The Next Right Choice

One of the many clichés in recovery is to make the next right choice. It's served me well over the past three years. When I don't know what my next step is, or which issue to tackle next, when I haven't known what to do about the enormity of the dysfunction that I still live in because of my past - I don't have to have all of the answers, heck I don't have to have ANY of the answers. I need to make the next right choice.

It's not this pressure of perfectionism, oh I have to get it right. It's that I know I could choose to sit down and write, or I could go stare in the fridge and dream about what my next meal will be. My right choice is the one that leads me towards life, towards wholeness. It helps too, when I mess up, when I decide that I'm going to not just plan my next meal, I'm going to eat it right now too, even though I'm not hungry. It helps because I don't have to beat myself up, I can make my next right choice - to own my slip, to own that I chose medicating over feeling, and to release myself from my own judgement. I take my consequence and I make the next right choice.

Those choices add up, over and over until I'm now in this place where I no longer tie my worth to my weight. Where I like and even love who I am becoming - this introverted creative, full of scathingly brilliant ideas, who thrives on routine and is learning to live outside of the rules and the boxes. Where I can look in the mirror and see things that I like about myself, instead of only seeing what I hate. This place is one where I'm finally grateful to be alive, grateful that my best efforts to not live didn't succeed.

The past several months a recurring theme has been showing up - this theme of "I don't belong". It's not new. There were too many other things on my plate. It sucks, walking around feeling like a junior high girl left on the outside of every group. There's a lot of pain that says that it's true. There's pain that says that people would want me, value me if I was skinny. There's pain that says no one cares, you aren't unique, your words don't matter. There's pain that says I need to isolate, run away, withdraw, give up. I could do those things. I could believe all the things that my pain says. Much of what I'm feeling is based in the past. Because when I was a junior high girl, I didn't belong. I didn't fit in. I wasn't valued or cared about by my peer group. I was left out, repeatedly. Just because it was true back then doesn't mean that it's true in the present.

I've spent several days having to make my next right choice in this. Choosing to text a friend, choosing to tell my safe people how I feel, asking those closest to me to tell me one more time that I'm valued, that I matter to them, that I belong. It feels needy. It's also necessary. Some days I can hear my pain and validate what used to be true. Some days I can even list ways that it isn't true now. But some days, all I can do is add fuel to the fire and those are the days that my next right choice tells me to pick up the phone and ask for help.

This isn't going to just go away. My learning to like myself has taken years of hard work and choices. This is going to take time and choices too. It's not that I need to get rid of lies or stop believing them. My pain from then needs to be felt, to be written through, to be held and heard so it can then be released. In the process of doing that, my right choice then becomes reaching out when pain's voice drowns out my own.

Who knows, maybe three years from now I'll look back and see that I have learned to feel secure in my friendships, that I can trust that I am wanted, see that I'm valued, and feel included. Until that day, I'll keep making my next right choice.

The Girl In the Corner

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or...thoughts on self-perception.  also a further excavation into self-judgement.

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I've been turning this over and over for the last three weeks.  I've started to write this and walked away.  I've considered whether I needed to share it privately with my course-mates, or only with select individuals.  In the end I settled for writing it here.  Doing anything else is only fuelling the very feelings that I need to talk about.

I no longer believe that I'm intrinsically evil simply because I'm female.  I'm still wrestling with all of the repercussions of how that belief has defined me.  In the wake of that shifting and changing, another core belief surfaced.  I have this perception of myself as "other".  It has historical trauma roots like most things that I continually face.  It's not just one root.  This is almost as strong of a core belief as being evil used to be.  They are tied together.

I was other the very first time I went to public school because I lived in the cult up the street.  I was other because I already knew how to read.  I was other because there were crafts that I wasn't allowed to do.

I switched schools two years later - and I was other from day one.  It wasn't anything that I did or didn't do.  I lived in a different city and I hadn't started in kindergarten with the rest of the class.  The next fall the family moved out of the cult building into a house - and the friends that I had had there, well once again I became other.

When my self-harming behaviours escalated out of control in high school, I was the other that every one was terrified would succeed in killing herself.  Even before that I was the other not allowed to see my peers outside of school hours, not allowed to go to parties and I had long ago learned that it wasn't safe to bring friends home.

