On the road to becoming authentically me I’ve realized so many things. The more obvious are the people, places, things, I will leave behind. The behaviors I will no longer tolerate. I’ve worked through a lot of fears, and then had to work through them again. Fear of rejection, abandonment, judgement. Hell, I’ve even practiced working through my fear of death. Lately, my fear of judgement is coming back up for me again, and for the past couple days I’ve felt that I’ve been able to make a lot of progress with that. What it all comes back to is how much I’m judging myself.
This morning I have been thinking a lot about how I was taught that I was responsible for my moms feelings growing up. She feels that I still am responsible for how she feels, but I’m no longer feeling responsible. I’ve learned what boundaries are. She used to say to me, “You always find the broken toys and try to fix them”, when referring to my friends or relationships. In private I would get so frustrated because I didn’t understand what was wrong with me. So I would exhaust myself trying to fix them, or abandon myself for months, even years until I got sick of being abused by them at some point. There would usually come a point, at least in romantic relationships, where I could say enough is enough. But with friendships I would hold on to them tightly no matter how toxic they were. The fact that I could keep them for as long as I did meant something, was all that mattered. Nothing else. My loyalty was the most important thing to me. I thought that I would be rewarded for it eventually. Maybe secretly hoped that someone would notice my stoic suffering at the hands of my loved ones and commend me for it. But that day never came.
So my life crashed and burned. It needed to. I was left with one true friend, and eventually my sister came back after she also did some healing work. And there are other people that have tried to come back in, but without realizing it, just through my responses I’ve showed them I’ve changed. There is the friend that always expected you to match the level they are on or they didn’t want to talk to you, yeah thats out. You can no longer tell me what to do. Or the friend who has such strong opinions that if you even slightly speak one that is different than hers she would cut you off in an instant. I tried this after 7 years of friendship as an experiment and haven’t heard from her since. Or the friend that expected me to bail her out of every difficult situation she put herself in, be there for her whenever she needed it, but never be there for me. She now gets bland responses back if she reaches out to me. I just no longer have the energy to put her above me. I could continue to go on and on. The interesting thing I found upon reflecting is the friends I chose were all fragments of my mom. And the abuse I’ve suffered all my life. I spoke of her abuse being insidious yesterday, and this is also why it is the perfect word for it. The grooming in childhood to put her first, to abandon myself, put me at risk for abusive relationships all around as an adult.
I reflected on that this morning and am working to reframe my mind. Instead of thinking “What a loser I am, I have no friends”, I am thinking, “Would I really want to be friends with them”? The same goes for a relationship, someone I meet, someone I’m considering being friends with, I no longer need to abandon myself to be liked. Because liking myself is all that matters. So now, instead of wondering if they like me, the bigger, better question is do I even like them anyways?
The Girl Without A Face 