All of the Side-Effects with None of the Catholicism

I struggle so hard to be perfect on the outside that I end up killing myself on the inside. For what? I can't make everyone happy, and on a surface level I recognize that. But disappointment in me is something I apparently can't handle from other people-- I crumble under the weight of it. And no matter what, I always disappoint.

I don't really understand where things started to go wrong for me. I'm a happy person. I love openly, with my full heart. I try my absolute hardest to take care of the people I've brought into my life. I always pick myself back up when I fall down, I always push through hurt and give it my all anyway. But somehow these things don't make me a good person inside. There's something else I'm not grasping, something that other people have that allows them to move mistake-free. Either that or my mistakes are so giant and obvious that other people's life-errors are insignificant in comparison.

Or it's all in my head, and I've driven myself crazy with guilt for all the years of not being the perfect friend, the perfect lover, the perfect daughter.

I just don't know. I'm tired of the roller coaster of emotion inside me. Am I worth all of this? It seems like at such a young age things should just be rolling off my back, but they don't. I cling to every little worry. I rip each one apart and open them up and stare at all those guts and I can't for the LIFE of me bring myself to throw them away. I consistently make myself physically ill over my guilt. The mind-numbing, never-ending guilt.

And I thought I was doing so well.