A Better Alex, stage 1: EPRHA Journal

[apollolux]

==14 days done==
In the middle of the 14th day of EPRHA. I've been feeling more emotional during the past 14 days than I have for the past 14 months.

I had a long conversation with my aunt today, during which I felt like I lost control of my emotions and began raising my voice and broke down again. I don't feel like the issues at hand (which are inline with the issues I expected to arise during EPRHA) are resolved, nor do I feel like they can be resolved. It seems like many EPHRA and AM (especially AM6) journals here give anecdotes about the issues brought up being nearly instantly resolved by simply acknowledging them and questioning them and their usefulness; this is not the case with me.

I acknowledge that reframing "failure" as simply "feedback towards eventual success" is the healthy way to go. I acknowledge that, after that reframing, whenever I feel like I've failed I've been able to still get up and eventually solve the problem in question by approaching from a different angle; where "failure" is simply one of the methods I attempted to get past a brick wall that is a problem that didn't work (e.g. through, over, around, etc) and "success" is getting past the brick wall of a problem somehow, "defeat" is if, after making legitimate attempts, the wall falls down on me and for one reason or another (e.g. I'm not strong enough, no one is around to help me) I am unable to get it off of me.

I feel...defeated.

I've been crying almost all day and have headaches, probably because I've been crying so much. I continue to feel like whatever efforts I've made to better my life and my situation are in vain and are not good enough for me to get results and succeed, and are not good enough to show other people they can rely on me.

I know EPRHA is doing something because I've usually resorted to bottling these emotions under the guise of them not being useful to me. I still don't feel they're useful and I feel like even just expressing them pushes people away with negativity, but I feel like I can't bottle them anymore. I fear that the next few weeks will be unproductive and worry that I'll be useless, ending up curled in a fetal position for 12 hours/day or something. I feel like I need to get to ASC as soon as possible if I'm going to survive the next semester with my sanity intact.

I feel defeated.