5. List your bad habits and/or addictions and what you have tried to rid yourself of them.

You'd think this would be a difficult topic for a lot of people to brooch, but the fact is, I sort of hate myself all the time, so I don't really have trouble coming up with things that need to be changed about me.

Which leads us to point one. I have low self esteem. Like, really low. But it's weird, because objectively I don't really think I'm that terrible. Granted, appearance-wise, I'm like a four on a good day, and I am not particularly nice, but I'm at least loyal to my friends, and somewhat helpful (to my friends again- fuck volunteering and shit) and fairly entertaining and decently smart for a girl. But everything I do doesn't feel good enough. I have pretty much no self-worth and my general outlook is that I am completely replaceable in every regard, to all people. So that leads me to feel like nothing I do matters and everything is sort of this downhill spiral of self-loathing after that. The one bright spot of this is that I've felt this way pretty much my whole life, so at this point I'm inured to the feeling of worthlessness. Okay, well, maybe that's not really considered a "good" thing, but it maintains the status quo and I'm fine with that.

My one "habit" that I need to stop is biting my cuticles. Actually, before I was about 16 I just straight up bit my nails. But for Junior dance I got acrylics (the one and only time) and with those on I couldn't bite my nails any more and so somehow I just stopped. However, the habit was quickly replaced with biting my cuticles. This is both better, because now I have long nails to paint, which slightly detracts from my oddly large hands (I swear to god I'm not a man), and worse, because sometimes I bite them so badly they bleed. I would pretty much have to wear gloves to stop this, or just never be bored again, because it's definitely a bored habit. However, I don't see either of those happening. We all have vices I suppose.

I guess the other habit that's really terrible is the procrastination, which ties in partly with the permanent apathy mentioned above. The procrastination keeps it from devolving into a total sense of ennui (I can't even pronounce that word correctly as I took Spanish, not French, so it wouldn't serve me well to be consumed by it as such) because I constantly have to distract myself to procrastinate- usually with movies/television shows or books. But we're talking like... reading an ENTIRE book or watching a whole series run on Netflix here. While it's interesting and I suppose increases my cultural IQ, it's not particularly great for, say, my school IQ. To improve this, I would have to not be able to successfully do stuff at the last minute and still make decent marks. (Un)fortuantely for the case of the procrastination, I can pull that sort of thing off, so... not gonna happen.

I think Elaine would like me to stop nagging her about working on her med school application, but that isn't going to happen, either.

As far as addictions go, I suppose there's Nutella. Or food in general. I eat too much. It's why I'm fat. Thankfully I have no issues making myself work out, so it keeps me from becoming morbidly obese rather than just overweight. To break this habit, 1) food would have to stop being delicious and 2) I would have to get some goddamn will power. But that goes back to the procrastination/effort thing, which goes back to the apathy, which is really the source of all my issues apparently.

Finally, I suppose we need to look at the source of my apathy. I don't like failing. I don't like letting myself or others down, and I don't like being vulnerable. So I try not to extend effort to things that I might possibly fail at. I don't like being shut down- it's why I never flirt with guys, I just assume I'll be rejected so why bother. So the apathy is a defence mechanism because it keeps me from caring about things that might end up breaking my heart or whatever. The problem is, it all probably started as a defence mechanism where deep down I really did care about stuff, but sometimes I'm starting to think that it is really true a lot of the time now. I mean, I'm fairly easy-going to begin with and don't tend to have strong opinions on stuff, but I think I genuinely don't care about myself and thus my life at all. Not in an emo way, just in a "meh, whatever" way.

This post ended up being more depressing than I intended. Here are some pancakes.