my collection account where I make fancy edits of my collection, and a trading account where I sell and trade Kpop photocards in hopes I am able to finish my collection. In this community that I’ve been a part of for a little over a month, I’ve never felt more accepted and felt like I fit into a community as much as I do there. At first, I was anxious of allowing myself to communicate with these people just because I felt like no one would get me or understand me or whatever, but now the moots I have in that community are some of the sweetest and most endearing people I’ve ever got the pleasure in meeting online.

On the day I had this major anxiety attack, my moots in the trading community kept reaching out to me for support with their endearing words, and tons of Seungsik photos to cheer me up. After even talking to one of them about what was happening, they said that in the couple of times we’ve spoken, they learned how much of an angel I was and how I was the nicest person and that I deserved to be happy. I cried my eyes out because of the overwhelming love this community has brought me, and like even me being able to run to my friend, Anthony, and just vent everything out and just to have him listen without judgement was just incredibly refreshing.

This is the progress I don’t want to jeopardize. This is the version of myself I dreamed of being when I was younger. This is the version of me that I always wanted to perfect, even if this version of me is far from being perfect. This is the progress towards my depression and SAD that I hoped for when I started to seek therapy back in May 2018. This is the journey I’ve wanted to be on, but was too afraid to ever go on. This is my progress, and I am doing what’s right for me in this moment and in this moment it’s for me focusing on my present and my future.

Of course, I’ll always have set backs and become nostalgic and sadness will get to me. I will have moments when I’ll still cry and get overwhelmed and parts of my past will resurfaced. It’s happening as we speak since the summer has always been the roughest time for me and it has been for the last three summers. I still get very triggered like it was just yesterday, but that’s just a part of the healing process; that’s just part of the trauma I internalized for decades of my life.

But even then, I will not allow my progress to not be progress anymore. I refuse to make major setbacks to the point where my progress is overshadowed by chaos. I will not allow anything, anyone, or any part of my past, present, and potentially future fuck up the progress I am making at this exact moment. I don’t tell myself often how proud I am for just being able to do what I’m doing, but I guess I do when I admire the progress as much I as do.

I am a prime example of the saying “things do get better.”

I remember reading a book for hours on end in the sixth grade at home when I first started mindlessly plucking my eyebrows. I was only 12-years-old.

I grew up with pretty much a unibrow. I was always teased for it, and without even knowing I guess I just started plucking it with my fingernails whenever I needed to keep my hands busy. The more I plucked, the more bald patches i had with my eyebrows and the thinner they became. I even remember one of my good friends in middle school looking at me and saying “you shouldn’t pluck your eyebrows, Liz, you need to pluck the hairs that makes that unibrow.” At first, I guess that stemmed from a place of feeling like over-tweezing your eyebrows was what pretty girls did. But as I got older and thicker eyebrows were now the trend, I still found it hard to stop plucking my eyebrows. At 26, it’s at it’s worst.

Hi, my name is Liz & because of my need to control everything in my life, I pluck my hair as a defensive mechanism for my anxiety. It’s called Trichotillomania.

Trichotillomania is what people call the “hair-pulling disorder”, it’s when people pull hair off of their bodies with creates bald patches on the places where there should be hair. This hair-pulling can happen on places like your scalp, eyebrows, private area, and even your eyelashes. While there’s no concrete tracing to mental illness, Trichotillomania can coexist with many anxiety disorders.

This was something I was very ashamed of talking about when I realized it’s become more than just a problem of “over-plucking my eyebrows”. It then transferred to plucking more than my eyebrows; it was now my hair from my scalp, body hair, even eyelashes.

After speaking to my therapist about it for the first time in late 2018, I realized that it was stemming from a place of anxiety and the lack of control I had over the situations going on around that time. I tried a stress ball for some time, anything to keep my hands busy and away from my face when my anxiety was at its peak. Unfortunately, it’s a habit that never really died out, and it has its moments when it’s not that bad and when it’s at its worst.

Last month it was at its worst.

I hate having to constantly cover up the bald patches with some type of makeup powder because it’s a reminder that I have this issue. I know that this issue only resurfaces whenever I feel like I don’t have control over my life or when I’m extremely worried about something that I’m shameful for doing or not doing. Last month it was at it’s worst because leading up to my first in-person visit with my bariatrics doctor since the pandemic happened, I was incredibly disappointed that I wasn’t able to stick to the whole “diet” during the time I was at home. In hindsight, I was extremely worried that I gained a lot more weight, and I was afraid to get my first weight-in after the pandemic and to see the number raise higher than I expected it to.

So, I take it out on myself, like it’s my judgement’s twisted way of saying “you deserve to feel like this.” Hence, I practically rip hair off my body.

