I know these things. But, I also have a ridiculously big heart, and love beyond compare.
I have always struggled to find the line between what I want for myself and what is just crossing into selfishness. That being said, I refuse to bend for anyone ever again. It has taken me so long to figure out how to do that.
I use to live other people's lives...I would get so caught up in living for them, that I would lose myself, I would revert back to remembering how I had nothing to offer, so I wasn't worth having my own life, so I would live theirs...cause they were important and I could show them that! I still obsess over people and find myself starting to live for them. I still lose myself occasionally. We all do. Part of keeping myself on track to figuring out what I like and want in my life is working on myself. I have to, or I'll get lost again...
Self-worth is a goddamned bitch. Holy hell. I seriously don't know anyone that doesn't struggle from it sometimes.
I know now that much of my self worth was rooted in me being taught that I didn't really matter. I know that when I was young I was told that my mom had me basically to rope my dad into staying with her, and when that didn't work and they divorced when I was two (he left her for the woman that he was having a affair with, you know, grass is greener shit), I became a pawn my mother would use against my dad. I think that was the start of it. The start of me devaluing myself.
Devaluing yourself is always easier when someone teaches you how to best do it. Both my parents were excellent at doing it to themselves and really everyone around them. They would say, just like I would say about myself, that I was always making the best choices for everyone and giving so much of themselves for others. But really, like me, all they ever were doing was making choices out of selfishness and fear. Those things are the two worst things a person can feel together. They make for some hell of some choices. Even now, as a awake and open person, I still make choices out of selfishness and fear. My awareness is helping me to realize it and correct the behavior...by the time I die, I should do it nearly not at all....ugg.
I know now that my parents didn't have the ability to give me the tools to be a good, well-rounded, happy, self-confident person. How could they give something they didn't have themselves? Most of the time I'm not angry about it anymore, most of the time I just feel sorry for them. My father was a addict who only could see finding to someone who would he could control their love and my mother was a manipulative mentally ill codependent who also had a penchant for pathologically lying. They were categorically not equipped to have children. Like I say all the time, I am glad they did, of course...but they should never have. They couldn't provide a good psychological base for their children. They had no concept of contentment. They were constantly striving for something they just could never find.
My father died in 2006 when I was 23, I was a horrible daughter at that point. I hadn't seen him more than a handful of times in the last two years of his life while he was sick. When he had his massive heart attack in Texas, I was on my way to moving to Seattle. My sisters told me to keep my plans and that they would go and take care of dad. I agonized over that choice, but ultimately, I chose to make my move. My dad would have been pissed if I hadn't. But when my relationship with that boyfriend terminated 5-6 months later and I moved back home, I still didn't go see my dad more than a handful of times. Honestly, I think a big part of it was how he was not himself and how completely miserable he was. He couldn't do anything he had ever done before, so he was more miserable than I had ever seen him and I had seen him pretty fucking miserable. I just had the hardest time seeing him that way. Being so young, it just didn't feel right that this was happening. When I got the call from my sister that he was going to pass, I got on the train as soon as I could...I got the call not a hour later that he was gone. I lost my mind. That may have been one of the hardest things I have ever experienced. I have a lot of regrets, but the one that sits with me everyday is that I never got to say and learn so many things. That goes twofold, that goes with him being a shitty father, and that goes with me being a shitty daughter. It's a hard place to be.
My mother and I have not talked since one week after my wedding to Eric Oct 15th 2011 at Gooseberry Falls and I have made the choice to never talk with her again.
