crispy-gypsy:

I’m sick of having to prove myself to my everyone.  I hate knowing that when I fail at something, my family will always react in a way that is “I knew it” or “that’s typical,” that my working as hard as I can isn’t acknowledged so that they can still try and convince themselves that I’m a lazy bastard, and that when I succeed half of them act momentously surprised that it happened, and the other half act openly fucking bitter about it.

I hate how stressful it is to have to try and keep telling myself that I shouldn’t feel bad about it, or I shouldn’t allow the way that they treat me to drag me down, and I shouldn’t become the failure they expect me to be and think that I am. There is something to be said about the encouragement of others—it gets hard, having to constantly think “YEAH, I’LL SHOW THEM. THEY’LL SEE EVENTUALLY” as opposed to “I can do it. They believe in me!” 

Sure, when you succeed, I guess you can say it feels great because you proved someone wrong, but sometimes I feel like I’m burning out on the workaholism that it’s instilled in me. I start getting panicky if I’m just sitting back doing nothing, or even just playing video games, or taking a second to eat, because suddenly I feel lazy, and I must be proving them right. I’ve developed a deepseated anxiety about it, and suddenly every little mistake becomes a huge failure, and I don’t feel like I’m allowed to be bad at anything. The successes also start feeling less rewarding.

They still call you lazy despite trying your hardest to be otherwise. They still say you’re unreliable, that you’re mean, ugly, worthless, etc etc etc and I’m sick of trying to prove otherwise when they act surprised for a second, and discard it until the next victory.

I am just tired and freaking myself out.

I wish I knew what to fuckin do about this.

I’m in a similar situation - my folks decided long ago that negative reinforcement will work better than positive reinforcement. It took me a long time but eventually this meant that now I don’t listen to most of the things they say because I know it’s tainted with them insulting me thinking it will be motivating. My way of dealing with it was to not let my parents have a say in my life, and once I came to this conclusion, my life got so much less stressful. Unfortunately, it’s a hard thing to break out of, and there’s no set way to do it. :/ I just got so fed up that I couldn’t take not doing anything about it anymore, so I broke myself from it. Their comments still get to me sometimes (rarely), and it’ll always be a voice in the back of my head when I’m having a really bad night, but day-to-day, it’s made all the difference.

Also, this quote: “There is nothing in the world so easy to admit as failure. It is, after all, what everyone does all the time.” It’s from Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, and it’s been the one bit of wisdom I’ve ever come across that I will say to myself when I start getting stressed out over possibly screwing something up. It’s helped me tremendously, and I’m not quite sure why, but if it helps you too, then please, try it out.

And if you ever want to talk, I’ll happily listen. :) As I said, I definitely don’t have a how-to guide, but I can somewhat relate to your situation, and sometimes that’s the most important thing.