What fears have you overcome and how?
Today’s Daily Prompt is one I answered last year, therefore I cannot answer it again officially and have it appear in those answers. But I can talk about it here. There’s no law against it. Matt Mullenweg hasn’t even run for office. 😛 I tease him like we’re friends, but we’re not. We just went to the same high school in Houston, Texas years apart (I’m older). He’s not this web god to me, he’s a kid with a horn (which I believe was tenor sax). We weren’t in the same class, but we were in the same jazz program. My one regret in life is not making the commitment to go to HSPVA even though I lived in Sugar Land. I think I would have been a better player if I’d had more years with Doc, but by junior year I was so overwhelmed (more so at Clements because I’d never done marching band before, and the rep was much harder) that I was over it. My senior year, I took study hall and Microcomputer Applications instead of any music at all. Once I got over the overwhelm, I started singing seriously, changing gears completely.
It was stepping out on a ledge to be a singer instead of a trumpet player who faked it. I had such imposter syndrome. Handling that fear came from fellow soprano Cecilia Bartoli………. A trumpet player who faked it. I can tell when she’s singing baroque that she’s controlling her breath and the way she sets her throat for every single note (there’s an almost imperceptible gap between each note. Listening to her sing a Bach melisma sounds like Wynton Marsalis doing the opening to CBS Sunday Morning.
In an actual sermon, this is where I’d tell you the part that Jesus was also a trumpet player in some way or another….. Chasing tax collectors with a whip is a very good example of first chair arrogance. 😉 But when I approach a blog entry, I’m not necessarily looking for a Biblical connection, though I do it all day long. It’s more that I’m telling myself the words I need to hear. Anne Lamott, a fellow armchair theologian, says much the same thing- you have to write the book you can’t find on the shelf.
No one is ever going to do an exhaustive study of me that will ever actually help me more than taking an exhaustive history and physical of myself. External validation is deadly when you focus on it instead of feeling secure inside yourself. It is a spiritual journey no matter what path you take to get there. It only matters that you make it. Self actualization is key to being able to make life pleasurable, because you’re never going to live in a world without conflict.
If you focus on people pleasing, you’re not actually doing any conflict resolution. You are fitting your personality to the people around you…. Or at least, that’s the difference I’ve noticed since I stopped giving any fucks what other people thought of me at all. That there wasn’t anyone in the world I could rely on to know me and care for me the way I do. It’s not that I don’t trust anyone else, it’s that no one else lives in my head a hundred percent of the time. I had to learn to love me because no matter what, I’m stuck with me. I deal with conflict resolution in myself on this Web site. Man vs. Self is easily the hardest conflict to resolve, because just like when you look at your art you pick out the flaws, if you concentrate on everything that’s negative about you, that’s what you’ll see.
You won’t see yourself as worthy or deserving of love.
I feel like I know this better than most, because my mother had bad teeth for a lot of her life. She never smiled because of it. Then, later in life she got her whole mouth redone, and her smile was movie star. It didn’t make her smile any more than she did before, because what was wrong was internal and no amount of body work was going to fix it. She had to get under the hood, and she was only starting to do it when she died. She was so young that I grieve more for the future than the past, because I would have liked to see her on a journey of self-actualization. Once she started on her own, I was able to talk to her about talking to someone, and perhaps getting on medication. She had dysthymia her whole life, undiagnosed but Al the signs were there. She fell down on the job as a parent when she was in grief, because it consumed her completely. She was too lost in her depression to take care of us, and I mean this sincerely. She was not a bad parent on purpose. She was in grief. I can let it go and re-parent myself. I can give myself all the things I needed in childhood. She didn’t miss anything because she meant to- she missed things because she couldn’t see them.
I didn’t have children because I got close twice, and then never again. Once my trauma started showing, I realized that I had too much crap to pass on that would be detrimental to a child, and that I wouldn’t resolve it before my baby years were over. That it was more important to be healthy than create another unhealthy person living in my house.
