I have overcome a lot in my lifetime.

My intention is to share what I have learned with others just in case I can help them even the tiniest bit to shortcut the process. 

So where do I start?

When I was young, I collected lint.  While the other kids were collecting coins, bottle caps, dolls, stamps, and baseball cards, you name it.  I was collecting lint.  No.  I think I was saving lint.

You see, I believed that when people died, they came back to earth in an inanimate form.  I prayed every night not to return as a drain.  That was my biggest fear.  And I intended to save all the lint (obviously some poor souls that were doomed to that fate) from being stuck in the bowels of some drain forever.  I even shudder to think about it today. 

I was also cripplingly afraid of dogs – well, all animals, really, but let me tell you – dogs are the most prevalent and in-your-face animal in our society.  And people do not like it when you are afraid of their dogs.  Everyone, myself included, wanted to know the origin of my fear.  But we didn’t know.  Imagine me on support dog day at the hospital or at school when I was literally running to get support because the support dogs were there. People really didn’t understand me.

As a young girl, I would lie awake at night worried about wolves tunneling through the concrete driveway and into our suburban home near Houston, when really wolves weren’t a problem in our area.  I’m reasonably sure they never even inhabited that part of Texas.   But I was afraid of that, nonetheless. 

My hyper-sensitive, overly-compassionate, imaginative nature overwhelmed me and most likely those around me. 

My years in high school, college and graduate school were anything but carefree.  I was naturally smart, but fully believed that people would like me better if I wasn’t, so I tried to take on the appearance of not caring or not being smart while I was at school.  Deep down though I always wanted to get perfect grades.  I just didn’t want people to know that I was getting them.

I also derived my worth from the amount of struggle I had, so if something was enjoyable I deemed it not worthy of my time. 

Some other things I believed early in my life are as follows:

I believed that people were not to be trusted,

I believed that credit cards and loans were just free money to be spent recklessly and with wild abandon,

I believed that I was completely non-creative (I was a math and science kid),

I believed my standards of friendship were too high

I believed that I had to do anything and everything to prevent people from seeing the real me or they would run away.

I believed I would never escape the deep sadness, depression and anxiety that plagued me.

I believed that I would indeed end up ugly if I couldn’t conquer that sadness.

I believed that my destiny was to have stomachaches and headaches every single day of my life.

I believed that I was broken and fundamentally defective. 

I believed that I needed to be perfect to be accepted.

When I would walk into a room full of people, I would size them up.  Not because I was judging them, but to try and predict who might judge me, which is admittedly a form of judgment.  However, I came to my conclusions by deciding who was prettier, thinner or any other – er than me.  Those were the ones that I assumed would be snubbing their noses at me.  I alternately avoided them and sought them out.  Avoiding them to try and avoid feeling small and seeking them out to try and prove to them that I was ok.

I based my feelings about myself on the reactions I got from other people.

When I eventually gave birth to my three daughters.  Becoming a mom was itself a huge challenge for me.  Because I had been such a sad and fearful child, I was terrified that my children would also follow that path.  Early motherhood was hard for me.  And people would tell me that I should enjoy those years because they would be gone before I knew it and I would miss that baby stage so much.  This frightened me also.

I believed boundaries was bad and hurtful.  Harsh boundaries had been used as punishment in my lifetime and I didn’t understand them.  I struggled mightily, knowing that I wanted and needed to set boundaries, but believing I would be bad if I did.

I believed I was not competitive.  I had been a tennis player but was kicked off the high school tennis team for not being competitive enough.  They said I never tried to win, and that might have been true because I was afraid of upsetting or outshining my opponents.  In retrospect, I wonder why they didn’t coach me on how to embrace being more competitive. 

Although I did continue to exercise and prioritize fitness after that, I believed the story that I wasn’t an athlete and I was no good at competition.

I longed to play the piano from a very young age and worked diligently on it until I thought that it would be an embarrassing skill to continue working on, so I quit.

I believed that the world was unsafe after experiencing two home break-ins before I was 18.

I believed that I was flawed and broken, after being coerced into not respecting my own sexual boundaries in my teens and then being sexually assaulted in my early 20’s. 

I believed that I had to do the hardest thing that I could, and earned three degrees, a bachelors in math and two master’s degrees in meteorology and chemical engineering, but two of those degrees I never even really wanted – I got them for other people, unbeknownst to them. 

I believed that careers were not enjoyable, but just something to be endured, and embarked on a career path that I didn’t really like. 

I believed that I had to marry to know I was worthwhile and married a man I probably shouldn’t have married to begin with. None of this was his fault at all, and I carry guilt to this day for this decision. 

