2005-11-11 
 

glad to be me

If I had it all to do over again, I'd like to try and stop hating myself a bit earlier in life.

Surrounded by people who loved me during my youth, yet feeling that I was an aberration...that I was somehow supposed to have been above it all and failed miserably, kept me wavering between hopeless despair and intense self hatred.

Maybe this is normal, but I tend to think not.

Sometime in 4th grade I accepted Mr. JC as my lord, mostly in hopes that he'd save me. In many ways he did, but like any good god, he knew that letting me find my own way was worth more in the long run than a wave from his magic wand.

I'd fall asleep praying to him, "please let the apocalypse come...life is too hard...let it all end now...please let tomorrow be the last day." For many years, these were often my last waking thoughts, but he never answered that particular prayer.

There was a little group of druggy types in junior high who called me Smiley because...well I was always smiling. I'd learned that keeping that fake smile pasted on did one of two things. It either scared people into leaving you alone or convinced them you were okay and needed no further attention. The druggy types just thought I'd found some really good weed.

I made a feeble attempt at suicide at age 13 by downing a bottle of aspirin and various other low level medications I found at home....hoping they'd combine forces and do me in. My naivete is almost laughable in retrospect, but I'm thankful today that my parents didn't have anything harder biding it's time in the medicine chest. I suffered nothing worse than a few hours of throwing up and an extreme dizziness. It even got me out of school the next day, but I spent several years hating myself for being such a total wimp because I hadn't even had the guts to kill myself properly.

My epiphany that God loved me because of who I was instead of in spite of it came at age 16, shortly after I'd decided that falsely following rules I didn't believe in would only result in hurting those around me, and myself, more than rebelling against those same rules.

I stayed pretty quiet about it all at first, but over the course of several years I learned to allow myself to be happy without feeling guilt and started to pass that message on to friends who needed to hear it. A decade later I fully surrendered to the power of the universe around me and finally forgave myself for being alive in a messy world. It was that day that I felt myself cradled in God's hands and knew that everything was going to be okay.

I thought the point I was making was this:

How great would it be to feel that way earlier in life instead of waiting until I was in my late 20s? How much further could I have gone had I chosen to change my mind as a child instead of as a teenager? What if I'd moved faster and given in to joy in college?

The truth is that I think I needed to remember this journey I'd taken. I still stumble across old recordings now and again. Looped admonitions that I'm worthless and a failed person, but they're harder to hear and easier to erase than in my youth. That being said, I've been so busy these past few years that I'm in danger of forgetting that life's a continuous journey.

Changing my mind, and deciding to love myself was one of the hardest and most powerful things I've done in this life. I need to remember that. The choices I'm faced with these days sometimes seem insurmountable, but I've already made the toughest choice of all.

Labels: dose of mikey, memory lane, spirit

* posted by me at 3:12 AM

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