If I’m ever going to create my future, I’m going to have to come to terms with my past.
I’ve been trying to avoid it, deny it, explain it away, make excuses for it, compensate for it, erase it, and so much more.
I’ve struggled to accept that this is the truth of my life. That this isn’t “just a phase.” It isn’t just going to disappear one day like it never happened.
I think I may have (unconsciously) thought that if I worked hard enough I would be “cured,” I’d become 100% “better”, and it would all be as if nothing had ever happened. That there would be some kind of “redemption” where I would be saved from my own damn self.
In practice what this meant was that I was working toward a model, a “goal” identity, that was completely inappropriate for me.
I wanted so badly to be normal. I would have done anything to not be so “complicated.”
The ideal future self I had in mind was so boring, so basic. So unthreatening. She was some happy, carefree, extraverted, easy going, and very chill girl (that’s why they said they wanted from me, right?).
I thought I could nip and tuck and edit away all of my humanity, become acceptable to the greater mass of society, and call it a success.
I would know I had “made it” when I was deemed normal by everyone and no one ever said anything bad about me ever again.
That was my vision for health: to completely erase myself, and finally just be what everyone else wanted me to be.
My vision now is this: I will not deny my past, I will not erase this self. I will not even try to compensate for the suffering I’ve had with some grandiose and misguided attempt to “make it all worth it.”
I will integrate my past. I will honor myself.
I will acknowledge all of the places and the people I have been, regardless of how strange or scary others find them to be.
I will speak to the truth of who I was, and how it was that I became who I am today.