I believed I didn’t get to pick my friends, I thought I had to take whatever friends would tolerate me. 

I believed that my cystic acne was my inner ugliness exposing itself, exposing me. 

I believed that if somebody didn’t treat me well, it was my fault and I needed to get better.

I believed that it was my job to make everyone like me and make everyone around me happy.

I believed that taking care of my own self was selfish and that I should only take care of others.

I believed that even having needs was not ok, and so to express them clearly was unacceptable.

I believed that it was necessary to beat myself up every single day for not being better, thinner, prettier, smarter, more creative – perfect. 

My life was exhausting.

I tried intermittently through the years to numb the pain, alternately turning to spending, eating, drinking alcohol, exercising, going to therapy, reading, etc.  All to try and squelch the pain.  As you might imagine none of these things helped.  I kept believing that if I could just become a perfect person, or as close to perfect as possible, I would be accepted by all.

Trying to become perfect

I worked so hard to try and become perfect, reacting to each insult I received with both determination to please that person and a healthy dose of anger, both at them and at myself. 

I would experience moments where I thought maybe I actually was ok but then slip back down the slippery slope of self-doubt, forgetting that it was ok to trust myself.  I would start to feel confident but was stuck in the rut of doubting myself and not feeling good enough. 

I would rise up and feel great and then fall back down into sadness or sometimes despair.

My life became a series of oscillations.

What this looked like from the outside, though, I can only imagine.  It wasn’t fun to experience it from the inside, and I would imagine it wasn’t fun to experience from the outside either.  What I imagine it looked like was something akin to the Incredible Hulk.  I would look just like a normal person, by forcing myself to act “perfect” (aka demure, agreeable, happy-go-lucky and easygoing) and push down my true, complex, layered self. Eventually this suppression of my natural self, who was pretty outspoken, and confident and opinionated would result in an explosion of the true self that I was trying to suppress.  Only this true self wouldn’t come out in a nice or healthy way.  It would come out as water bursting out of a dam.  I lost several friendships as the result of this attempt to squelch followed by the inevitable explosion.  It was like I was holding a beach ball under water only to have it fly out somewhere in the middle of the pool and hit somebody in the face.

All the while, I was watching others feeling free to be who they naturally were – not trying to be what I considered to be perfect, and I watched them be accepted this way.  I watched them simply playing with the beach ball, rather than trying to hold it underwater. My brain tried very hard to make sense of this. 

I read every book I could get my hands on, starting with How to Win Friends and Influence People and continuing with How to Keep People from Pushing Your Buttons.  I read all of the Seven Habits books, I read Wayne Dyer and Eckhart Tolle, I read books about how to make small talk (I was in a graduate program for meteorology, so weather was off-limits as a topic for idle chatter), I read books on parenting, and books on how to be a good wife, I read books on how to be happy and books on how to not control your emotions.  I read books on forgiveness and books on boundaries.    I read books on natural medicine, parasites, and whole foods.  I read books on self-compassion, and self-discipline.  Radical acceptance and radical honesty.  You name it, I read it.  I was searching.

I also learned from musicals, another passion of mine.  I listened obsessively to the lyrics of the songs and tried to learn about life from musicals such as Les Miserables, The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins, My Fair Lady, The Music Man, Aspects of Love, Wicked, Jekyll and Hyde, Six, Chicago, & Juliet, Phantom of the Opera etc., etc.

I also loved lyrics of countless non-musical related songs that I listened to on repeat through the years.  Too many to even count.

I tried to learn about the world through books, through music and through close observation of other people. 

I would follow many different paths through the years.  I started teaching myself different skills, starting with learning how to laugh at myself.  This was a helpful skill that I highly recommend to everyone.  It worked well for me until I realized that I had become so self-deprecating that I was allowing myself to be mistreated by others, allowing myself to be the butt of every joke.  I would eventually become so self-deprecating that I would inadvertently teach the people around me that I wasn’t to be taken seriously.  So I wasn’t taken seriously at work or at home.

I taught myself to apologize and own my part in any interaction.  What a great skill to learn.  Again, something I highly recommend and find to be an invaluable life tool.  I took it too far, though.  At one point I had someone very close to me admit that because I was always apologizing they believed that everything was in fact my fault.  I would come to realize that apologizing is a great thing to do when you actually have something to apologize for.  It’s especially useful in situations where you are interacting with somebody also willing to apologize. Sometimes I apologized just to try and get people to be ok with me again.  Sometimes I apologized for things I hadn’t even done or didn’t feel remorse for, and sometimes I apologized for just existing.  I took it way too far.