Eric and I had made the choice to have a very small wedding, just immediate family and a couple of close friends at the ceremony and dinner. I knew that my mother would bring her puppy dog friend that she always kept with her, so I called her and talked to her and explained that I would not be ok with her being there. When we showed up to the center to get ready, of course my mom had brought her. I was royally pissed, so I went outside to have a cigarette, my mother decided to follow me. I ignored her and did not say a word to her. So she sent her friend and my step-dad to the car to stay there while I got married, I was livid with her with that. When we went to take family pictures, I only included her in one. Then my wedding happened, and it was, of course, wonderful. Afterwards, I was informed by my sister that my mother left at the very beginning of my ceremony and that my brother-in-law had missed the beginning of my wedding to follow her and try to talk to her into staying. She did not come to my wedding dinner in downtown Duluth even though she was staying at the same hotel. The next morning, I ran into her checking out and she handed me my "wedding gift" of towels. She had just given my sister a bag of nearly the same towels a few weeks earlier. I felt even more like shit knowing my own mother didn't even try to do something special for me for my wedding.
I called or she called me a week later, I don't remember which. She spent that phone call, not apologizing for any of her actions, but telling me that I was a brat at my wedding and that she should have slapped me. (I asked people after if this was any kind of true, and I was assured that I was completely chill as a bride and that at no point did I act out of line.), my mother was trying to manipulate me into thinking that everything was my fault. My step-dad then got on the phone and starting talking shit about how bad of a dad my father was. That ended that phone call. I informed them I was done and hung up. I vowed to never talk to her again.
This behavior, sadly, is not anything new for her. She always did anything to have the attention on her, anything to get people to give her what she needed. She had hypochondriac tendencies and I what seemed very Munchhausen by Proxy-ish. My childhood was filled with lies, and mystery medical maladies. When I moved back from Seattle and my car died halfway through Montana and she and my sister's cousin-in-law came to got me, she disowned me as her daughter a couple hours into the trip home because I wasn't being nice to her. Excuse me, I'm sorry, I just broke up with my boyfriend of two years, am completely broke and my car broke down filled with my things in a state that I have zero resources in....get the fuck outta here with me being nice at that point. Fuck you for being a mother who would disown her daughter during that. My childhood and early adulthood was filled with these things.
My wedding was my final straw. I clearly have some very unresolved mother issues. There's no way they will just go away, and likely I will have to deal with them at some point. But they will not be with her, I am done. That toxicity will have no part in my life again. That damage that women has done to me is unreal. Learning to forgive hasn't come easily. My anger ebbs and flows, I try to remember that she can't do it anymore and that I have to let things go. I try to empathize with what she went through as a child, horrific things supposedly. I try to be a better person in understanding. Then I realize the damage learning many of those behaviors or coping mechanisms in growing up with her did to me and I get angry, so angry that I revert to pushing everyone and everything away because I start to devalue myself again.
Add my longest relationship, among others, into the ring of self-deprecation and you'll find plenty of fun reasons that I seem to find no value in me when I'm in my darker places.
Aah, and here we are again...devaluing myself. I'm so fucking good at it. I isolate, I push people away, I try to control everything in my life out of fear. I get so stuck in my own head, that I forget all of the good, all of my positive qualities. I forget to remind myself that everyone has negative pieces of them and that everyone makes bad choices sometimes. I start doing harmful things and making really horrible choices. I revert completely.
Valuing yourself is absolutely a learned behavior. Don't get me wrong, I love me. I do. However, I am so good at convincing myself that I don't deserve things, it's ridiculous. There's no finding me in those moments, there's no snapping out of it. I'm not aware that I'm in that moment usually, it's all so subconscious.
That is why it's time for me to do what's right for me. Only me. I always have to remember that other people are involved and I need to take their feelings into things of course, but ultimately, if something isn't serving me anymore, it needs to go. There is no room in my life for things that I don't want.
This life has zero guarantees, I could get hit by a bus tomorrow. Today is the only day that matters, and today I will live for myself, I will make choices that make me content and improve how I see myself. I will try to hurt as few people as possible in the way of this.
I have value, we all have value. We just have to learn to unlearn all the bullshit we were taught about ourselves. All that negative that has been passed on, it's time to let it go and stop believing it and start believing more in ourselves.
So. Much. Work.
I'll get there, so will you.
Pan
