About two weeks ago, I found myself sitting across from my therapist uttering the words, "I don't know if I know how to be myself anymore."
About a month prior to that, I found myself sitting across from my sister uttering the words, "I feel this constant pressure to achieve perfection, and I just cannot do it anymore."
And for the last two years prior to that... hell, maybe arguably even my entire life thus far, I was busy contorting myself into whatever and whoever was required of me to feel accepted. If it was required of me to be the only one in the room to laugh at someone's bad joke just so they wouldn't feel bad and an awkwardness wouldn't overcome the whole room; I laughed. If it was required of me to be complicit in a conversation I fundamentally disagreed with just so I wouldn't be abandoned, I complied. If it was required of me to comfort my parents for their own mucky adult decisions just so they wouldn't have to feel bad, I comforted.
Yes, it's true- I am a people-please-er from a long line of people please-ers. At best, sensitive and empathetic. At worst, martyr-esque and self-destructive.The irony is that this thing about me that was once genuine and delicate, has, with time (and equal parts disappointment and exhaustion) become rehearsed and hard. These days, expressing any feelings outside of anger and anxiety feels grossly disingenuous, though I can feel in the rhythm of my bones that I am still soft inside, becoming encased by a hard shell.
Yet, I am hopeful. I'm hopeful because in this new point of desperation that I am in, I can see that deep inside, I still exist somewhere. I am not lost; only buried. Digging myself out, uncovering myself- that is my life-line. My gift. My right. Something I've yet to allow myself to own.
