Me is {more than} enough.
I wrote this post over 4 months ago. It is the culmination of a tangled, emotional struggling and growth, something of a metamorphosis, that I’ve undergone in the past few years. When I wrote it, I was standing on the edge of a precipice looking into a great divide, and I was ready to step off, not knowing if I was going to fly or fall. For awhile, I didn’t care which. As it turns out, I found I was carrying a bridge to the next peak in my own back pocket, and in unfurling it, what “fell” was this post, out of my heart and soul, onto the digital page. Something in me cranked, turned, and locked into place. I was absolutely sure I was going to publish the piece; I often publish my ugly stuff, my emotional wailings, and then… I didn’t.
At the Blissdom Conference, Brené Brown was the Opening Keynote Speaker. I sat there in awe as she started talking about shame, about vulnerability and fear, and hot tears pricked the corners of my eyes. My mouth fell open when I heard her saying things I had written in this post. I had written that I was enough, that I accepted myself, and then I didn’t publish. Somewhere in there, I was telling myself “I am enough… but not quite enough to publish to the world that I am enough.” Kind of ironic, no?
Brené reminded me that when I allow myself to be vulnerable and truly open with the world, I am the happiest me that can exist. Yes, it can be frightening, but there is no more real way to live. And so I pull this out of drafts, I hit publish, and I affirm that I mean what it says. I hope it speaks to someone. It’s a truth from my heart.
~
I am {learning to be} comfortable with who I am. I know I am a being in process, unrefined, unsure, and, in many ways, different from others, different than you.
I accept me for who I am.
This has not always been the truth. Far from it, in fact.
During grade school, my hair was dorky, my clothes weren’t “cool enough”, my ears poked out too far, and I was a nerd for genuinely liking to read and learn. I lived in the South, and most of my peers went to church and believed in God – I didn’t. I liked popular music, but also classical and old rock, preferred dorky to preppy, and laughed with a hitch. (#snort)
Most of the time I was okay with all of that.
Except for the times when I wasn’t. You know the times; the moments when others, intentionally or not, make you doubt yourself for your differences. Those moments shaped me in an ugly way. Those were the moments when I wished I was anything but me, anywhere but inside my own skin. I learned to put on a tough act, pretend I didn’t care. But I did, I cared so much it hurt.
I don’t think any of us are inherently comfortable with being put down, cast aside. I sure am not. It’s a painful thing. If you can accept that pain and move on, you’re golden.
I’ve begun to learn to accept Pain as the Dark Valley lying far below the Peak of Joy.
I’d never understand how high that summit was if I hadn’t climbed there from the foothills.
The disparity lends meaning to each extreme. I wish for it to make us focus on the blessings of our joys more greatly. Unfortunately, many of us (myself included, during a great many times in my life) dwell in that pain instead, and refuse to let it go, even when we’re at the peak. Somehow, we take it with us, wrapped like a shroud.
That’s a negativity that can color as much of your life as you give it room to roam over.
So, for much of my life I have said and done things here and there, again and again, to try to gain acceptance from others. This is not to say that I haven’t also been true to myself in many ways and embraced many of my differences but there has always been an undercurrent of intense need that has made me strive to be what others want from me.
What a foolish waste of time. What an endless recipe for misery.
The acceptance that follows from such a practice is false. It may feel good briefly, or on the surface, but it is acceptance under pretense and deception.
It is an illusion.
As an adult, and increasingly in the past several years, I have grown tired of trying to please others to gain approval, to appear to be someone I am not in order to receive {perceived} acceptance and {false} fellowship.
I am not interested in relationships built around the idea that I should change, am not what I should be, think/feel/believe the wrong things, need help to be better, am broken, or need to be or do more *whatever* to be good enough.
And while I’d like to say I don’t need others, I will fully admit that I do. This is also something new for me; this is part of shedding the “tough act.” I DO need friends. I DO need support. I DO need people who care about me.
