Lesson, Someday, Learned

I've been reading a lot this summer, self-helpy type stuff that in years gone by I would have scoffed at, my nose turned up, literally thinking, "I don't need that hippy dippy, touchy feely garbage.  I don't know who's worse, those who write it, or those who read it!"

I can tell you now it was a huge mistake to wait so long to start trying to do what self-help books are made for: helping myself.

When I got divorced last summer, I knew I was making the right decision.  It was awful and sad and it broke my heart to hurt someone I love as much as I love my ex-husband (notice I'm saying love, not loved--there is no past tense--I still love him, just not in the way spouses love one another).  I realized, long before we split, that we needed and wanted fundamentally different things from a relationship, and that we had a toxic dynamic that was making us both sick.  No amount of counseling, arguing, prayer, or sheer stubborn hope was going to fix it.  I knew if I wanted us to both be happy, we couldn't manage that together.

Luckily, I hit the divorce jackpot and in the last year my ex and I have developed a friendship that was at the heart of our relationship, and we know we are better off in this configuration of us.

But (you knew a big one was coming, right?) even though I was the one who said we had to end it, even though I have never regretted it, even though I have always known it was the right thing to do, there was a whole lot of self-work that needed to be done in the aftermath, and I just wouldn't do it.  I pushed myself at work, I settled in to help my friends and students and family members with their own struggles, somehow believing that if I was strong enough for and helpful enough to them, my own shit would just disappear, cease to exist, my issues would deflate like so many carnival balloons.

Turns out, that's not how it works.

I had to get really quiet this summer, spend a lot of time alone, and yep, read the self-help books I have derided for years to realize that my stuff, my issues, don't make me a bad person, they're just the things I bring to the table like everyone else does.  And nothing I have gone through or dealt with is my own, it's the universal experience of human struggle that ties us all together and if we talked more about what we need, what we know, and what we fear, we may actually all start to stumble out of the darkness.

A friend asked me recently how I manage to shut off my head.  I am inwardly critical in a way that rivals Mommy Dearest, calling myself names and breaking myself down in ways that would make me slap someone who spoke that way to a friend.  I would never allow such negativity, and yet I push it on myself again and again.  But the trick I've learned, as I told my friend, is that I've taken to asking if any of the things I think--in the middle of my dark little tea-time of the soul moments--are true.  Would anyone who knows me and loves me think I am bad, dumb, stupid, moronic, childish, unworthy, beyond repair?  Would anyone who knows me and loves me allow anyone else to say those things about me?  And the answer, overwhelmingly, is no.  None of those things is true, and no one who loves and knows me would suggest that they are.  Even if I did something they didn't agree with or understand, they would never say those things about me because they would never pass judgment on me.  That's what loving someone means: to be free of judgment, to be supportive and even critical, but never to call names or deliberately hurt.

So, I have to learn to love myself that way.  It may be the hardest lesson I'll ever learn, but I'm worth it.