#119 - Learning How To Like Myself

Content Warning: This essay contains frank references to suicide/suicidal ideation, as well as thoughts on bullying, fatphobia, eating disorders, and emotional neglect.

“We let people treat us this way.”

~ my least favorite quote of all time

This morning I went and wrote at a coffee shop.

It’s my favorite place to write. My little table in the corner of the patio, smack dab in the middle of Bushwick, on a street packed with fashionable 20/30somethings who all love to get a $4 cold brew on their way to Work From Home.

Sometimes, when the weather is just right and I’m debuting a new clothing item (in this case, my new corduroy LA Dodgers hat, the first and only hat to ever fit me and not make me feel like I looked seven years old) I hit a writing sweet spot where I can let go and just be honest.

I wrote ten pages about being bullied.

Because I had to get it out. I had been keeping it in for so long.

I have been bullied my entire life. And that’s hard to admit because the first question usually becomes about my actions and then I feel stuck because the response of “it was mostly due to other people’s fatphobia” makes everyone real uneasy.

But it’s true!

See, the thing is, I wasn’t just bullied by a bunch of random dudes throughout middle and (some of) high school via being asked out every day (the joke is that no one would ever actually want to), I was also bullied by my friends and partners. Family, even!

School? Unsafe.

Home? Unsafe.

And when there are literally no safe spaces to be yourself in, and then you get to college and live kind of alone but also surrounded by other people all the time, you may just have a full meltdown! And then you may spend the next 10 years of your life coping with the heaviness of all of those realizations before you finally get the chance to be on your own for the first time.

And then every time you have an epiphany over the course of those next two years about how Ok & Maybe Normal you feel, you’ll feel bad about how long it took to get there because it’s like soooo embarrassing to admit that you don’t think you experienced anything close to true joy for the first 29 years of your life because that sounds absurd and tragic in so many ways but THEN you realize that this is the first time in your life you don’t have to interact with anyone who finds you embarrassing and the ludicriousness of the entire thing reaches critical mass and the bewilderment re: lengthy timeline, clears.

The thing is, there are plenty of reasons kids get bullied. But regardless of the individual, bullying occurs to keep the status quo. And a lot of people are petrified of being tainted with anything Uncool because they’re so insecure in themselves and they feel a ton of shame around that fact so they get very sensitive to what they imagine others’ perception of them is.

Being fat isn’t cool anywhere. (Except in history when it denoted a higher class status/wealth, which is a weird fact to be told as if it would provide comfort. But alas, hasn’t stopped many from trying! Have you ever seen a Botticelli though? They follow up with, as if they’re the most original person in the world.)

But there are the people who bully, there are targets, and then there are the insecure masses standing on the sidelines just hoping they won’t Be Next.

And then sometimes The Targets make friends with The Bystanders.

And in my case, suddenly those insecure people became good friends with a fat girl and had fun with the fat girl—but they felt bad about the shame they felt around feeling weird about being friends with the fat girl in public.

Sure they have fun in private, but…out there? Where people could see? What will other people say?

So I was a secret friend for some. No Top 8 position to be seen, but I sure as shit slept over most often!

(Sometimes it was small things that indicated the shame, like noticing that when they hung out with other people they would mention who in their AIM Away Message—but when I was hanging out it was always a vague song lyric. And sometimes it was much bigger, like being sent a link to a webcam stream where the two people who I considered my best friends held up pictures of the three of us and made fun of how fat I was and called me “the blob” to their audience of weirdo old men who were watching teenagers online in 2008.)

So when those other people did say mean things about me or our friendship, did anyone have the spine necessary to stand up for their friend, or were they too worried that would put them in the line of fire? And how does that inability to protect those they care for make them feel later?

In some ways, I wonder if the shame of bystanding keeps people in line better than being an actual target of bullying.

It’s much easier to admit to being a victim than to analyze the involvement and repercussions of one’s inaction.

I’ve always been at the bottom of the food chain because I’m visibly fat and I dared to exist uh, somewhat loudly. I am also, autistic! And while I may not have clocked it you can actually scientifically prove the other kids sure did!!

It’s so hard to not be resentful of my past. But I also was like so stuck in it. In this awful fully-obsessed way I got caught up trying to figure out why all the time.

