Dreams.

Last night I had a dream that absolutely GUTTED me. All day, thinking about it brought me to tears. I felt silly trying to explain it to my roommates, because when I say it out loud it sounds so ridiculous, but my dream last night was like someone made a movie out of my worst fear and then forced me to play the main character.

In my dream, I was hanging out with two of my friends from work. We were in some sort of hotel suite. They would leave one room and say they’d be right back. After a while I’d realize I was by myself in the room and I’d go find my friends. A few minutes later they’d leave the room. Eventually I’d find them and join them again. After this happened a few times, I walked into the room they were in and they were just chatting and drinking wine and I lost it. I yelled at them to stop doing that, that it made me feel like they didn’t want me around. They sort of averted their eyes and didn’t deny it.

Later in the dream, the guys who work the night shift came in (in real life, the three of us hang out but never really see the night shift guys outside of work) and were all chummy with my friends. They started cracking jokes that made it very clear that they all hung out as a group and routinely gossiped about how they don’t want me around.

Every day, this is the exact feeling that I fight. That I have to shove down deep in my chest because, logically, my friends wouldn’t waste their time hanging out with me if they didn’t want me around. And because I had a friend in high school (she is still my friend, she just doesn’t do this anymore) who used to frequently comment on how she thought we were only her friends because she had a car, and this was irritating. It made me want to say, “Well, I DID like you, until you wouldn’t stop complaining that no one likes you.” So I don’t talk about it, or think about it, and I just fake it til I make it. 

When I told one of my roommates about my dream, and explained that this is one of my worst fears, she looked bewildered. “Really?,” she asked. I said, “Yes, I generally tend to worry that my friends don’t actually like me or want me around.” All of a sudden it hit me that this is WEIRD. That most people can just accept that their friends want to hang out with them.

It made me so jealous that other people can just accept this at face value, and what I’m stuck with is fighting every day to be a normal person who keeps in touch with their friends, despite all my instincts telling me that I just shouldn’t email those people because they probably don’t want to be bothered by hearing from me, anyway. Somehow, this dream set me back what feels like YEARS in self esteem, confidence and just plain sanity.

I’m a little terrified to go to sleep now, for fear of having to see all of this all over again, but I know I need to get up early to run. Here’s hoping for less horrifying dreams tonight…

mental health is health too