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| One of my own quotes. What ya think? =P |
Caution:
It's been a very long time since I've blogged, and it's the first time I've just allowed myself to unleash my raw thoughts. Bare with me if this first post doesn't make a lot of sense. I'm sure it will as time goes on!::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
I had a long talk with my therapist some weeks ago.. about trying to turn swine into pearls and learning how to forgive myself for not living up to the expectations of a "normal" adult as my parents or others I care about; see it, as well as not holding much credence in their persistence that I am a failure in life...
Have you ever gone through something similar with your parents? 😕
Mine are the passive-aggressive sort with many narcisstic tendencies, who prefer to belittle me & undermine my confidence through small regular & highly confusing doses, wherein I have to guess most of what they are feeling through the things they tell everyone else but me; or when I do get them to talk directly to me: trying to figure out what they are trying say by what they are trying so hard not to say & then figure out what exactly I need to do to fix it, cause they'll never actually just come right out & say what it is that they need to feel better.
So suffice it to say that there are plenty of things I should be owed apologies for, that I'm not likely to ever receive, regardless of how much I'd be hassled for not profusely apologizing to them promptly if I'd done anything half as inappropriate or cruel.
I'm not going to go into great detail about what they should be apologizing for, at least not today.
For now, I'm more focused on the divine art of learning to accept apologies I'll never receive (from people who will intentionally never accept that they did anything wrong), so that I can let them go & move forward into the life I deserve to be living.
A life that is most certainly free of feeling like an failure & infinite fuck up.
It's up to me to recognize myself for all my life's accomplishments, to know that I am not a fuck up no matter how many times I have messed up in the past, and to hone my own ability to accept myself especially in the face of those who likely never will, especially when they're projecting their own shame & fears, or trying to get you to do things their way, even if there's nothing at all wrong about the way you naturally go about accomplishing or overcoming something. I can never make anyone else accept me or love me, but I can stop giving away my power to give myself that acceptance and love.
Something that feels more and more important to figure out how to do with each passing day that I have my family living with my parents while we get our debts down & save up for something sustainable & suitable for our small family.
It feels like out of all the mountains I've already had to climb in my life, this tiny little mole hill that's sheltering my injured inner child, is going to be one of the hardest & more cathartic life lessons I'll ever have to digest & put into practice. I mean, I already knew well before I ever saw a therapist, that it was not up to me to please everyone else, and that it's a load of crap if anyone else tries to tell you that you're responsible for how they choose to feel or to blame for their crappy choices, emotional patterns & negative behaviors. I already knew that it's up to me to forgive myself for the decades of beating up on myself for feeling like I just wasn't capable of living up to the standards of the people who were supposed to love me unconditionally & expect me to succeed because of my 'differences'.
IMO, no child should ever have to grow up feeling like their parents expect them to fail 'because' of their differences. Especially when being different from the "norm" is not a crime, nor any sort of factual defect. It's just different.
Though these are things you & I already know.
Things my therapist continues to remind me of, whenever my own personal development & growth gets halted by my sucky self-esteem level, social anxieties andor persistent fears of success.
"There's an old saying," said my counselor, "You can't get pearls from swine."
"Yes..." I said, "That's true... I know it."
"And in the same sense," He said, "You're parents were likely raised by parents who were also PA & whom also did not accept them for who they were. So while they'll always be a great resource if you need some 'constructive criticism' or to find flaws in your plans, they're just never likely to be a good place to find appreciation, pride or understanding."
And from that moment on, I've been working to get my emotional mind to accept what my intellectual mind has known for years: My ability to succeed is not controlled or defined by the beliefs or expectations of anyone else but me.
After all the ways I've gotten gritty and forced myself to grow over the past few decades, I really never would've expected the apologies I'll never receive, to effect me so deeply & so thoroughly. Half the time I'm not even aware of when I am undermining my own success because of those little traumas. Memes that really aren't even all that bad in comparison to those I know who were beaten and emotionall scared by much worse parental actions than I ever had to experience. I always told myself that my life could've been worse until I learned that one of the truest marks of a real victim, is their own ability to undervalue their own experiences by reasoning that there's always someone who had to go through much worse.
It's in those moments of introspection that I realize just how much I hide from myself, and how much work is still left before I can fully step into the powerful and badass woman I've always been destined to become. Before those epiphanies, I just tried to grin and bear everything, assuming that if I could just bury the worst of the hurts & haunts deep enough, that they couldn't effect my life (at least not in any deterimental ways). Though the truth is that it's these deeply buried shadows that effect our ability to succeed in life the most. They are the crude oil that feeds your self-doubt; the destroyer of dreams, and most damaging element to any recipe for success.
Without surfacing these memes and working to consciously & entirely mend those rifts in your own soul, they become little gremlins that mischievously flip switches and pull triggers inside your mind, usually at the worst possible times; effectively causing you to self-sabatogue all of your hard earned successes right before you actually cross the finish line, or sometimes right after success is achieved, making it feel like a false hope. Basically, trying to go the vanilla route of just trying to block out anything that would require any great deal of introspection, self care or boundary adjustments, the real trick is to push yourself to become radically conscious of your shadow self & all that it's been hiding. This radical consciousness & commitment to finding self-acceptance within your shadows, is the only thing that can disempower them & put the control of your future back in front of you.
At least... every successful person I've yet met or learned about, has had such introspective journey's in common; they've all had to face and fight the mirror image of themselves & learned at the end that they never needed any weapons to defeat their opponent, but instead they just needed to embrace self-love & radical self-acceptance, just like the mythic heros of old.
Now it's mine to figure out just how to do that too. Something I thought would be much easier than it has been, and require much less grit.
One way or another, I'll figure it out 💪
Anyways! Enough of my unintelligable ranting!
How about you? (Yes! YOU.)
Where are you at in your journey to Radical Self-Acceptance and all that jazz? Tell me your story in the comments below. Tell me I'm not alone in trying to figure out this weird thing we call life & self-acceptance 😉
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