Why it happened. Why people behave(d) that way. Why I stayed when they did, why I forgave them, why I decided that shrinking into myself was the best course of action.

Cruelty is unknowable in some ways and so explainable in others.

It’s just that oftentimes the explanations make people feel really uncomfortable because what if they’re like that?

It’s easier to avoid the mirror than to process what they’re seeing. To be willing to change the uglier parts of our belief systems that were handed to us whole-cloth from the unhealed society that came before us. It is the fault of the institutions, but the desires those institutions need to constantly reinforce are carried out by people who refuse to know any better.

I didn’t like myself for a long time.

And part of that was because I had never been allowed to be myself uncritically or unconditionally, but a bigger part was the inner voice that had taken on the vocal tics of my worst and meanest critics.

I would get dressed and look in the mirror and the first five thoughts were the meanest fat jokes my brain could think of. A gamut of the most horrible things someone could say about what I was wearing. Echoes of my mother telling me I “looked like I fell off the back of a truck”, etc.

And I had to muddle through that and get myself to go outside wearing it anyway, and nothing bad would happen because I’m an adult so other adults aren’t generally nasty towards strangers, but that data couldn’t breach the impenetrable self-critical wall, and the cycle would continue.

It took everything I had just to convince myself to leave the house most days.

In college, I didn’t want to go to parties because I didn’t have the right clothes, and I knew enough to know I didn’t have the right clothes so I would stand there in whatever outfit I had cobbled together and try not to notice that everyone else got at least one “I love your shoes” and I rarely even got eye contact.

I would put on a good face because I knew that no one actually wants to hear insecurities being spouted off. And in the moments I couldn’t hold back, I would get a sympathetic ear up to a point but it gets weird because the whole ~societal conditioning~ meant that oftentimes when I would complain, someone would delicately lobby that maybe I should just—& strap your boots on for this radical suggestion—try to lose weight.

As if that was a new suggestion. As if that was going to help me in that moment. As if that wasn’t the crux of my decades-long bulimia.

But so often I would go to the party, and I would try.

I would try to not be sad/frustrated/envious because once again I had to grin through being left slightly outside of the conversation circle. And then I had to temper any resentment that bubbled up around the fact that no one at these parties was ever really nice to me. It just wasn’t exciting that I was there—my presence was to be dutifully ignored in the hopes I would get the message and not come next time.

And while occasionally my friends would be considerate, or allow me to trail behind them throughout the night without making it weird, more often than not I ended up going to a lot of parties with people who kind of wished I wasn’t there because it’s not fun to bring the ugly* fat girl to the party. It’s certainly not cool as the fat girl to try and unsolicitedly hit on people because if there’s one narrative we’ve really drilled into public consciousness it’s that the only reason a guy would ever sleep with a fat girl is as an act of charity because the dude’s friend wants to hook up with the fat girl’s skinny friend and they were “in the way” so he “took one for the team”.

*we no longer use the word ugly in polite society, we’ve changed it to the much less offensive “unconventionally attractive” or, as I like to say, “conventionally unattractive” but that only goes over well with other people who also don’t care about how attractive the masses fine them. Uggo’s of the world, unite!

Cool! That’s so fun. It’s awesome to have one narrative around why someone might be attracted to me and have that narrative be some combination of pity & friendship duty.

It did not help that I was in college when Jersey Shore was popularizing the term “Grenade”. It did not help that a particular Kanye song was regularly played when I got into cars.

If your stripper name "Porsche" and you get tips from many men

Then your fat friend, her nickname is "Minivan"

Kanye West, Diamonds from Sierra Leone

(When I was in middle school, AMC would run The Breakfast Club on loop and one of my bullies discovered the ultimate reference because Bender declares, “Claire is a fat girl’s name.” Which isn’t even fair at ALL because Molly Ringwald wasn’t even fat in the movie!!! Just catching strays left and right!)

But then sometimes guys would like me, because I’m attractive to them, but then they would be overwhelmed with shame about what other people might say about them, and about me, and about them liking me, so they would either

a) take their inner-shame out on me in confusing ways

and/or

b) keep me as a secret backup crush/attention spicket.