I taught myself to see the good in everyone, to recognize that everyone is hurting.  I then took it upon myself to find that good in everyone and to build up everyone’s self-esteem at any cost.  But I again took it too far when I ended up coaching my children to literally apologize to people that were mean to them so they could show that other person love and unlock their goodness.   

I taught myself to always be kind, even when others were mean to me.  I taught myself to let others mistreat me, to see their inner goodness, to be ultimately forgiving.  When others were cruel to me, I often bought them gifts or offered them nice words or simply just let it go, trying to mend the relationship without stopping to consider if it was a relationship worth mending.  What I started to notice is that other people couldn’t so easily see my goodness.  I noticed that I was being accused of some pretty bad things, even as I refrained from accusing others.

I studied forgiveness.  In fact, forgiveness always came quite  easily to me, primarily because I had always prioritized being liked and accepted, hence my struggles with boundaries.  As I attempted to grow my forgiveness I found myself forgiving those who felt no remorse for the act I was forgiving them for.  It took someone saying this to me – pointing out that I was forgiving people repeatedly who didn’t seek forgiveness.  I was forgiving blindly and rampantly without boundaries.  Once again, I had simply taken it too far. 

And I was drowning.

Now I realize that I am nowhere near perfect.  In fact, all of this was my attempt to become better.  All of this was a reaction to the certainty that I was not good enough and that I needed to change, to be better. 

And I understand that I did not do any of this perfectly.  In fact, it looked chaotic and a lot like the Incredible Hulk dynamic I described above.  But on the inside, this is always what I was trying to do.  Find good, be good, do good, even as I beat myself up mercilessly for not doing it perfectly.

The real growth

Now I have had many turning points over the years, each one inching me closer to the truth. 

And the process of healing has not followed anywhere close to a straight line path.  It’s been more of an oscillation.  Even today, the oscillations continue, but they are overall getting smaller as I approach an equilibrium I will never actually achieve.  I will always be growing and continuing to learn and that excites me.

The most important turning point of all might have been the one related to seeing the portrait of me.

Just in the past decade, my mother happened to give me back a portrait of 4-year-old me saying she no longer wanted it. I threw it in my closet and forgot about it.

Soon thereafter, I was in the middle of verbally assaulting myself for not being perfect.  In the middle of my self-hatred rampage, I made eye contact with me – 4-year-old me.  This stopped me short.  This took my breath away.  In that moment, I realized that beating me up was the same thing as beating her up.  She looked so sweet in her red checkered dress and shiny patent leather shoes.  She was 4 – younger than my youngest daughter was on that day and I would never in a million years have said any of the things that I was saying to myself to any of my own daughters.  So how could I continue saying it to her?  Even if I didn’t think I deserved love, I knew that she did.  That’s when things started to shift. 

When I inevitably began beating myself up again, I would see that portrait of my 4-year-old self, either literally or in my mind.  And I would stop short and be kinder to myself.  I would start treating her like I treated my own daughters.  I already loved and adored my daughters.  I knew how to do it, I just had to start loving and adoring me in the same way.  It was not easy and it didn’t feel natural. 

I had been told for many years that I needed to have self care and I never understood that until this moment.

I had developed a motto for my daughters, “you’re snazzier than you think you are.”  Now I turned that motto back around to myself.  I was snazzier than I thought I was too. 

Turns out I didn’t have to be perfect, I just had to be.  I was already ok.  I had actually been ok all along.

In the end, it didn’t matter if those around me approved of me. 

In the end, I didn’t need everyone’s validation. 

In the end, I realized that I could just be my authentic self and let people fall away if they didn’t like who I was.

In the end, I would come to see that perfection shouldn’t have been my goal, authenticity should have been the goal.

What I have overcome

Somewhere along the line, I would overcome many things.

I would dig myself out of my suffocating credit-card debt and in the process learn how to live within my means. 

I would overcome my more than quarter-century long phobia of dogs in less than a single hour. 

I would overcome my fear of being a mom.  I would learn to listen to my children.  To see them.  To be curious about them.  And to just simply give them space to grow into who they are.  Yes they need structure, and parenting is about finding that balance of structure and space so as to allow the children to become who they are meant to become.  I would do this parenting thing very imperfectly and make a lot of mistakes, admittedly.

I would learn that I disagree with those that told me that I should “soak up every second” and that I would so miss that baby stage.  I did love my babies more than I can express, but I have LOVED every stage of my children’s lives more than the stage before.  That continues to be the case even now, 23 years after my oldest daughter was born.

I would learn that my children can teach me just as much as I can teach them if I stay open to and curious about what and who they are.

I would develop methods of parenting and ways to encourage my children to be kind to each other and to others, while also being kind to themselves.

