Progress Report
Agent: Ash
Mission: Introspection
Subject: Why so many shitty relationships?

I'm afraid the pie charts will have to wait a little longer: I haven't quantified it all yet, but I do have a great deal of qualitative evidence. It took only 45 minutes with Dr Baker to crystallize it too. He's that good at his job.

Or I'm that obvious.

Anyway: I keep coming back to two main underlying factors, which are most likely closely related, or at the very least one of them feeds into the other. The first, most fundamental one is the dependency "issue", which encompasses so many of the problems and repeated patterns in my bad relationships and friendships it isn't even vaguely funny. The secondary one is the feeling that I'm somehow damaged or tarnished by my experiences. Not that I'm dirty: for some reason I never had that, more that I'm fractured, broken, the teapot with a chip in the spout that makes it pour wonky, in desperate need of spiritual superglue. It's not even so much the worry that others will view me that way, the problem is that I do. It needs to stop.

No question about it, there is hope, I feel much more myself when I'm being independent, I just need to practice getting to that feeling. Matt is helping enormously, contradictory though it may be to have a boyfriend help you figure out and minimize your dependent tendencies…I think it's because I trust him to be there for me, and I know him to be entirely accepting, even if I he doesn't feel the same way, he believes what I say and that it is important to me. Since I know I can completely be myself around him, there's none of the temptation to change things just to please him.

It's so refreshing to have more friends now who can say "I'm happy for you", or "well if that works for you…" and not have it be a backhanded way of telling you they think you're fucking insane, and stupid to boot. In many ways those other people suffer from codependency just as much as I do, they cannot separate themselves from others, cannot allow someone to be utterly different and not have it be a comment on them. This is why I want to rid myself of it: I don't ever want to be that girl.