I’ve dealt with this internal battle for 14 years now, and it’s tiring. It’s tiring having to feel like I’m only pretty when I cover up those things. It’s tiring to not be able to go a day without applying anything over the spots and just go out the way I’d like to go out. It’s tiring that people classify me as “one of those girls” (a guy has called me that before), the ones where you can’t take to the beach or a swimming pool because you don’t know what she looks like underneath the drawn on eyebrows and eye makeup. I don’t do it because I want to, I literally have to or else my issue becomes a topic of the day.

Also, I’m aware that this hair-pulling disorder is just another way of self-harming yourself that many people don’t talk about because you’re not leaving scars on your body and you’re not trying to kill yourself. No, but you’re punishing yourself for the things that you don’t have complete control over, and isn’t that one of motives of self-harm?

I’ve alluded to this for years now on the blog, and the reason I wanted to speak about it on the blog was because I’m tired of the energy it has on me. I’m tired of silently fighting something that will always have some sort of hold on me for as long as I live, or at least as long as I allow my body to feel like I need to have control in every aspect of my life. Maybe it’ll get better as time goes, but I also know that it probably won’t, but as long as I acknowledge it and know why it happens, I could at least try to focus my hands on doing something else.

This is me diffusing the energy behind something I’ve been fighting with since forever. It’s about time we finally spoke about it publicly and speak out its existence to the world.

I hate to admit this about myself because it’s such a toxic trait I have, but I have a bad habit of playing the role of victim when things go wrong.

I might’ve alluded to this in the past, but when I was younger (and even throughout my 20’s) I found myself becoming very defensive in confrontations, and even in situations where I was in the wrong I played the victim.

Hi, my name is Liz, and I play(ed) the victim.

Maybe it was embedded in me at a young age; I thought I could never do any wrong or hurt anyone on purpose and therefore I blamed my actions on the people around me. “Well, you made me do that; if you weren’t so mean to me then maybe I wouldn’t have done what I did.” “You’re the reason I self-harmed that night; what you did to me was so hurtful.” My teenage years sound a lot like that, and even though no one else had control of my actions and my decisions, I made them. Sure, people can influence your actions and decisions, but no one put a gun to my head and made me do anything. I did it because I either wanted to at the time and I allowed for it to happen.

But my toxic trait– the one I’m learning to reflect on and resolve– is that when I owe up to something, I seem to link it to an event or a reason from an outcome. As I think back, a lot of my arguments in my last relationship where I tried to explain my reasoning for something seem to be because of something else instead of just openly saying “I did this and I said that because I wanted to and I take responsibility for it.”

Of course, it’s not always so black and white like that. A lot of my bad decisions came from being in a bad place and being hurt by other people’s actions in the past. I’m not a saint; I do things to hurt those who hurt me first, and only because it takes so much to legitimately hurt me to the point where I’m willing to throw everything away and say fuck it, I’m hurting you back. It’s so fucking toxic, I know, but it’s the truth. Will I ever be able to not do that anymore? Maybe, and maybe not. Maybe it’s a defensive mechanism in me too deep-rooted to fix right away. At least I’m aware of it, right?

These days, I don’t try to play the victim anymore because it’s just unrealistic for me to try to obtain this perfect image. I’m only human and I’m bound to do some bad things to myself, to other people; it’s just the cycle of life. Of course, I can’t help but think if the “playing victim” thing is so embedded in me, that I don’t even realize that I do it. I worry that every time I try to tell my story or my truth, I sound like a victim. I sound like I need saving. I sound like people should feel bad for me.

The truth is, I don’t want people’s sympathy for my past anymore. I don’t the validation that my actions were justified because they weren’t. I also don’t need people to read my story and my truth on these posts and go, “well, damn, does she want us to really know all this sad shit? Is there a hidden agenda in the words that she writes on her blog?”

I write it for me. I write it to diffuse the negative energy behind my journey, not for a pity party.

The past version of myself, the one who tried so hard to obtain a certain image and level of perfection, would not tell you that she did things without thinking first. She would brag that she had the upper hand in a situation where she knew she was losing in. Everything was a damn competition to her because she was worried the people she loved would forget her, and even to this day this version of myself is afraid of being forgotten, but that’s another story for another blog post.

But what the past version of myself would tell you is that she felt like her voice and feelings were never heard. She found herself not speaking up for herself and prioritizing her feelings and whenever she tried to, people then threw it in her face that she was self-centered, inconsiderate, and always plays the victim. 

So, it wasn’t a surprise when I began to get those comments again when I was finally practicing prioritization towards my feelings and speaking for myself in situations. And possibly that’s why I still feel like I’m always playing the victim when I spoke up and wrote down my stories.

It’s something I’m always worried about when telling my story to people who I meet and that I trust with my baggage. I have a really good friend, Anthony, that I pretty much get philosophical with every now and then, and sometimes when we discuss things like our past selves and our journeys, I’m always worried if I come off as playing the victim when telling my story. Either or, I just try to be honest with myself as much as possible and learn how to stick up for myself, but take responsibility for my own actions in the scenario.

You don’t gotta hate yourself for your toxic traits, just be aware and accept that you have them.