Oh? You want some attention? Just call Claire! She’ll be right over, she can’t get enough of this string-me-along will-they-won’t-they (oh they definitely won’t) shit. Oh yeah it’s actually really fun, sometimes people ask outright if we’re dating (because I, the guy who she likes and who likes her is sure as shit acting like we’re dating) and she’ll say, “No.” but I’ll hit ‘em with the, “We’ll talk about it.” and it really keeps her on the train for another month!

The one thing that got me through the weird tribulations of Meeting Guys In College
Who Then Got Weird About Me was a random call-in to the Savage Lovecast in which Dan Savage stated that fat women have to wait until they’re 28 to date because it takes men that long to stop prioritizing their friends’ opinions over their own attraction preferences. And look, is that like fair or kind? Not really! But it was clear and honest and I clung to that life preserver so hard on the nights I would be danced around in a kitchen only to be ignored at the party later.

In high school, I discovered the root cause of my bullying in middle school had stemmed from a kid admitting he had a crush on me to his friends. His friends made damn sure he would never admit to anything like that again. It wasn’t about me it was about reinforcing desirability politics—which wasn’t in the scope of a seventh-grader brain at ALL and has provided little comfort in the years since. If anything, it only increased the tragicness of the cruelty. But at least I know it wasn’t random, at least I can trace the pattern back to the unfortunate but explainable root.

So when someone finally did date me right after college, oh my god it was on.

In the worst possible ways.

Did I love her? Yes. In all the ways that I could at the time.

I didn’t have…any healthy models to work off of. Not even like, from culture.

But we didn’t argue so I saw not having conflict as a positive thing rather than a super clear sign that we were both repressed beyond belief.

And like, we had fun together, when it was the two of us. We had fun hanging out with my friends. Her friends? Haaaated me (oh my god they hated me so much it’s kind of funny in hindsight how long I was able to subtly torture them with the sheer act of my presence). And I would beg her to stand up for me, but she would act as if what I was saying wasn’t true, and hey they invited us for dinner next week and surely the girlfriend of her best friend wasn’t going to spend the entire night calling my partner by a weirdly intimate nickname and putting on a playlist in order to compete with me about how many more bands she knew, right?

Uh, wrongo bongo!

Four years into the seven-year relationship, after my ex once again evaded inviting me out with her friends who were visiting from out of town I confronted her and asked her point-blank if she was embarrassed of me.

“Yes, okay? Yes. I don’t—I don’t know. So. Yeah.”

I felt my heart splinter. Crack.

I started to sob. Couldn’t breathe even a little.

And it provided very little comfort to see that she was crying too.

The room felt so heavy because we both knew it was unrecoverable.

It was out there now.

So. Yeah.

She felt wretched, but she couldn’t take it back. And even if she could take back the words—the actions were still clear. I had just made her label them more clearly.

And I knew, in that moment, it was over. It couldn’t—there was no way back from that.

But we were moving to New York City in a few months. I was moving back to the one place I had ever loved living in. And I had to get out of Portland and I had to take my two cats with me and I couldn’t figure out how I was going to get everyone on the plane without sticking to the plan.

The plan was keeping me alive.

So I woke up the next morning and I went to work per usual. I strolled on down by the Pepsi Factory and waved to the truckers who let me sneak by before they started reversing into the bays. I put on Rachel Maddow’s podcast and I actively disassociated to the sounds of her highlighter strokes while I walked across the bridge.

I could cope, I was coping great, in fact. I started doing even more work at my job that I had speedrun my way up the ladder to secure and I wasn’t breaking down into tears all the time so that’s good right!!! No time to think and process lest it all catch up with me but I also needed to order more trucks of dog food and revamp the collar wall and make buying plans for Superzoo.

I didn’t really snap back into reality until four months later when I landed in JFK, Weem in hand.

My best friend met me off the red-eye and we took a taxi back to her place.

I was so tired that seconds after I had tapped in my Seamless order on her phone, I passed out on the tile floor.

I hadn’t slept that well in years.

I was out! I had escaped Portland!! And it was just Portland that was the root of all of my problems and surely not the social entanglements that left me feeling bereft, right?

I spent a month in New York City on my own. I got a (bad) job, I locked down a (terrible/tiny) apartment, and by the time I had come up for air my ex arrived with my other cat and our belongings came in a crate and for my birthday she unpacked all the boxes and gave me a home and I took that as a sign that it would be okay, we could start fresh in a new city. (I apparently didn’t take that I didn’t miss her or think of her that often while we were apart as a sign at all which like, maybe was informed by financial reality reasons but let’s be honest—that one’s on Coach Claire.)

