SHADOW WORK: What aspects of your life do you project onto others in a very unhealthy way.

 I like to drink. Rather, I forced myself to like drinking. I liked the feeling of becoming "undone" by alcohol, the moment where everything becomes blurry and you're carrying the weight of your body with fractured steps. Those times spent with people, or by myself, drinking like sailor were times when I felt like I was the most myself. Alcohol felt like a free-pass to unhinged and uninhibited authenticity. Every one gets a little bit crazy the moment it starts to sink down to your gut. I'd even go up a notch and say that everyone who does it does it with the intent of letting loose and waking up with a slap on the wrist after. I'm not an exception. 

My parents were not crazy drinkers, in-fact, they barely drank at all. Still, there was always alcohol available. In the countertops, in the chiller of the fridge or arranged neatly in a rack. Every time they would bring home a new bottle they received as token in a business function, I took as opportunity. Opportunity to shove spicy liquid down my throat, as if I was a baby with a sippy bottle. My logic would be that if they just left the bottle to be used as embellishment and collect dust in our house, I might as well finish the content out. So I'd chug the bottles up to the last drop in less than 15 minutes. I've gotten so used to the feeling of the acid in my stomach whirling and threatening to pool out from my mouth that the sensation had become a familiar friend. 

But the intermittent high came with the worst of lows, and I was a horribly destructive drunk. 

I was a monster to people who were unlucky enough to take care of me. Screaming fits were common. Besides the verbal abuse, my impulse control would also be at an all-time low. I would break everything around me, denting doors, breaking bottles, using the broken shards to pierce through my skin and cutting my hair. Suicide attempts were also common. I once got so drunk in a family function, I tried to drown myself by inducing a cramp and sinking. I never told anyone about that. 

What prompted my need to get drunk was my perceived inability to feel emotions. I always grappled with the fact that I never reacted to situations in my life accordingly. I seldom cried when I broke up with my exes. I barely grieved when my grandfather passed away. Somewhere along the way, I lost the ability to feel my emotions to their full propensity and without it, I felt subhuman. I was missing out on a very big portion of what it meant to live. The only thing that was constant to me was rage. Rage was natural, big, and visceral. I wanted to feel rage all the time in the absence of everything, so I always put myself in positions that made me feel angry. 

But my rage persisted even outside the influence. I was angry at myself for having lived life that way. For spending 10 years in a pit I dug out myself. For losing a big portion of my youth to shitty relationships, self-abuse, and missed opportunities. I loathed myself for wanting validation from the people who trampled on my innocence and ruined my perception on my body and sex. I hated myself for my inability to circumvent these issues. I resented my parents, my mom for taking my assaulter's side. I hated men. I hated myself for letting men have so much power over me. I hated the fact that I didn't have friends, or at least friends I could honestly talk to. I hated not being the best in the few things I could actually do. My life was centered around a perceived scarcity of good things. Things seemed so impermanent all the time, and I let myself be helpless to the problems I made for myself.

I projected all those issues to my relationships. In my head, I was doing them a favor by making myself so unlikeable, it made it easier for them to move on to the next big thing. My partners became a punching-bag for all the aspects of myself and my life that I loathed, and at times it got violent. I would never properly diffuse these conflicts either. I didn't think of myself as capable of love, so I trampled on it the moment it would be given to me. 

I never had a healthy outlet to these complicated feelings, never sought out for one either. Deep down, I wanted for people how badly I was hurting. I was too much of a coward to face my hurt head on, but it was hard to fight an adversary that you could not see clearly. For all the love that was given to me, I was not equipped with the proper toolkit to manage my emotions when they uproot. There was no acknowledgment for the aspects of my life that became difficult because my life was, to the eyes of many, already good. The things I could complain about were non-existent and it made feel like I made everything up, and so I drank. And smoke. And screamed at people. And ruined friendships, betrayed the trust of the people who only wanted the best for me. Allowed myself to get taken advantage of, because deep down, love was something my body rejected. Love was something I felt utterly incapable of practicing. Love seemed impossible. 

It takes a substantial amount of time to recognize how miserable you are, and even longer to get yourself out of it. When I went out of my previous relationship, I realized how many blinds I put to my shitty behavior that by the end of it, I had become the person I told myself I would never become. I spent the late parts last year in rumination, purposefully sabotaging my academics and wishing I could just stop showing up to school in the middle of the semester. I was blind to the way I was hurting people. These heavy-handed realizations desecrated my entire self-perception, and it's this all-time low that has been  motivating me to seek out long-term changes and improving my quality of life. Becoming better, especially in the situation that I put myself on, is simply a non-negotiable, hence why I'm writing this all down. Why I'm here, typing furiously on my laptop, because my projections can only stop when I weed things down from their roots all the way down.