20 years

The other day, I dug out an old journal from my sophomore year of high school.  I figured it would be a funny sort of exorcism of the demons buried in my girlhood.  Imagine my total shock to discover sentences within it that are identical to ones I have written recently.

My fifteen year old self writes of being lonely, of wanting someone to love me, of feeling like I may never find that soul mate, that person willing to put everything on the line for me.  In my adolescence, I was searching for a sense of belonging, for a place to fit in the world and, sadly, I still am most days.

Reading the entries, I was stunned at how often they referenced other lives, the accomplishments and dramas of my friends and family...I didn't think I was a worthy subject, so I didn't often write about myself, and when I did, it was all about which boy might like me, how I could find validation from male attention, what I needed to do to be more attractive to a potential boyfriend.

How, I wonder, does that happen?  How does a young girl--smart and beautiful and kind and interesting and engaged in the world as I was--not see her own worth?  And why, at 35, am I still struggling with it?

This article, Extreme Modesty: The Case of the Disappearing Self, offers some insight into why smart women, praised in childhood as smart girls, grow up feeling the need to prove their worth and ability.  I feel that, and I feel the need to earn praise that comes my way rather than just accepting it, at least in love relationships.

No amount of self-reflection could have prepare me for the discovery that my central desire at 15 is the same twenty years later: I just want someone to love me.  And I guess, for that to happen, I have to learn to love myself.

Why does it have to be so hard?

Alone

Someone asked me recently what it means to me to be alone.  She encouraged me to write it all out, to explore where it comes from, why it is so scary.

What I've come up with is this: being alone means no one wants to be with me.  It means I am unworthy of love, not enough or too much.  Not enough to satisfy someone or make them feel like I'm worth the effort, or too much for them to handle--too emotional, too intense, etc.--too little or too much.  Unworthy.

I know I am a good person.  I know it because other people tell me so, but I'm not sure I know it for myself.  I think I broadcast my faith in myself so often as a way to hide the fact that I'm not really all that together.  I'm sort of a mess, actually.  And when you get down to all that's left after your plans have burned away, you discover what you're really made of.  For me, the language is pretty much all that's left.  I am realizing slowly how broken I am, and that is really okay considering I think all of us are, though some are better at compartmentalizing than others.  I don't have that skill.  I can't bury my head in the sand and go numb and pretend that everything is okay when it isn't.

Even my performances each day at work--being good in the classroom, being strong for my students--are all underwritten by this weird twitch in my left eye that won't stop and these odd scratches that keep showing up on my face each morning.  I think I'm wrecking myself in sleep.  Lord knows the dreams I'm having don't help.  Dreams of conversations with a man I love who no longer acknowledges that he loves me.

I keep looking at all my past relationships, the other men this most recent one called damn fools for not knowing how to treat me.  Now that he's one of them, I'm about as heartsick as you can get.  I keep thinking about this one that cheated on me or that one that told everyone I was his roommate, not his girlfriend, or the one who stopped talking to me when the girl he really wanted became available.  I used to think it was my bad luck to find all these assholes, but the constant in every situation was me.  It's more likely that I was being treated that way because I was broadcasting that I didn't deserve to be treated better, so if I want better, I have to believe I deserve it, and right now...well, I'm trying.

It's funny, being alone is the thing I have feared for so long, but it's also the thing that is giving me back to myself, slowly but surely.

I know I'm supposed to learn from this, to grow, to come out better on the other side, and I want to, I really do, but tonight, I wish this silence wasn't so deafening.  I wish there were arms waiting to hold me, ears waiting to hear me, hands waiting to smooth my hair and tell me everything will be alright.  I have to do that for myself now, and it's just not the same.