I was certainly a happier and better version of myself here, it could be that this was all we needed, right?

And we had been together for so long like, she would look inward and change and grow because she loved me, right? She was in the wrong—and she even knew it! So I just had to trust that the love that she kept professing for me would manifest as respect for my personhood. Right?

Yeah, that never happened.

Because I had already shown her that I would stay. That I had no self-respect at all. Not even like, a little tiny bit.

And that was my fault because I let her treat me that way. It was my fault because I should have already been a complete person by the time we got together. It was my fault because I was just so fucking embarrassing.

So if I was the problem, maybe I could be the solution.

I would just have to be less of an embarrassment.

I would just have to be really cool all the time and impress her friends because if I could do that she would see that I wasn’t a mortifying plus-one and I would have solid evidence that I was loveable.

Because when you don’t receive unconditional love as a child, it has all these weird knock-on effects that someone should really write a book about someday.

As an adult—I can see that it was a result of a lot of alcoholism and the fact that my parents are people with their own core wounds and life stories that got expressed differently to each of their children but like…alcoholic families have these fun textbook family roles you can point and I was The Scapegoat so that was already bad/weird (there are no good roles but scapegoat is uhhhh rough!) and I was fat which really irritated my parents because they knew other people judged them for it so they took a lot of pride in my thinner siblings because it demonstrated that they weren’t bad parents, I was just a bad kid who must have been binge eating at night or something because the rest of the brood were fine and skinny and liked normal sports and not “is that a sport?” sports. And on top of that, my Dad was like constantly uprooting all of us because he was not uh, dealing with any of his shit from childhood in rural Ireland, and my mom had Lymes Disease in the 90s before they really had much knowledge about it but her husband kept making her do transcontinental moves with three kids and no support, and none of me or my siblings had any significant oversight on our development so things like their dyslexia got missed and my autism wasn’t flagged by anyone (which is also because we just don’t diagnose girls/every girl is so socialized in masking techniques it’s really wild to think about) and the houses were weird and tense and awful but we were always told that we should be grateful because both of the parents grew up poor and we weren’t poor, so there were no problems because poverty was the only possible problem a child could ever face and they had solved that.

Turns out, you can’t outspend the emotional reality (or repercussions) of neglect!

And my brain was so squishy back then and there was no life experience to dilute reality with so I was really really good at:

• assuming things were my fault
• trying my best to keep everyone around emotionally regulated (mostly via my faaaamous sense of humor)
• doing everything in my power to not be yelled at

And the thing is, you can’t regulate alcoholic adults. That’s like, literally not possible and certainly not a child's responsibility. But when that’s your situation, you’re going to try. You’re going to figure out how to cope.

(My parents couldn’t even wait until I graduated to call it a day on being my parents. They were so close but called it a day right before my senior year. My mom moved to Florida for two months and my dad refused to house me at his place because his wife was working on her thesis. Super cool, very legit reasons, definitely did not evoke a feeling of outright abandonment that went on to inform my attachment patterns to people or anything.)

So I! Am! A! Really fucking good coper!

Oh man, gold star. Gold medal even. I coped so well I didn’t even realize I was doing it! Autopilot ON hit that cruise control let’s goooo!

By the time I entered ~the real world, every situation in my life turned into a personal challenge that I met head-on, silently screaming, “Oh, just watch how well I can deal with this by simply refusing to acknowledge it’s happening and continuing on!”

I had been bullied at school, and then at home, and sometimes I would switch it up and get bullied at this all-girls summer camp (I went back despite this because it was getting me out of my house which was definitely worse) and like, yikes, should not have had so few options in terms of places where I could just uncritically exist!

It evolved over time. I got bullied a lot more by my friends rather than Rando’s and that was harder because it hurt more and was just so personal and really betrayed my trust so I had to like reconfigure that whole system but before I had time to do that I was off to college!

Ah college, the magical land of everyone being so desperate to be cool at all times.

