I have spent many years wondering if people like me.
I’ve wondered and often ached for them to approve of me and the choices I make. I have used up lots of energy and killed lots of time hoping that family and friends love me as deeply as I would like them to, every moment that I need them to.
To achieve this constant and deep type of love, I would survey the relationship.
I’d ask many questions and give extreme scenarios to understand how important my existence was to them. However, I was also living and being in a way I thought was most pleasing to the other, rather than what felt authentic and fulfilling to me.
I was just going through the motions for everyone and trying to stay out of trouble. I stayed out of physical trouble.
Somehow though I managed to get into trouble in other ways. I challenged everyone’s emotions and their feelings about me. This was exasperating to others.
I felt angry and sad, emotionally hungry and desperate.
What did I want?
Validation perhaps. Deep conversation maybe. To be rescued and saved? I don’t know. Maybe. To be deeply understood and completely known? Possibly.
The problem with all of this and perhaps why none of the surveying made me happy was because it was all for someone else. I was seeking someone else’s understanding, validation, love, saving, and perspective of me. Though I didn’t even know myself.
How could I have gotten to know myself through the eyes of someone else?
I was a blank canvas, and I kept asking the world around me to paint for me. No one was ever able to paint the whole canvas for me.
There were always blank spots. I kept trying to get others to fill those blank spots. Asking constantly, in many ways, “who am I? What am I? Where am I? When am I? Why am I? How am I?”
By asking the outside world these questions and eagerly trying to have others fill the blank spots for me, I was running from the very thing I wanted to be, and do, and needed most. Myself.
Though I didn’t believe myself and I didn’t like myself. Hence the running.
As Glennon Doyle writes in her book Untamed, “Glennon, you are always so desperate to find yourself and ready to abandon yourself.”
I wanted nothing more than to be myself, but I abandoned myself because people mattered more to me than my own existence ever mattered to me.
I was always so desperate to find myself and ready to abandon myself. So, I stayed angry and sad, emotionally hungry, and desperate. There have always been blank spots on my canvas.
Maybe it’s time to get a new canvas and finally become my own painter?
I think that’s the best option, and my only option.
For if I don’t become my own painter, I’ll remain desperate and become guilt-ridden, and obsessive like Lady Macbeth, shouting to myself, “Out, damned spot; out, I say!” for the rest of my natural life while I keep trying to get others to fill the blank spots.
How sad? What a waste of energy? Don’t keep wasting your life away.
It’s time to pick up the brush.
Just think, how exciting! You get to use whatever damn color you want. And the only person’s opinion, validation, approval, and perspective that matters in this process, is yours.