Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

My self esteem is in the crapper right now. Why? Who cares? All that matters is that it is. And I can't really do s**t about it. Every time I try to get my best friend to open up to me, it has to turn into a rather long-winded speech from me about how she never lets anyone in. How she keeps everything bottled up. How she won't talk to me about anything.

Believe it or not, it actually makes me not want to talk about anything to anyone. At all. It doesn't seem to be doing any good. It doesn't work with her. It doesn't work on my guy friends. It doesn't work on the last two female friends I have (yes, I pretty much only have five friends.) So what am I supposed to do? If they can't talk to me, why should I talk to them? Why do I constantly go out of my way to make myself open, to give them the power to hurt me? Yes, it makes me feel better getting it off my chest. But they just get burdened down with how I'm feeling and all the problems I'm having, and that puts more stress and pressure and unneeded feelings inside of them, which, since they bottle them up, won't exactly be helping much of anything.

And for the record, I don't think of it as a bottle. I think of it as a balloon. Fill it up enough, and it'll pop. Put too much outside pressure on it, and it'll pop. Assuming that this theoretical balloon is always tied at the bottom when air is not being taken out or put back in, and assuming that the balloon will naturally fill up with air (by some miracle of raptor jesus) all on its own, then the only way to prevent the popping of this balloon is by regularly releasing the air that's built up inside of it, at least enough that the balloon won't pop under the usual amount of pressure. Yes, there will always be a point where the balloon will pop (unless it's already completely empty), but it will be that much harder to actually convince it to pop when there's less inside pressure. The outside forces would have to work harder and harder.