FINDING YOURSELF?
You know what I hate… I hate the saying, “I need to find myself.” Really? I mean, where on earth did you go outside yourself? You are who you are, there is no escaping that reality. You are you. Unless you have been body snatched by aliens and your mind is now out and roaming free of your body.. then yeah.. I mean then you need to find yourself. Otherwise, you are who you are.
I have been through a lot with my depression. Some real low points in life that I’ve no desire to drag you through as a group. Better left as the hush hushed secrets I tell my therapist anyway. But yeah, they were low. In that time I had to answer many questions about myself and my past. You know the basic lay on a couch and tell me about your childhood stuff.. except well I didn’t lay on the couch, kinda sat on this little love seat thing between a clock with miss numbered roman numerals.. which I think is a test the therapist put there to drive me insane… and a half dead plant. In those travels into the inner self, I realized one thing that made so much clear. People suck.
I developed a very keen lack of identity as a child. A real good sense of what others wanted me to be so I became it. I buried myself in layers of lies upon lies until I thought I was exactly what I needed to be. It kept me safe. It kept me invisible. It was my way of surviving. Why did I do this? Because people suck. People have their own shit. They have stress. They have problems. They have poor coping mechanisms. And everything they did, I thought it was me and so I learned to make myself what they needed so I didn’t upset them, or maybe to be more of what I thought they wanted. What I learned through intense scrutiny of self, is that I didn’t do or deserve any of their behaviors. They took their issues out on me, and since I didn’t understand that I handled it the only way that made sense to me. I blamed me.
Hey, you do it to. You know people who cheated on you, who hurt you, or took you for granted. You wondered, “Why did they do that to me?” When you couldn’t figure it out and they didn’t give you a damned good reason, your mind sorted it the only way it could, by questioning what you did wrong. Your mind needs an answer, and without one it will build one from the information it has. So we blame ourselves, and we build another layer of lies onto ourselves in order to avoid that same thing in the future.
Which brings me back to, you are who you are. You can’t lose who you are without a major trauma. What you can do, is bury yourself in so many lies that you start to lose track of what is real and what isn’t. You don’t need to find yourself.. you need to figure out who you aren’t. Find that lie you pasted onto yourself as a shield. Rip it off like a hot wax Brazilian and breathe through the pain. Let those worries and concerns go to the people they belong to. End your internal blame of the pain you had to endure from others, and be true to you.
After all, happiness isn’t in becoming what others want, but in finding those that love who you are.
