Hazard to Myself:

*Note, this is not a cry for help.

(Made that mistake once before. Once, I was a little too candid about my feelings on a forum that's private and seen by my colleagues only (aka models), where I thought I was safe to share my thoughts. Then, a member told me about how a model told him I was thinking about harming myself. Thanks. BTW January 2016 my mom's best friend's daughter took her own life, that moment, I promised my mom I would never do that to her. So no matter how dark I feel. I'm a woman of my word.)

With that said, I will try my best to make this as coherent as possible because I'm realizing something about myself and I want to sort out my thoughts:

I am my worst critic. I am such a perfectionist, and get so fixated on things it's borderline destructive. When I'm having a bad day, I get so caught up in blaming myself for my inadequacies as a model and a person, I basically just shut down. I find it difficult to pull myself out of that downward spiral mentality where I just beat up on myself nonstop.

I feel like all I've been doing on cam is letting the pace in the last 6 months get to me. Ever since I received that anonymous tip note threatening to roofie and rape me, in March. Then, I found out he was one of my top members that I had met. I've been trying to get back in the groove. I'm so caught up in my head and how people think I'm boring, "pregnant", or wondering why people don't like me. I feel so inadequate to even give models the advice they are seeking because I'm so humiliated by my own inability to really engage with my room. I feel like a deer caught in headlights post MFClife. It's like the plague and it's hard for me to bring myself to move.

Background:

Mental health has been a topic I've seen here and there on Twitter. I don't like to discuss this because of the stigma and prejudices people have towards it, but here it goes:

My grandma is OCD, so is my mom. People think that OCD means someone is a neat freak, that is false. I am not a neat freak at all. I'm a mess inside and out. I frequently find myself being obsessed about something, and then I still can not stop myself from the compulsion to act on it.

"Bipolar" runs in the family too. I HATE to admit it because of the negative connotation it has, and the misconceived notions people have about it. Everyone experiences ups and downs, I experience them more drastically. My perception of the world is amplified in many ways. I am very sensitive to emotions, expressions, feelings? Call it intuition? So sometimes when people talk to me, I have a way of reading between the lines that people find striking, but like I said, words have connotations/meanings, the words you choose to type/use, all have emotion that say beyond what you realize.

I believe my heightened sense of perception and awareness is also what makes me creative as well. I see the world, and I can't help but break it down by colors and shapes because that's how I make sense of it. I think because I'm so sensitive, it also takes me a lot to excite/motivate me. I get bored easily, have a short attention span, I tend be a bit of a thrill seeker and procrastinator.

I'm usually aware of whether I'm feeling elated/manic, or when I'm feeling really down/depressed but that doesn't mean I can do much about it. I don't think this makes me "crazy" as people might associate with the word "bipolar". When I'm elated, I'm hyper sexual, talk very quickly from topic to topic, don't sleep as much, have new business ideas, very textbook. When I'm bummed I just don't want to move, I sleep a lot.

Ok enough background. Now, my upbringing:

From 2-7 I was raised by my maternal grandparents in China. My grandma is just, I don't know how to explain it except she's so negative, pessimistic, cruel, pathetic, almost borderline evil, but evil would imply having knowledge of how bad you are? I don't know if she knows how much pain she causes people by the nasty words that come out of her mouth. My first trip back to China after leaving at 7 was when I was 9. I wore these clip-on earring because I wanted to look mature for my grandma and the first thing she said when she saw me was that, "you look like a whore". Slut shamed by my grandma at 9 years old. The list goes on and on, including telling me she wishes I was never born but the earrings incident was one of her earlier criticisms.

My grandpa is the most thoughtful person I know. Family meant everything to him. He always took care of his family, and constantly thought of us above all. People think I'm thoughtful, that's him. It's really weird being raised by the person you love most in the world and the person you hate most in the world. I say that with absolute certainty that my grandpa is the best person I've known my whole life, and my grandma is the ugliest person I've known.

My grandma is emotionally abusive, and physically abusive growing up. My mom, as close as my mom and I have been, as candid as we have been, she has her dark side that she gets from my grandma. The same dark side I hate about myself, and the reason I can't even stand to look at my grandma in the eyes. I'm afraid to look into an empty vessel.

My mom has had her moments where she is the same, emotionally abusive, and physically abusive. She's gotten a lot better because we don't live together.

I've mentioned that I don't like spanks, and that it has to do with me getting them as a kid. My grandma used a broom handle, my mom used a rolling pin. At one point in my childhood, my mom punished me by making me hit myself. So now, I hate spanks. The concept of me being made to inflict pain on myself was traumatic and I don't like it. But I love spanking others and spanking really hard. I get off on it. Sadistic. I know.

It doesn't actually matter that I inherited their fixation on things and the sense of obligation to do them. I doesn't matter how I constantly hear my grandma's voice in my head picking at everything I do. What does matter is what I will do about it.

Change:

I have to be mindful to be positive because I don't want to turn into my grandma. Whenever I see her, the things she says, I fear that's what I may become. This persistent self-loathing and criticism is so destructive to my psyche I am literally paralyzed by it. I just sit there and I can't even move because I get so down on myself.

A thought I had earlier today was I miss the guy who saw me for the best part of me, the guy who was so positive he saw me for who I wish I was (or am? IDK sorry grammar freaks I struggle with tenses). I don't miss him because he turned out to be a jerk. But I miss how I felt when I talked to him. It was nice to talk to someone who believed in me. Someone who saw the good in me, when I know I'm not all good. He was the only person that I met who made me feel that way. So it made me think:

I want someone like that in my life. 

But before I start looking, I need to stop beating myself up. I need to stop comparing myself to other girls who are more successful. That's my grandma. That's her voice in my head. I need to channel my grandpa's genes, yes he was an alcoholic but he was and still is the best person I know by far. It's why I'm so proud to be an alcoholic and I say alcoholics are my favorite people: my grandma is allergic to alcohol.

My MFClife experience has been quite moving. I was well aware of how manic I was from the lack of sleep and level of elation, also knowing that a crash would follow. Models, their light and positivity constantly remind me which direction is the higher ground. I need to be more aware of my thoughts because I am poisoning myself. It is impacting my experience on cam so much it's toxic and I am tired of feeling insecure, inadequate, and subpar. That's why I could no longer be friends with someone who's actions made me feel just that.

I shouldn't need someone to make me feel better. People's actions shouldn't dictate my emotions PERIOD. I need to not let others dictate how I feel about myself. Maybe it's time to grow up, do that adulting thing people try to do.

I don't think I can start being a fully functioning adult, until I truly start loving myself. Because as much as I love to "fake it till I make it", to some extent, that's also a really fancy and fluffy way to say, "I'm in denial".

I don't want to just get by, live or be like "The mass of men", in the Thoreau quote and lead a life "of quiet desperation". I want to thrive.

It's easy to idolize camgirls because you see what we want you to see, and then it gets harder to admit that we are not perfect.

I still feel like a kid in a grown up world, lost, confused, unsure, but I'm not helping myself by being so hard on myself.

Still trying to remember that Ghandi said in a very long winded way, that changing destiny starts with changing thoughts...