To be honest, I found the majority of people wildly lame, but I clung to the few people I found who I thought could maybe be my people. But then my first semester was a total disaster (I drove “friends” to the Jon Stewart Rally to Restore Sanity—omg throwback!—and they ditched me in the crowd because they really resented that they were associated with me in front of the Hot Georgetown Boys who were hosting us and I had been so rushed the night before when getting the car to drive everyone in that I forgot to pack a hairbrush and when we got there, we all showered but then I overheard them making fun of me in the bathroom when they thought I was downstairs so I was too nervous to ask to borrow one of theirs the next morning. So I just ended up slapping a hat over my tangled hair instead and proceeded to overheat the rest of the day. Which was double fun after the Rally because I just had to pretend they hadn’t abandoned me in the middle of a crowd with no cell access so it wouldn’t be awkward on the six-hour car ride back!). Eventually, I managed to hit some sort of reset the second semester and things were…fine.

And while my sophomore year was even better than that low-bar of fine, I ended up spending a good chunk of time making active plans to not be alive anymore. It just all hurt so much all the time. And I thought I was happy sometimes but it felt like an echo of happiness, a hint of what it could be, and that was somehow more depressing than when I thought I had reached the peak of what I thought my life could contain in terms of joy.

But then my best friend from high school was like “Move to New York City for the summer and live with me.”

And uh, that’s why I’m alive today.

Well, that and I thought it was too cliche to attempt suicide in Ithaca. Shoutout to the opening pages of Cat’s Cradle. Did me a solid on that one, Vonnegut.

Aren’t the gorges beautiful? This year, two girls jumped into one holding hands. They didn’t get into the sorority they wanted. They wanted Tri-Delt.

So I moved to Bushwick and became a resident of 595 Koscuizko St (Apt. #4). It was the first time I got to know myself because the apartment was filled with people who liked me and weren’t ashamed of that fact.

When we went to parties they asked me to do their makeup and they made me feel included even if we couldn’t trade clothes and they opened up the conversation circles and told people to “move over, that’s Claire’s spot” and threw their arms around my shoulders and when they introduced me to people those people hugged me and said they had heard about me and had been excited to meet me and then my best friend’s best friend/my new roommate was kind and open and gave me her number and didn’t make a competition out of our mutual best friend’s attention and then we became best friends and through her friendship my entire life has been radically transformed because there’s a real awareness that she got to see me for the actual me in that summer and she liked me and that data on it’s own meant I was officially likable.

(She has the best taste of anyone I’ve ever met and she’s the coolest person I know because she doesn’t let anyone else’s opinion ever stop her from trying new shit and when life gets bad we just smoke some weed and make plans and figure it out. She’s the first friend I ever actually fought with about real shit. It was actually kind of a miracle to experience our mutual dedication to preserving and strengthening our friendship in the wake of the battles instead of just vaguely speaking around it forevermore.)

Our friendship will always mean the world to me because it’s what allowed me to discover that I am worthy of existence without having to provide penance for my presence.

So I didn’t tell her what happened that night in Portland when I got my ex to admit to the embarrassment. I was too embarrassed and the bestie had enough wherewithal to tell me to leave the first time I “didn’t fit in the car” on the way back from a gig and that happened four years before The Admittance and I didn’t want her to judge me for being weak. So I went silent and inward uh oh! First major warning that something’s not right!

But I did admit that I was worried that my relationship was predicated on me and my ex giving each other permission to be the worst versions of ourselves.

Looking back, I think I was mistaking that permission for intimacy. It felt like it was just ours, these worst-versions we didn’t openly display to others. Like our lives that happened inside our home were unrepeatable.

Secrets create a bond, just not a healthy one.

And thank god my worst self is just blazed out of her mind and middling the time away playing video games. My ultimate vice is laziness. Soooo easy to recover from, I just had to stop giving into my worst instincts and like…try.

Just a little bit.

It really wasn’t that hard once I started—but the energy it took to get over the mental blocks I had accrued in order to keep coping? Yeah, that took months to build up the strength for.

(Only to immediately be discredited by me because it took time at all. Uh oh, rigged system! Couldn’t let myself win.)

Anyway, I stayed in that relationship for a whole three MORE years, right up until she came home one night and announced she had cheated on me.