Where I had believed I wasn’t an athlete, I started playing tennis again, and then became a runner and a long-distance cyclist.  I even found the part of me that absolutely loves competition.  Turns out I’m quite competitive – who would have thought?

I would learn that my piano playing was something to be proud of and I would start playing again, even as I lamented those missed years.

I would overcome my stomachaches and headaches, as well as other health issues, after struggling for decades to find their root cause.  I would do this despite doctors suggesting that I give up.  I found that healing.

I would realize that sometimes faces break out and it means nothing about who the person is on the inside – it might just be hormones that are out of balance or some other imbalance in the body. 

I would overcome my fear of not being good enough.

I would learn how to have boundaries that were healthy but not punitive.

I would leave one marriage and start another one.

I would leave my unwanted career path behind.

I would unleash my natural ability to lead.

I would recover my innate ability to have fun.

I would learn how to forgive only the people who sought to be forgiven and seek to reconcile with only those who wanted the same honest and truthful and deep reconciliation that I did. 

I would learn to value and trust myself.

I would learn that I didn’t need permission to make my own choices in life.

I would learn that I didn’t need validation.

I would learn that not everyone would be a good vibrational fit for me, and that that was ok. 

I would learn that I do get to pick – I get to decide who I want to be around.  And others get to decide if they want to be around me.

I would learn that I get to show my natural strength, and sometimes others will be intimidated by it, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t show it.

I would learn what it meant to be both firm and kind, like Mary Poppins stated.

As I studied I would find that forgiving isn’t just about “turning the other cheek” over and over and over again.  Forgiveness is about not holding onto anger in your heart, even as you create the distance necessary to take care of yourself. 

I would learn that forgiveness and reconciliation are two very separate things, the former being in my control and the latter requiring interest and consent from both parties.  But forgiveness does not have to mean reconciliation.  And reconciliation without forgiveness is unworkable.

I would learn that I had to take care of my own self first and foremost, and let others take care of themselves. 

I would learn that sometimes I would have to forgive from a distance.

I have overcome so much and I am unabashedly proud of it all.

I have done all of it completely imperfectly.

I have learned that I will never be perfect at any of these things or anything at all. 

I have learned that I will be forever learning and growing and improving.  The path will never end.

Continuing on the path

I now see that when I acted out of this intrinsic distrust of myself, I was fighting myself and out of this internal struggle, this unawareness of who I was deep in my soul, I inadvertently hurt many people.  And I do feel sorrow about that.  I never wanted or intended to hurt anyone.  My thrashing around has impacted many, and their thrashing around has impacted me. 

One of the people that I hurt the most through all of this was myself.  Turns out that it has always been and will always be my biggest responsibility to take care of me, and I was erroneously looking to those around me to do that instead of owning that responsibility for myself.

I now see that equilibrium is the goal, that I can’t sit on either side of the continuum that sits between good and bad; between selfishness and selflessness; between unrestricted forgiveness and holding grudges; between arrogance and self-deprecation; between boundaries and boundarylessness; between people-pleasing and retaliation, between overreacting and impassivity; between avoidance and hypervigilance; between productivity and laziness; between neediness and being a loner.  For each of these there is a third way.  The real magic that lies somewhere in the middle. 

I now see that there will always be people in my life that cannot see me for who I am and that simply has to be ok, even as it is painful.  All I can do is accept that, accept myself, and keep on moving forward.

I can now say that I am somewhat reluctantly grateful for all of these challenges, for the whole rocky path of my life. 

I believe in the depth of my heart and soul that all people are essentially good.  I believe that love can unlock this goodness – this can include love from others, but it absolutely has to include love from our own selves. 

Importantly, I no longer believe that it is my job to help others unlock their own goodness.  While I still believe this about people, I now recognize that people need to come into their own on their own time and some never will.  That is not my responsibility. And I do not have to stick around to try and convince them to become the love that they are deep inside.

I’m still nowhere near an idealist, I’m definitely more of a realist.  And I know that countless people will sadly never figure out what it even means to love others, much less themselves, and will never know what they might have had to offer the world without all of the masks and hiding and labels and fears and insecurities.  But if what I’ve learned can help even a handful of people find their way through the darkness to the truth of their beauty, I believe it can have a ripple effect in the world.  So I have to try. 

Back when I was trying so hard to save that lint, I now see I was trying to save myself.  I have now done that. 

I still slip up and will continue to do so, particularly in times of stress or when I see so much fear and hatred and meanness in the world that I know is masking a deep love.  I still feel sad that it is so hard for so many to act out of this love that I know is inside of them. 

But this is where I have landed.  For now.  And it is from this place that I reach out to help others who are also searching.