However, I do love children, and I am not opposed to dating parents. That’s because I love kids who already have parents, and I’m just the girlfriend who spoils them. I do it by turning on her brand of working with kids. It is ironic how much she missed with her own kids while giving away everything she had to others. It’s what made her feel secure, teaching. It’s what didn’t give her imposter syndrome. She became more of herself as a teacher. It didn’t mean that in her time at home, she wasn’t grieving. It was a show she could turn on and off. We all can.
It’s what you do to get by as a preacher’s family expected to be perfect. In public, nothing shows. Not even a crack.
So, the sermon I need to hear today is that I did something my mother didn’t, which is to find peace within myself after watching her die without it. That it’s okay to acknowledge she was a wonderful parent when she was attentive, but she couldn’t be when her own life went to hell in a hand basket.
This is not a testimonial where Jesus made it all better. It’s not that kind of sermon. The sermon is that you have so much more to give the world after you learn to start taking your portion of your energy first. Get yourself into homeostasis and work from that internal compass rather than feeling freaked out by other people’s feelings all the time.
You know what’s true and what’s not. Other people’s words become different to you. Your self esteem doesn’t go up and down when someone else speaks. People pleasers are often anxious about offending anyone and making up ways in which they have. Self actualization stops the feeling that people aren’t in touch with you because they don’t care. Being confident in yourself makes you feel like they shouldn’t bother contacting you if they’re not willing to do the work.
You had to go through hell to self-actualize, and afterwards you stop hanging out with people who make you feel like you’re regressing, because those patterns are so toxic. It’s not about thinking that you’re better than anyone else, just a feeling that you have a right to exist in the world. That you’re not a ghost.
People are treating you like a ghost because you’re not taking up any room. You’re not making any demands of them. It’s not a give and take. It’s a take and take, because they get something out of you being the one who’s always there for them, and so did you. You just come at it from opposite ends of the spectrum because they don’t have to deal with your boundaries. Only you have to deal with theirs, because your self-esteem is so wrapped up in what they think. It is unsustainable, and changing from a people pleaser to someone who is actually willing to take up space in the world took a very, very long time.
It was 10 years before I was ready to say goodbye to the promise of a relationship with Supergrover, because I just wanted her to notice me. I was being emotionally vulnerable, doing all the right things, and nothing. So, I got tired of it and moved on.
But it wasn’t until I let go of trying to please her that I came into myself. That I saw the game for what it was, and told her to take it somewhere else. And then I had a change of heart, because I thought, “what if she was trying to be healthy and didn’t know how? What if I’m getting the opposite of what I actually need because she’s trying to communicate and it’s so angry that it’s pissing me off. Lay out your feelings like you actually like me and we’ll talk.
That is what self-actualization can do for you. That you can let even a great love go because you’re not willing to engage in toxic patterns any more. In short, I laid out my expectations, and she rose to meet them. However, she didn’t really fold and listen to me until I said I was so much happier without her, which I phrased poorly. I wasn’t happier without her, I was happy without the roller coaster. Just setting in with Zac and Bryn and not worrying about that third string so much.
But, something in her changed when she heard “I’m happier without you,” and she actually listened to why I thought that and agreed to help us fix our relationship. It was a massive win, because it represents everything I’ve been trying to do….. Be so comfortable in myself that she didn’t matter more than me to me.
But it’s very hard, because she’s so endearing. 😉
On day one, she said, “you’re not going to fall in love with me, as adorable as I might be. You’re going to fall in love with truth and honesty.” It has turned out to be the most prophetic thing she’s ever said, because it’s 11 years later and I don’t feel any differently than I did then.
So, on this Pride Sunday, remember to be proud of you. It’s the only way you’ll cope when others aren’t. We can talk all the time about how the establishment ignores us, but it’s not as big a problem as internalized homophobia because of it.
I’m proud of being queer, because it only makes my tapestry with Supergrover that much more rich and the colors deeper.
The sermon that I needed to hear this week is that as I became more proud of myself, I became more proud of her. That having boundaries allowed me to love her more, not less.
Bah dum pum…… Jesus!
I told you I’d have it done by 10:30.
Stories That Are All True 