I’ve been down lately. There are a lot of reasons. Most of it comes down to something that happened ten months ago, something I am still grappling with and not ready to share about. It has caused a bit of a snowball effect where it has shined light into a number of aspects of my life that I am not particularly thrilled about.
Yesterday something came to light unrelated to that something I need to face. I am wasting my life, I am wasting the time I was given here on earth as me, in this body. I am wasting the gifts I was given and squandering what I was born to do.
I was born with a deep feeling that I came here to do something important, to make a difference in the world, to help create meaningful change. Instead I allowed myself to be bullied and minimized, to be diminished and overruled. I overrule myself even , I don’t need anyone to do it for me. I do it to myself, because I have been so well trained since childhood. I was made to feel that my goals and desires, even my achievements were not important. It wasn’t cruelty I grew up with, it was simple indifference. It kept me small. It set me up to stand aside again, and again, and again in life. “Oh yes, you first”. “Oh, yes, I’m silly, I know.” ‘Oh no, I don’t matter, you are correct.’
That step asideness has followed me from childhood, into friendships, roommates, and eventually a marriage where my needs, my goals, my desires were unimportant. After my husband left, he attacked every attempt to move forward or stand up, to achieve, to succeed, to create. From cyber attacks to full on defamation, to threats and insults hurled publicly online and in private messages. His thinking was always my success was his failure. I cannot understand the thinking, but I can see it throughout our relationship. Anyone around us having success meant his failure. Of course it didn’t, but to him it did. It was how he thought. And, I allowed his skewed thinking to keep me small, fearful, and quiet. That is not to say I have been totally idle, I have continued and built and created in spite of this, but I see that I hide. I hide my real expression, I hide my thoughts, and my writing. I have a folder on my computer filled with posts for this site that I have written and never posted. dozens of them, over a hundred maybe.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve done art shows, written a book or two, had an artist’s residency. From the outside, it probably looks pretty good. I’ve been told I’m strong and resilient, that I do so much, and I have done so much, but it is nothing compared to what I want to do, what I’ve done, or half done and kept hidden.
Back to yesterday, I decided to start transcribing some of my notepads, I began with one that was mostly filled with daily and weekly to do lists, but sometimes I wrote stuff in, it is from 2023, and I was stunned by how many of the same projects I am still working on, how many of the same goals remained unacheived, and how much of what I wanted to do, see, be remained unattained. It was a gut punch. So, today I begin. Today, I stop making the same lists. Today, I do something to push myself forward, and this is it.