30 Days of Little L - Day 4

Day 4 - A habit you wish you didn't have

Mask | Kat Theobald

I can think of a thousand habits I wish I didn't have. 

Like I mentioned in my first post in this series, when I'm nervous, I chew my nails if they're not painted or pick/chew the polish off my nails if they're painted and chipping. I'm nervous ALL THE TIME. So Big is always fussing at me about it. He can't deal with repetitive clicking noises, and mouth noises really bother him, so the nail picking/chewing drives him insane. 

I play with my hair constantly. It's super thick and I shed a lot, so it has a tendency to come out in my fingers when I'm playing with it. This is not to be confused with trichotillomania. I don't pull. I just run my fingers through it, or braid it, or twirl it. And when I say I shed a lot, I mean I've broken multiple vacuum cleaners with my hair. I'd save us a lot of hassle and money if I could keep the hair fiddling to the bathroom. 

I check Twitter obsessively. I've reinstalled the app on my iPad, and I appropriated old, unused accounts from a project that never got off the ground for this blog. I'm @BigLsLittleL and Big is @LittleLsBigL. I don't know that he'll ever use the account. He barely uses his main one. 

But the absolute worst is the self doubt and imposter syndrome. 

For an under achiever who spent the better part of her early adulthood addicted to alcohol and drugs, enduring physical and emotional abuse, and struggling through mental breakdown after mental breakdown, I've actually accomplished a lot. I have a 14-year-old blog that spent a good bit of time being popular in its niche before I got bored with it. (Writing about the same thing for 14 years leaves one with little to write about, ya know?) I worked my way through the ranks of a relatively popular e-zine starting as a journalist and eventually becoming Editor In Chief. I'm (slowly but surely) independently publishing my own fiction. But I still manage to convince myself that I'm a terrible writer, everybody hates me, and I should just go hide in a hole. 

That's ridiculous. Some people do hate me, and I probably gave some of them a reason to, but some is not all. Sometimes my writing isn't perfect, but neither is anybody else's. That's what editors are for. And if my blogging isn't "up to par" by "professional" blogging standards, who cares? I'm not writing to be a professional blogger. I'm writing to share my experience as a woman with mental illness trying to survive in a world that has turned on its head. It's messy, and painful, and offensive to some, and that's okay. That's life. 

I wish I could think that way when I'm struggling. I'm working on it.

This series inspired by a writing challenge from Living Off Love and Coffee. Find the full list here.