The Gift of Rejection

I’ve been an outsider from…birth.

Up until a year ago, I considered this a chronic, major, life-defining, detrimental catastrophe. Almost 100 percent of my actions had been to change myself, to just make it so that I would have a “tribe”. Only when I felt this sense of belonging could I be content. 

In my current stage, I realize my real catastrophe was these actions.

The pandemic, while horrific and affecting humanity in full, has allowed me to do “shadow work”. A hot term in psychology, it simply means to deal with your repressed features. Why we have a shadow side is fodder for another post. While I detest staying home and avoiding the community, this has been my way of turning lemons into lemonade.

Choosing to stray from the flock is a zeitgeist for the times. Our social media feeds are flooded with opinions on who the “sheep” are and are not. If you haven’t seen a cartoon meme addressing this, you’ve done a good job of avoiding the dumpster fire that the internet has become. Most of us have seen the black sheep warning the white sheep that something isn’t right. Or, of course, the lemmings jumping off of the cliff, a highly misunderstood phenomenon. What’s distressing is that our society, even globally from what I have seen, is committed to believing the other side of the coin is the flock. Some are taking this conclusion to their deathbeds. Anyone that knows me knows a person that is stubborn. But the ideas about Covid-19, the pandemic, and vaccinations are the Mount Everest to my garden stone not-gonna-change-my-mind mentality. 

Coincidentally, standing alone is now a zeitgeist for the phase of life I am in, and really should have been decades ago. Like most in our 40s, my actions are now about doing what matches my values, interests, and well-being. I no longer make decisions based on what people will think. The thing is, I wonder if I would have gone through this metamorphosis, were it not for my biggest catalyst:

My daughter.

When you become a mother, your experience will be different than 100 percent of other mothers. My experience shook my life, my identity, and my reality like popcorn in a classic popcorn-maker. The specifics of events before, shortly after her birth, and still going 2.5 years after her birth, are too numerous to go into. Let’s just say reality as I knew it is gone.

Some quotes got me through the daily crises and mini-crises, and now define me as a person:

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”- Friedrich Nietzsche

“You never know how strong you are until being strong is the only choice you have.” -Bob Marley

“The Lioness has rejoined her Cub, and all is right in the jungle.” – End scene of Kill Bill Vol. 2.

Putting my daughter before anyone or anything has transformed me into the strongest woman I have ever met. I am afraid of nothing, I have confidence for any task, and I now know what it is to feel love that knows no limits.

Amazingly, while I had proven this just before the onset of the pandemic, I didn’t know it until I performed the arduous task of healing.

Considering what most of the species is going through and has gone through, I am well aware that we are very lucky. We have a beautiful, safe home, our health has been generally great, and our needs were provided for.

But mentally, I was living in a dark cloud. “Staying home”, even while interacting with my child all day, just left too much room for the ghosts of the past to scream at me. Everything in front of me was good to great, IS good to great, but the toxic words I used to allow in my life sang at me like a broken record. I am grateful for the gift of music. Putting on the song with just the right lyrics cleaned up that garbage right away.

Still, we can’t survive on our coping mechanisms forever. We need to go from surviving to thriving. So, shadow work.

 

In my work to overcome PTSD, I learned many new concepts. Firstly, something called “Complex” PTSD exists, where you experience trauma chronically. Next, the strategies that narcissists use to manipulate people, such as gaslighting and scapegoating. And finally, I knew what self-sabotage was, and always figured I was doing this throughout adulthood but didn’t know why. 

Here I need to credit a life coach from the UK, named Richard Grannon. In recent years, Grannon has posted numerous videos on narcissistic abuse, CPTSD, healing from trauma, etc. His description of the cause of our self-sabotage was the missing piece for me:

“Imagine there is a garden, it’s the most beautiful garden you’ve ever seen. Gorgeous flowers, luscious trees, clean air. You stare longingly at this garden and decide you’re going to work towards enjoying it, maybe even living in it. You toil for years on end. You deserve this garden, and belong there.

However, the people around you see your desires. They notice you wanting the garden, and working towards it, and even getting close to being there. If the wrong people (toxic people) are around you, they are jealous. They want the garden. You getting into the garden would feel like an affront to them. So to prevent you from getting there, they manipulate you. They alter your mind and your sense of reality. They do it to such an extent that it is their mission, and their goal is that you are frightened of your garden. They want you to give up on your dream. They want you to stop working for the garden, or if you get there and enter it, to realize it’s “dangerous” and run from it.”-not an exact quote.

 

Hearing this, last year, I thought I was struck by a lightning bolt. The ten fingers on my hands are not enough to count how many times in adulthood I had run away from gardens. I either gave up on a garden, entered a garden and sprinted away after seeing a bee, or decided a garden was full of weeds and burned it down.

For twenty years, I had been told I was doing this because I thought I didn’t deserve the garden. Probably true, but telling myself I deserved that garden and should live in it wasn’t working. I kept hitting a brick wall, because I would get to the garden, and not be happy. The garden seemed “wrong” somehow, and I couldn’t understand why suddenly I didn’t want the exact thing I had dreamed about and worked so long and hard for.

I was afraid of the garden, and didn’t know it. The most important people in my life, for my entire life up until the age of 40, were teaching me to fear the garden, while they were dancing in it. I don’t fully understand why they would do this, but I knew they had to be gone. If I allowed them to feed poisonous words into my mind, I would continue living crouched at the barbed wire fence, and not understanding why I felt so hopeless.

So here I am, alone. My toddler daughter and I, alone. Does it mean I want to be alone forever? Of course not. It means I have room to heal, and room to attract the right sorts of people. 

I have room to learn who I am, not the person I have been pretending to be to please others. Not knowing who you are is the ultimate loneliness, because you are not even with yourself. 

So, to the people who have rejected me. To the people who called me “crazy” while acting like psychotics. To the people who told me I would never be good enough for them while they did nothing good for me. To the people who told me you can’t raise a child without help, while making it harder for me to raise a child. To the people who told me I needed a man to be happy, while telling me to be with the men who made me miserable. To the people who said “family is family”, insisting I care about people rooting for me to fail. And, best of all, to the people who said they would always be in my life, no matter what, for the rest of our lives…only to ignore me and pretend I didn’t exist.

Thank you. THANK you. THANK YOU. One more time, a MILLION TIMES thank you. Because I am now a diamond. I am becoming a person I never dreamed I could be. The fires you put me through gave me my shine.

By the way, the garden is beautiful.