However: I do not need you to solve my problems. I do not need you to guide me. I need you to care about me, have an interest in my well-being, want to laugh with me, and be willing to listen when I need or want to talk. I need you to accept me for who I am, what I am comfortable with, and what I am not. I need for you to like me for who I am, or leave me alone.
I need you to like me, to even love me, for who I am right now, in this very moment.
And I will do the same for you.
If we are different, I am happy to find our similarities and celebrate them. I am happy to accept our differences and move forward. It *is* okay to be different, that really is true. What I have come to feel very deeply is that when you can accept someone, despite their differences, without trying to change them, that is true acceptance.
That is the basis for real friendship, humanity, and love.
[I am also okay with not needing to be friends with everyone. Tolerance and acceptance are the most important when there are differences that drive us apart.]
When I was a little girl, I loved Popeye, and I delighted in him saying, in his scruffy, twisty voice, “Iyam what Iyam, and that’s all that Iyam!” And I guess that’s what I’m saying. I am what I am, and that’s all that I am. And it’s enough.
I am Me.
I am {learning, growing, adjusting to being} comfortable with who I am. I know I am a being in process, unrefined, unsure, and, in many ways, different than others, different than you. I accept me for who I am.
I accept you for who you are, too.
believing in rediscovery
April 26th rolled past me, as it did you. It brought pain and joy and all things in between to him and her and them and the others. It was a day, and we all walked into and out of it, just like we do so many others. Some days leave their marks on you and those marks, be they soft lip prints or jagged, deep carvings, stain you. This is Life’s Tattoo. This is the one that can’t be removed; you just have to learn to live with your new ink. You may even find beauty in it.
I thought about this baby several times on this past day that happened like they all do, as clocks everywhere mark the time that slides by without any effort. It has been 2 years since that first miscarriage, the one that opened the door on a special kind of fear and loathing, and introduced me to the doubt of my female body. On this day I wondered, as I have so many times, who that one could have been if conditions had been just right. I sometimes stare off into nowhere, eyes distant, face slack, thinking these thoughts. Then I sigh deeply and swallow a lump in my throat; my hand may wipe at a tear that rolls absently. Other times I feel a peace, a moving on, an acceptance.
My world feels different than it used to so many moons ago. I am changed. There are some wonderful differences and there are, scattered about, some not so fabulous ones. These things, the changes both good and bad, are all just a part of the What Is. I can handle that. I can roll with it and still find a reason to be, see a splendor in life. It’s always there, waiting for me to rediscover it.
There have been times I didn’t think that was possible – that I’d be able to see beauty and feel bliss in life again, be able to even care if it was there or not. But I hold that knowledge, that truth, close to me now, as I live and breathe. This tender awareness seems to sit in the palm of my hot hand like a smooth pebble. It holds weight and feels cool against my skin. I like it; it grounds me.
There is splendor in life. You (and I) can always rediscover it.
I have learned another truth during this time, as well. A less fabulous one, I’m afraid. In every situation during the past two years where I have said to a group of women (of any size) that I have had miscarriages, at least one of them always shares that she has had one, also. There are too many of us. Why does it never fail to shock me, even though I know well by now how often it happens?
To all of you who have experienced this or other painful loss, I thought about you today, too. I felt sadness and tension, and then I released it. I sought the love and peace in my heart. After soaking it in for awhile, I released that into the universe, too.
I hope it finds you, much like a cool pebble that might just land, unexpectedly, in your upturned palm.
Why flinging yourself off the ledge is a good thing.
I have written, in the past, about how I truly enjoy spending time alone.
This is not to say that I don’t enjoy the company of others, or that I don’t have genuine interest in people. I thoroughly enjoy time with friends and acquaintances alike, and I’d say that other human beings interest me more than almost anything else.
These things, enjoying time with others as well as time alone, are not mutually exclusive. While I like people, I need a considerable amount of time to myself. I always have, and I always will. There is a sense of overload if I’m around too many people at once or for too long. I literally require the decompression that being alone brings.
