I've been thinking about a few things lately that I've come to understand more as I've grown up. Grant it, I'm far from being completely independent and a total adult, but I consider myself a grown up now. I'm learning a lot about who I am lately. I'm starting to see what has shaped me into who I am.
I am a lot of things. I am first and foremost a wonderful friend. I may not be the most social person or really extroverted at all. However if you befriend me; you've got a friend for life. I am loyal and caring. I am the person who will drop everything and be at your side through thick and thin. I am reliable. I stick with my word and I try very hard to be honest. I may not have many friends, but the quality is far more important than quantity to me.
I am going to be a great psychologist because of this someday. I will be helpful and kind. I will be there for other people who may not be so lucky as to have a friend to call on. I will help resolve personal issues (much like I do now for my girlfriends) and help to overcome fears.
I have overcome many obstacles. I have had my heart broken. I have been rejected. I have been abandoned. I have been stuck with my own debilitating fears and worries. But I have overcome all of these things.
I have had my heart broken, but I learned about love. I also learned how to love myself by being hurt so deep. I learned to rely on my own self for happiness and not on anyone else. I have learned how to talk and share personally with someone. Chris may have hurt me a lot, but I thank God for him every day. He is one of those people that were so perfect and so wrong at the same time. God gave him to me as a means of teaching me how to love and become the person I am today.
I have been rejected by those who I thought were going to always accept me. I was rejected by Chris for a long time and just now we are starting over as friends. (I asked him his favorite color the other day. We haven't just talked like that in years.) Rejection hurts. I learned to protect myself. I also learned that sometimes, if you make walls so high, no one will dare scale them to reach you. I have learned about expectations through rejection.
I was rejected by Katie in a way as well. I had an expectation of this woman instantly being proud and loving me for who I was. But, I had to prove myself to her. I didn't know how to make her see that despite my problems in my life, I was a person worthy of her love. I expected Katie to become a strong part of my life in college and onward. I have been proven wrong. I have talked with my friends and family a lot about her. I believe that I am going where I need to. If Katie wants to be part of my life she can put in the effort as I have tried to. I can also understand that when Katie and I began to talk as I became an adult, I was not in a good place. She did not get to see my best self. She needs to understand that, just because I have faced problems and very near failed a lot of challenges, I am ok. She needs to understand that I am good now and I plan to stay good. She needs to understand that I understand if she wants to move forward in our lives, on separate paths. I respect her desire for her own family, life, friends, existence. I will be sad if she chooses to move forward without me, but I feel as if she has already made that choice. I am worthy of a relationship where I am allowed to be the young adult who is still learning and still feel loved and supported. I should not be criticized or punished for not being ok one hundred percent of the time. I hope that Katie will read this and understand my desire for things to be good for both of us. I harbor no hard feelings for her. I just want everything to be able to move forward.
I have been abandoned. This singular fact has irreparably shaped my life. I know I was put into my family for my best interest, but in my deepest heart of hearts I will never understand how a parent can give up a child. I know without a doubt in my heart that I would drop everything and give everything for any child I have the blessing to have in my life, whenever I have them. I do not judge or fault or intend to hurt anyone with this. I simply mean to express that I do not understand and this has caused me a massive amount of pain. I do not lack for love and I do not wish for a different life. I have an internal fear that I will always be left. I cannot believe that anyone truly will stay by my side forever. It is an internal battle I fight every day. I have been abandoned by friends and family. Basically everyone from high school left me on the ground broken and bleeding and kicked me on the way out the door. I have been intimately hurt by Chris and the horrible way he treated me when I was dealing with many of my deepest issues at once. I don't understand how people can give up on someone when they clearly need help the most. I am just not that way and I don't understand for the life of me why people abandon their friends and family when they need help or just someone to be there for them. I don't understand, but this continues to cause me anxiety and fear in my life.
I have fears of being left alone, abandoned, rejected, broken, and made fun of. I'm terrified of the dark, clowns, puppets, marionettes, and dolls. I'm intensely frightened of making new friends and being in unfamiliar situations. I am claustrophobic and highly anxious in social situations. I have OCD and when I get stressed out I clean and straighten and organize and spend countless hours and energy counting numbers in my head and counting my steps and listening to the sound of my feet on the ground when I walk and feeling off balance because I stepped on a crack with one foot and not the other. I have feet that never sit still. My toes twitch and my feet tap and if you try to get me to stop moving my feet I bite the inside of my lip so much it bleeds and becomes raw. I have psoriasis and it flares when I get stressed and as I become more stressed about it flaring up I itch and it makes it ten times worse. I have such bad anxiety in the mornings that I can't get out of bed for a few minutes until I can start to feel my lungs working again. I am afraid I will lose my handle on everything again and get called crazy. Despite all my problems, I am not crazy. I am thriving. I am handling everything and interpersonal issues too, everyday. The next time you ask me if I'm ok or if things are going good, remember these things before you judge me for complaining that I'm stressed out. A little stress for me becomes compounded by all these things and turns into a circular worry in my head that will refuse to leave. My head is a very, very, frantic place. But I am happy.
I am so good right now. I am doing well in almost all my classes, minus evil theory course..... I am enjoying friendships that are for once returning the effort I put into them. I am living in a place where I feel safe and comfortable. I am writing and learning new things about my poetry again. I am discovering all these things about myself and it feels good to know why I am who I am.
I never understood why I feel everything so much more deeply than others, until now. I love deeper, hurt deeper, feel deeper than everyone else because I know what it is like to have those things taken from your grasp. I know what it is like to not understand what you feel because you can't separate yourself from your feelings. I am an emotional person. I feel things before I understand them. This is my greatest weakness and my greatest strength. I know emotions like the back of my hand because I wear them on my sleeve. I understand people on an emotional level and this often makes things hard for me. I cannot just talk to someone superficially. That feels empty and unfulfilling. I make friendships based on an emotional place that I feel safe. Crowds frighten me because there is so much going on that I have no safe place to stand. I fear being abandoned because I know that the pain it causes hurts me to the core, every time. I have anxiety and all those other things because I am constantly on alert of any danger threatening to hurt the stable place inside myself where I have finally allowed myself to grow from.
Above all of this, I have realized I am not broken. I am not a part of a person I once was. I am not missing any pieces. I am a whole, strong, and beautiful person. I am determined to show the best me to the world everyday.
I again stress that I do not intend to hurt anyone and I am not judging anyone. I am just sharing the valuable things I have learned about who I am.So I pose this question, Who are you?
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