And the shitty thing is, I didn’t want to be cheated on. It was like a ~core wound~ thing from my parents’ divorce. But actually getting cheated on was super liberating because:

• it proved to me that I was not my parents and their relationship woes actually didn’t need to ever inform or dictate my opinion on my relationships
• the thing I thought was The Worst Thing In The World happened and I was fine/didn’t die/realized it wasn’t such a world-ending thing afterall
• I felt absolutely no guilt about the breakup because uhhh mmmm there was no guilt to be felt I didn’t actually cause anything

I remember describing it at the time like she had chopped off my arm with, “We need to have a serious discussion about our relationship—I’m done.” But then immediately cauterized the wound with her callous addendum, “Also I slept with someone else.”

The follow-up happened so quickly no guilt could get in. Infection free!

Like, it was weird and it took some getting used to to be single, but it would have been waaaay harder to recover if I had gotten Guilty Gangrene, y’know?

The experience I had around her cheating on me was weird though. Like, cosmically.

She had gone out to a rave a few nights before it happened (that I was not invited to but she had complained to my best friend while we all smoked a cig that she had “no one to go with”) and met the person, made plans to hang out. The night of that hangout, she had me do her makeup and be involved with the ~getting ready of it all.

I went to bed at like midnight not really thinking anything of the fact she wasn’t home yet, she was excited to have new friends probably got drunk, whatever, I was tired.

I snapped awake at 4:21.

Seconds later, my phone lit up with a text.

She bought us both breakfast on the way home the next morning. With my debit card.

Later that day, at my friend’s house I admitted that the whole thing was weird. Something wasn’t right.

“...but it’s whatever, it’s probably fine. It’s just weird. So. Yeah.”

It took me another 48 hours to get the answer, but I’ve never been able to forget the tingly vibe of the pre-text wake-up.

Like I could feel the energetic reverberations of her sending me that lie. The guilt must have been overwhelming. It refused to be contained.

Made it all the way to me before the text did.

She later insisted that she did love me and she meant it every time she said it. I replied that because she had said it in that text I didn’t believe that our definitions of love aligned.

Which was soooo dramatic of me.

But hey, not untrue!

I’m actually weirdly proud of how I handled the breakup but tbh it was a Top 10 Comedic Lifetime Moment because she made so many fun choices. Like on her way to break up with me, she called me and asked what snacks I wanted her to bring home so she was holding a bag of treats when she announced the breakup. They sat in the pantry for like a week and then I got high and snarfed all of them in one go in some vaguely ceremonial ~eat the sins~ way.

Breakup Pringles. What a concept!

But also, to this day, I am genuinely tickled by the idea of her getting all hyped with her friends to go home and finally break up with me, but first! she stopped at the bodega and bought me snacks.

I’m so glad we broke up. Like, can’t overstate what a great overall choice that was, even if I wish the handling of it had been different. For both our sakes.

And look, the big lesson I learned is not to hand any future partners a (metaphorical) knife and then point to my most vulnerable spot and say, “Just not here, okay?” over and over and over ever again.

It might be tempting them, almost, or something. Had to learn that lesson the hard way, whoops!

Thankfully it turned out that getting cheated on wasn’t the most hurtful thing. By like, a longshot. It wasn’t nearly as painful as what I had already (unknowingly) put myself through.

The truth is, there was nothing left to strike down.

I had razed the crops before she could siphon the grain supply.

Biiiig Napoleon in Moscow vibes. But I was both Napoleon and Count Fyodor Rostopchin.

Within the hour of being broken up with, I was sitting on my best friend’s couch as she informed me that by Sex And The City rules, I got to complain about the breakup for the half-life of the relationship which gave me a whopping three and a half years!

It was the best permission I’ve ever been granted because it gave me scale. And a timeline. And a loooong lead.

I was already on the self-improvement track (because I was determined to find something in myself others could be proud of) but I had to kind of switch destinations (find all of the things I liked about myself and enjoyed doing in life). We had momentum though, we were already chugging!

The past two years have been a journey of self-possession.

I belong to myself now.

The opinions of others don’t have to have a dwindling effect on my self-worth. My worth is determined by me.

Inferiority? Permission denied.

Their embarrassment, their shame, that’s for them to deal with. I can’t help those who aren’t ready to help themselves. It’s not my fault they don’t like what they see in the mirror that my existence forced them to look into!

Shame is so overwhelming.