It happened again when I went to college.  It happened when physical health problems kicked in.  It happened when I moved to a new country.  It happens every time someone asks me "so what do you do all day?"

It's been a pattern in my life - a pattern of reinforcement.  I have a mountain of evidence that says I'm other, different.  I feel like the girl in the corner.  She learned to hide there and watch people.  Occasionally she will dart out to share a crumb of herself before running back to safety, to watch and see what these people do with the crumb. I hate this.  I get it.  I see where it comes from.  I want to be open with people, and not in my defiant - here's who I am, you can take it or leave it, see if I care - way.  I still believe that if people really knew me, they'd run away or try to "fix" me.  That's usually what happens.

I don't trust that people are generally good or have good intentions.  "Good" intentions are what shattered my personality.  "Good" intentions kept people from calling CPS and allowed them to believe the deflections from my mother.

I'm rambling.  Yes I'm learning slowly that there are places where I don't have to be the girl in the corner.  The lies still surface, even in those belonging places.  All week I've felt like the girl in the corner who can't stop crying.  The one who's so broken, too broken.  I want to stand up and scream that my heart feels shredded and I can't even tell you why.  I'm using every self-care tool that I have - it's the only thing that's keeping me from disappearing into the madness.

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Part of my self-care is that I've begun learning how to belly dance.  It never fails that I walk out after a class feeling grounded and connected to my body in a way that I've never been before.  I walk out sore, of course, but centred in myself and my emotions.  I can step back, look back at the part of this entry that I wrote this morning when all of the emotions were all up in my face and recognize that I don't always see myself as other.  I have kindness for myself.  I can see that yes I am broken and that brokenness doesn't define me, doesn't have to define me.  There is a me that is bigger than the brokenness of my identity, a me beyond the horrors inflicted upon me by others, and a me that is becoming this kick-ass woman that I truly love fiercely and passionately.

Socially Awkward

Part of the repercussions of being raised closed off from most of society is that I am still very awkward socially.  I do okay once I get to know people and they know me.  Yet the process of building those bridges - oiy it's full of self-doubt and difficulties.  I can't connect with people over children or work or school.  I don't have any of those pieces in my life right now.  My life is very much focused around healing from trauma and addiction, my own and others.  It's my full-time job and I love that this is where I am right now.  I love that I am discovering myself for the first time ever in my life.  It's such a cool process.  Yet where I'm at right now makes small talk even more painful for me - I just don't do small talk.  I'm a "lets-get-coffee-for-four-hours-and-trade-life-stories" kind of a girl.  It makes new places and new people feel itchy and uncomfortable for me.

There's a community group through church that my husband and I have belonged to for the last 2 years.  It truly has been a belonging, not just an attending.  We started out attending and on paper we "shouldn't" fit with this group.  We're the only ones without children and around 10 years younger than the average age.  But there's something about the dynamic that just works.  It really does feel like belonging and it's amazing.

It's not the sitting-on-the-outside-please-let-me-play-with-you that we've experienced in the past.  It's healthy and vibrant.  There is life there.  There is a place where I fit, where I don't have to hide or fade into the background or bite my tongue.  There is room for my rough edges and my tears.  There is also room for my sense of humour and for my becoming.

It's times like tonight that I can look back and say that God knows what He's doing.  He's got places for me where I don't have to hide in the corner.  We had a group before this one, a group that we loved and where I was really comfortable.  It was uncomfortable starting over two years ago.  It felt awkward and strange.  I didn't know other's stories and they didn't know mine.  Yet as those stories have been shared, there's been a growing sense of belonging.

I'm writing to remind myself that once upon a time, this didn't feel like I fit.  I currently have a couple new groups of people in my life.  People that I don't know their stories and they don't know mine.  It's new and different and I feel that awkward there.  I'm over-analysing everything that I say and do in these new e-Course groups.  "did I share too much?  Did I not give enough background? Oh crap I totally put my foot in my mouth..."  I've been here before and sometimes it takes time to find the place that's mine in a group.

I'm grateful for the places I have now that I know where my fit is.  I'm trying to practice patience as I remind myself that I will find the place that is mine in these new groups as well.