Stronger struggle

            For a very long time, I didn’t like myself very much. I know, that seems completely incongruous with the person you know now. But it’s true; I genuinely did not like myself for most of the first half of my life to date. I wasn’t pretty enough, I wasn’t thin enough, I wasn’t even smart enough. I was a bad daughter, a bad sister, a bad friend. Worse than that, I didn’t really believe I deserved any better because in addition to not liking myself, I didn’t love myself. At all. I’d go so far as to say I actually hated myself in a way that I am not now nor have ever been capable of hating another person.

            And I was depressed. Clinically, markedly, chronically depressed. Even when I was happy, there was a voice inside of me telling me I wasn’t worthy of that happiness, that even if it seemed like things were fine or that people liked me, I didn’t deserve it. I’d either fooled them somehow or they were just too stupid to see the real, wholly unworthy me. And that led me to do a lot of really dumb things. Trying to bribe boys to like me in middle school, trying to be the superior smart girl in high school, and finally trying to just end it all when I got out of college and had no more energy or resources to keep pretending.

            But one day, it stopped. I just stopped being depressed for reasons I do not to this day understand. It just went away. And once I stopped hating myself, I gradually got to a point where I not only loved myself, but I really and truly liked myself. I looked in the mirror, and I smiled at the woman I’d become. I liked that smile, and I liked the person who was behind it. She really was smart (in a book sense; even I’ve never been delusional enough to believe I have a lot of common sense), she really was pretty, and yeah, she could stand to lose a few pounds but the body she had was kind of sexy and, well, it did what it was supposed to do and it did it pretty damn well, thank you very much.

When I started liking myself, I had more room to like other people, and it suddenly became important to me to be the kind of friend I’d always wanted others to be to me. Not in a “I do for you; you do for me” kind of way, but just in a way whereby I felt good about myself and even better about the other person the more I could be there for her or him. I discovered I have a really generous nature, and that I have an almost limitless ability to forgive and understand others in the way I had forgiven and understood myself. I started to want more from my life than just accepting the way things were or even making the best of a bad situation. I began to believe, and eventually acted on, the idea that my life could be as good as I wanted it to be; the only limit was my own capacity to believe and act on my dreams.

I’ve lived in LA for a year now (well, a year and almost two weeks if you want to get technical), something I talked about and dreamed about for over a decade before it finally happened. Before I made it happen. I found a good apartment in a great neighborhood, doing something I never thought I’d do by moving to an urban environment. I got a classroom teaching job again at a school that on the surface might not seem a good match but where, at the end of the day, I truly have a chance to make a difference in a way I never have before. And I got to spend more time with my friends, make some new ones and flesh out my wonderful security blanket of folks whose love for me I never, ever doubt.

When you care about someone, you almost automatically and against your will have to take what they say more seriously. Some of that explains the self-loathing I experienced earlier in life, but more importantly it has brought something to me recently that I had pretty much abandoned in my dogged quest to find validity and significance within myself. I care what the people close to me think. I value their opinions. They matter, and how they feel about me and what they think about me- and for me- matters to me.

If you’ve spent so much time isolating your emotional self so as not to risk being brought down or hurt or damaged, it’s a bit unnerving to suddenly find yourself questioning…yourself. But in the past few weeks, I’ve slowly come to realize that to question is not to fail or to weaken or to put myself at risk. It’s not even demonstrative of a lack of gratitude for how good things are; if anything, it’s the antithesis of that! If I am truly grateful for the person into whom I have evolved, then I have to keep evolving. I can’t just rest, fat and happy, where I am now. And the only way to keep evolving is to shake the tree a bit, to question and reconsider and reevaluate. It doesn’t mean I have to start disliking myself again, or that by recognizing that perhaps I’ve hung onto certain ideas for too long and need to move beyond them I am somehow not being true to the real me. If anything, it means that I have come to so secure a place in my emotional wellbeing that I can actually risk a little unsurity, a little upheaval.

So bring it on, self. Let’s keep this river flowing, keep this moving sidewalk rolling forward, keep this person growing and evolving. It might not feel great all the time, but as I told my students a million times this year, “Struggle is good for you. Struggle makes you stronger.”  And I think I am finally strong enough to struggle with myself again.