And I get why it suffocates so many people and snuffs the life force and we make one decision we’re not proud of, or we tell a little lie that spirals, or we have a thought that we think renders us an irredeemably Bad Person, and then we’re stuck.

Who can accept me now if I admit to thinking/feeling/doing that?

Suddenly, we can’t accept ourselves. And we become isolated. Smothered by shame. Desperate to be unseen. Because if someone sees me, they may know me, and I don’t like what they’ll discover.

And that drives us further underground, obfuscating our true selves with whatever version we deem acceptable in their stead. And we spend our lives in private and wonder why connection to others feels so fraught.

I’ve filled up 14 Moleskin notebooks since my breakup.

My literal Healing Diaries.

Because the breakup was the best thing that’s ever happened to me.

I would not be the person I am today if I was still holding myself to some imaginary Perfect Acceptable Person That Could Be Loved that I was attempting to cultivate within the space of that relationship. I needed to be alone, I needed time to tend to wounds that happened when I was way younger that kept reopening because I wasn’t healing them so much as pretending they didn’t exist and then getting angry when I could no longer ignore them.

And look, I should have never experienced the cruelty of being told that who I was wasn’t good enough by the same person who professed to love me. But I was so used to being loved in secret, to being loved a little less than other people that it felt normal.

It wasn’t a red enough flag, and even if it was I had bigger problems and there was always going to be a bigger fish because I was manic and uprooting myself left and right because I knew how to cope with that and whatever the this was on the other side was so scary and mysterious.

And it was easier to deal with the known than challenge myself to figure out the unknown. (When all of my energy went to keeping my head above water, it didn’t leave me much time to learn how to swim.)

Sometimes I feel frustrated because it feels like I’ve been the only one standing in my way the entire time.

But I no longer think that’s accurate.

It’s more like I’ve been frantically outrunning the mudslide barrelling down the mountain behind me and I finally fortified myself enough to be able to stand still and let the dust settle. I survived the crash in much better condition than I ever could have anticipated—and the ability to surprise myself was the single largest window into a better future.

It turned out, there was so much me to discover. And I had the community necessary to rebuild.

I’m so glad I gave myself the opportunity to. I’m so glad I forgave myself for “letting” people treat me poorly and instead focused on figuring out the roots of why it was happening. Not in a “who do I point the finger at” way, in a “what does this look and feel like so the next time it happens I don’t indulge the situation” way.

I’ve been holding back talking overtly about these ~feelings because I don’t like the idea of burdening others with negative/bad thoughts but I’m also aware that that’s just my go-to excuse and past-self extinction gasping to leave it alone lest someone yell at us for having feelings about their actions.

I think the grandest tragedy of what I’ve endured is that most people in these stories were doing the best they could.

There are few monsters in these tales. It’s mostly just the inadequacy of mankind to deal with the horrors of convention that we all feel crushed under.

Single, isolated actions don’t make someone a Good Person or a Bad Person. Trends in behavior that go ~unexplained~ almost always have an a wildly simplistic explanation of experienced cruelty or rejection or suppression somewhere along the line. How much power the individual has and how much more they choose to actively seek is what scales the impact of their cruelty.

I had to get it out, so that it’s no longer in. I had to start journaling so I could release valve. I would not be crushed by my reality and I would not suffocate myself with shame. Six pages, every morning, and I wasn’t allowed to be mean to myself or judge my decisions on the last page. On 5/6 I could be harsh, but I had one page per day of practicing being nice to myself. To do that, I had to invent a new way of speaking to myself. A language of kindness and grace. And once I did it a little bit, I leaned into learning that language, I went full immersion and tried my best to only speak in kindness.

There’s already enough cruelty, and no one benefits from me being mean to myself.

Least of all, me!

Sometimes I worry that I haven’t actually gained confidence, I’ve just gotten better at approximating what I consider coolness to be. And then I tell myself that it doesn’t actually matter if the latter informed the former, all that matters is that it happened. I have confidence now. I made it out of the pit.

I’m alive. And for a long time, I didn’t think that was going to be possible.

I actually love my day-to-day life. Yes, there is unimaginable tragedy happening all the time and a climate crisis and lack of true leadership in global politics—but my apartment, my cats, my daily minutia? Love!

Love, love, love.

Can’t get enough of waking up these days.

And I’m like really glad I stuck around long enough to find that out.