A Long And Winding Road - Or, a rather long rambling... in Phoenix

I feel like I spent far too much of my life rushing towards who I thought I was supposed to be when I should have been looking at who I was and learning how to love that girl. Now, looking back, I don’t know how I got here but I don’t like it. The girl I used to be was just fine.

I mean, sure, she was a little messed up because her home life kind of sucked (a lot) and she had crippling self-esteem issues and suicidal thoughts. But she wasn’t a bad person. She never wanted to do harm, always wanted to help, always wanted to be there for whoever she thought she could be of some… use to…

Okay, she always felt like she had to prove her worth. She had no concept of self-reflection or self-awareness or even that mental health was a real thing. Only that she had to prove why she was worthy to the people she wanted to love her. She had to get the good grades and stay skinny (except she didn’t…) and behave in this way and be modest in this way and be ashamed of… well… being human.

She was told she’d never snag a good husband if she kept eating those Little Debbie cakes.

She was told to marry for money and not love.

She believed that the only love deserved was the love you earned by being exactly what someone else wanted you to be.

Normal, human bodily functions felt shameful. I remember burping too loud once and not saying “excuse me” fast enough and getting smacked in the mouth. The only birds and bees I got from my parents was, when I was 17 and started dating my first husband who was 4.5 years older than me, “If you get pregnant, we’ll put you in an unwed mothers home.” As if those things still exist? I mean, I don’t know, DO they?! Then the mother made an appointment, I went to the doctor, I had the exam, and got the prescription for birth control. Oh my fucking gawd, how awkward that was. Especially considering I hadn’t been a virgin for over a year at that point, so hah!

Oh, white Russians, you fickle bitches… Making me a rambling fool…

Pretty much every single sex act, from losing my virginity the day after my 16th birthday, until… Jesus, I don’t know. Maybe even still. Sometimes. It’s honestly been so long at this point, I’m not sure, but I’m willing to bet I’ll be pretty awkward if it ever happens again. Because every single one for the longest time felt awkward and shameful and… That’s not what it’s supposed to be like, is it? Like… is it that way for other people ever? I didn’t know how to actually enjoy it for the longest time! I think maybe I didn’t believe I was supposed to?! It mostly felt like a chore… Just another thing I had to do to please someone else.

Be traditional. That’s an idea I think I was poisoned with for a very long time. I feel like that is what was expected of me. Be a good girl, get good grades, graduate, find a good husband, have 2.2 children, a dog, a white picket fence, and a mini-van. Or something. It was always this idea, this expectation, that certain things were just not talked about. Or just not talked about outside of family. There must always be this facade, this image of what my family was, for the outside world. A very strict code. My parents never, ever spoke a cross word to each other in front of me. They never, ever spoke a cross word to each other in public during my life, to my knowledge. To me, however… My mother always belittled me. It felt that way. I was talked about as if I was not present. I learned early how to be very, very quiet and unobtrusive because I was safe if her attention wasn’t turned on me.

Fuck traditional. That’s what all of this is, what all of the ugly self-hatred I have inside, it’s the constant struggle all of my life to be something I’m just not. I’ve spent my whole life acting in a play and reading from the wrong goddamned script! I couldn’t figure out why the hell I kept failing. My gawd, looking back at it. Holy shit. I wasn’t failing, I was in the wrong fucking theater!

And every other aspect of my life has always been this striving to prove myself, to earn my place, to be heard, to be loved, to feel important and necessary and desirable and just fucking LOVED. Loved for all my quirks and my OCD and my boundaries and my manic episodes and my depressive episodes and and all my anxiety and angst… Fuck me, I’m complicated.

But I am beautiful, too. I have so much love to give, so much kindness and decency. The people who have hurt me didn’t change me. Yes, some chemical imbalances affect me in a myriad of ways, but most of them I was born with. Those imbalances have caused me to be a not awesome person for a lot of my adult life. I didn’t know, I… I knew something was wrong with me but I was also gaslighted to fuck for 13 years solid and believed that most of it was just me, that I was just wrong and broken and crazy and that there was no help for me and that I should be thankful I’m being put up with. An entire family, a large family, gaslighted me for 13 years of my life into believing I was… unstable. Terribly unstable, incapable of functioning at full capacity. That’s a thing that happened and, all along, I was told it was all in my head. I literally had my own life and my own memory re-written many times right before my eyes. Things that I knew happened, I was told didn’t happen. Things that were said were later denied, it was just me making it up in my mind. These are things that happened to me.

Okay, deep breath. Fucking white Russians.

The chemical imbalances that I now know exist within me weren’t caused by these people and these things that happened to me, but they were exacerbated by them. In the last couple of years, I’ve figured out so much about myself and why I am the way I am, why I get on my own nerves, why I’m so damn… I’m not suicidal, ya’ll. Like, no. I would never harm myself. But I have these terrible thoughts, like oh my gawd, why did I wake up this morning?! Sometimes I fall asleep thinking maybe I won’t wake up and that’s okay. No, none of that is okay. It’s not okay that I’ve believed for most of my life that the goddamn world would be better off without me because it absolutely would not. That’s just bullshit.

And I wonder… Was I just always looking in the wrong places, trying to prove myself to the wrong people? That maybe I should have been worrying about proving myself to myself all along? Because I know who I am, all of me, down to the deepest, darkest bits. I acknowledge all of the things within myself that encompass who I am. I recognize that I am far from perfect, but I’m about as damn close as one can get to being human.

And isn’t that what matters?

And if someone doesn’t love that about me, well.

Look for the sheer humanity in people, folks. Look at all the little cracks and chips life has put there, see all of the things that make humans completely unique, and and see that they are beautiful because of their flaws and not in spite of them. See the strength in them, the perseverance. See the weaknesses, see the fears, and see the failures and the triumphs. See all of the things that make a person who they are. And then decide if you love them. Don’t see a fraction of the whole and think you can shape the rest. Don’t imagine them to be anything other than who they are and don’t hope that anything about them will change. Hoping someone will change into someone they’re not just to please you is not love.

In other news, I had an amazing, fantastic, wonderful day and evening and I’m achingly grateful for some truly astounding human beings I have the great pleasure of knowing. They genuinely make my world a better place. This… rambling purge… this is thanks to all of them and maybe a little to the white Russians, too! Fuck inhibitions, who needs ‘em?!