u/zealousfreak27

Lately I'm feeling challenged to be more confident, true to myself, and honest. I don't want to lie to people, ignore my feelings, or enable anyone. However, I don't know how to do this without hurting anyone. I'll give some examples of the conflicts in my life lately.

• I dated a girl for about a year. It turned out she had a serious addiction to benzos (I did not know this at the outset, she was in denial about it). I had to confront her about her addiction and I helped her withdrawal, but I hurt her badly by being too harsh with her. At one point, I asked her why she was acting so helpless; I was frustrated with her for being unwilling or unable to do her own research, and for getting into this terrible situation through self-neglect and blind faith in authorities. Right now she is not speaking to me because she needs time away from me.
• My little sister is a pathological liar and very difficult to get along with. I have sympathy for her because I know why she is the way she is, but I feel like all I do is enable her because I fear starting a conflict with her. I don't know how to reach her with honesty and love.
• I ended a friendship this year over my friend's stagnation in life. As cruel as it sounds, I couldn't respect him. It'd take a lot of time to explain the full situation, but essentially, he's 31, completely dependent on his parents (emotionally and financially), has enabled his father's bad behavior, has an overly close relationship with his whole family and no life outside it, and deals with his problems by retreating into childhood interests like Digimon. A couple things in the last year made me ask whether I really wanted to continue investing in him, and I decided I didn't. I know that this hurt him but I didn't see the point of even having a conversation, considering that he's never been receptive to that kind of talk.
• I have another friend who I've had to speak to five times about his behavior. He monopolizes social settings, speaks over others, doesn't listen, and is ridiculously pompous, calling himself a genius and such. I have tried to have patience for him since he's about seven years younger than me, but I'm getting to the point where I want to take him by the shoulders and shake him, because I haven't been able to get through to him no matter what I've tried.

Right now, I'm taking steps to get where I want to be in life. This year I started living and working at a conservancy, a truly fantastic place. It's the first time in my life that I feel surrounded by maturity. I can respect everyone here; in fact, I feel challenged to live up to their standard. What that tells me is that there are people in the world who don't force me into these horrible situations where I feel like I either have to ignore their behavior, or I have to hurt them and myself by confronting them.

My question is, is it even an option to only have relationships with mature people? How can I handle the immaturity of others? What makes me feel guilty is putting myself in a position to judge. Who am I to say how someone should act? I don't want to have to do so. However, I've been told by a mentor that seeing immaturity and saying nothing about it is enabling. Do I have to power through and confront people anyway? What if that confrontation gets me nothing but grief? Any thoughts are appreciated.

So I started a new job about a month ago at a farm/conservancy. I really like it here. I live on site. Most of my previous living situations and jobs have been terrible, but I finally found a healthy environment where I want to stay.

I didn't anticipate this happening, but I started feeling intensely anxious around the second week. Any time I make a mistake on the job, I start having really harsh self-critical thoughts. It's gotten so bad. It's like having someone in my head screaming at me that I should be punished for everything I do wrong. While I've been in a lot of environments that made me feel terrible for mistakes, no one here has acted that way.

In my second week, I made a mistake. Nothing that really caused any problems. I fessed up to this mistake and also worked to correct it. However, I felt like it lowered me in the eyes of my managers. One of them in particular seemed to treat me like I was kind of dumb afterwards. Ever since then, I've started trying to cover up mistakes rather than admit to them.

Nothing I've done has really been serious or something that would affect the operations of the place where I'm working. But I don't like this about myself. It's part of my constant anxiety. It's like I'm being controlled by my feelings. I'm also in this horrible double bind where I want to be liked, be seen as smart, be a strong member of the team, but my lack of confidence makes me continually fail to fit in and achieve what I could be otherwise.

The specific incident I want to confess to happened last week. So earlier, a couple weeks prior, I was told to be careful when harvesting an herb because it had moth eggs on it. I think I was shown the eggs, but it's all a blur in my memory at this point. Last week I was harvesting the herb and thought I saw eggs so I told my manager. I didn't realize she was going to tell the conservationist about it. Then later, the conservationist approached me and asked me where I saw the eggs. Then she said she thought I'd just seen aphids. I realized in the moment that she was right but I lied about it because I was so embarrassed and wanted to get out of the conversation.

Even as I type this, it doesn't sound like the end of the world, but it's really been eating at me. I want to confess to her but I'm rarely alone with her, I don't even see her most days and have only talked to her a couple of times.

I don't want to continue this pattern of behavior. I dislike it about myself. I've been working on honesty since I was a kid. It's easier for me to tell the truth when I'm not on the spot. Unfortunately it's still my default response to lie or cover things up.