I revel in being isolated in quiet, adore to be wrapped in nothing but my thoughts. There is a level of reflection and philosophy that I am incapable of reaching in any way other than alone in stillness. On the other hand, I delight in pounding my brain with loud music and smiling at a room that holds only me while I assault my surroundings with my interpretations of the lyrics and melodies. This is like medicine for my soul. I need it as much as I regularly need to feel sunshine on my skin.
So yes, I like to be alone. I like to have my thoughts to myself, to be able to control my environment, to be the master of my domain at any given moment. I am a hair away from saying that my sanity actually hinges on my having time alone regularly.
And so it feels odd to say that I’m horribly afraid of being alone.
I don’t think I’ve ever really admitted that. I’m afraid to truly stand on my own. Confessing that is difficult for me. I have always valued strength and independence, wanted those qualities for myself. Yet I feel as if I hold my head high on the outside, while in reality, I often tremble and cower inside myself.
Many years ago, fearing that he would never marry me, I suggested to my long time boyfriend that we part ways. He had given me some ominous answers to some very pointed questions, and my heart was registering some unwelcome and heartbreaking truths.
I told him that I felt I had lost myself in him. It would have been unfair of me to blame him for that, and I most certainly didn’t, but I had allowed myself to be dependent on him for so much, practical as well as emotional, for so long. I’d poured myself into him. I always knew I shouldn’t but I felt powerless to stop doing it.
When I realized that he would likely one day need to flee the suffocation of my pressing need, that he would surely turn and walk from me eventually, I panicked. I felt the crushing fear of falling alone on that impending day. How could I protect myself? How could I learn to be stronger?
I had to force a situation that would make me let go and step away. Inside, I knew I had to take a leap, to make myself learn how to stand alone. Jumping, after all, always seems easier than falling.
It is not. Falling happens. Jumping takes courage.
He did not disagree with me that we should part ways. Even though it was my suggestion, I have always been pained by that.
And so, what happened then, after separating myself painfully from my best friend of 7 years? Did I spend a good deal of time alone afterwards, learning to trust my ability to be an independent person? No. I lacked the courage to jump.
I am so ashamed of that.
I immediately started dating the man who would later become my husband. I leaned on him as hard as he would let me. He let me lean in all the way. My ex told me in a sad tone, after learning I was seeing someone else so soon, “You are dependent. You just go from one man to the next, always looking for someone to take care of you because you’re afraid.”
I was stung by his words, angered. I dismissed them as jealousy.
The kicker was that I secretly knew he was right.
I held my head high and moved on. I said to myself that I couldn’t walk from the love John was offering me, that I couldn’t allow myself to pass up a chance at happiness. I told myself I’d regret it mightily one day if I did.
Those things are true, I was not lying to myself.
But the other truth, the one I’ve never admitted outside my own head is that I was also afraid to do what I had set out to do. I was frightened to stand completely alone in the world, daring it to knock me down.
“What if it really does?” I thought. I wasn’t confident enough in myself to believe I could get back up.
Was it a mistake that I did not take that time and learn the value of being strong in myself? In a way, yes, very much.
You see, it is not so much that I am truly weak, or unable to stand on my own, to be a strong person and take care of myself. Even through my fear there is a knowledge in my core that I am strong enough. Fear has a way of making you near-sighted, though. I am often unable to see my core. I believe the lies that my insecurity whispers so close to my trembling ears in moments of doubt.
I do not regret loving my husband. And how could I regret a union that brought me the joy that is my son? I do not. This is my life. I take my past and wrap it like a bow around the person I have become. I cannot change my past, but I can most certainly examine it, always reflecting on where I have been, learning, and watching where I am headed. I am the constant analyzer, if you will.
The mistake was not that I allowed myself to love and be loved. That is never a mistake.
The harm was in not allowing myself a chance to see the living proof of my own strength. If I had jumped, I’d know for sure that I can fly, and that would have banished my fear of falling infinitely.
Today’s post is my answer to Broccoli, a writing challenge at {W}rite-of-Passage.
The following people took the challenge, too.
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