Who You Were…
We all tell a story about who we are. A daughter. A writer. A cat lover. A nomad. A homebody. The thing is, how many of us are holding ourselves back because of the stories we tell about ourselves?
I know what you’re thinking…and you might be right…I might be a little crazy…I might be a little esoteric…I might be taking being hardcore into therapy a teensy little bit too far. Or maybe I’m not. Maybe I haven’t been taking it far enough.
You see, I’ve been tasked and challenged by my therapist to journal about who I am. About what makes me, me. My values. My passions. My strengths. Because I have been all too willing to change who I am to fit the mold of what other people are looking for in the pursuit of supposed happiness, sex and I guess “love”…but can it really be love if I can’t be myself?
Anyway…before I go off on that particular tangent…I realized that when I sat down and really thought about the “story” I was telling about myself, it wasn’t a good one. It was a story that helped me perpetuate the same failing actions and the same failed relationships, over and over and over and over again. I can’t keep doing that. Definition of insanity and whatnot…
So, for accountability and to get it out of my brain once and for all, here goes nothing. This is the story of who I’ve been and who I will no longer be. Buckle in, because it’s a wild one;
I have always been the last stop relationship before people have found their “lifelong happiness”. The training wheels if you will. It’s been kind of a running joke that well over 50% of the people I have dated have pretty much immediately moved onto their spouses directly after me. Sometimes they left me for them, other times the timing was extremely suspect, so you can draw your own conclusions.
It wouldn’t matter how much time I took off in between relationships to work on myself, it just. Kept. Happening. Now, I’ve always prided myself on being an all or nothing kind of person, so when I have been in a relationship, I have given it and that person my absolute everything. And I do mean that. From my last penny to my last shred of personal dignity.
I have changed so many things about myself to try to become the perfect person for the person I have been with, it’s a little psychotic. Hairstyles, clothes, the way I’ve talked, I’ve gotten tattoos, I’ve not gotten tattoos, I’ve stopped eating and drinking things I really love. I’ve stopped watching the shows and movies I love and listening to the music I really enjoy and instead have just deferred to what they’ve wanted. I’ve accepted way less affection than I have wanted and needed. And probably the most telling about compatibility, I’ve not had the sex I’ve wanted and convinced myself that it was OK because I loved that person.
I have been a person who has been so desperate for love – so desperate to live the life I’ve always dreamed of – that I have jumped into relationships at the first sign of interest from people I had no business trying to be in a relationship with. I was so hurt and lacking of self-love that I sought it elsewhere, constantly. I routinely would see gigantic red flags and just keep on plowing ahead, convincing myself if I just tried hard enough, I could make it work. That I could finally be enough. But I never was.
I was never enough because they weren’t the right people for me. They all needed me to be something I wasn’t to fit their narrative, and I was all too willing to try to mold myself to fit their lives. I wasn’t living my life for myself. I was living my life to be seen and loved by other people.
And along the way, I lost sight of who I was, and I went from just not loving myself enough, to not loving myself at all, to actively hating who I was, because I was the person who got lied to. I was the person who got cheated on. I was the person who got lead on until they found someone new. But it wasn’t because I wasn’t good enough, it was all because I didn’t love myself enough to wait for the right person.
This was my story. This was my narrative. No more.
So if you see me around and you don’t recognize me, you’ll know why. I am changing my life. I am loving myself. I am putting myself first. I am fucking amazing, and I’m going to make a great wife to a very lucky woman some day. Maybe I’ll even make a great mom. Who knows. My story has yet to be written, but rest assured, I am the hero of my own movie now.
Naked 