Finally, I Chose Me.
For as long as I can consciously recall, I seem to have always believed that, in life, I wasn’t being chosen. Not for sports teams, not for friendships, relationships, or work. I simply felt as though I was a last resort, an after thought, no one ever chose me on purpose.
I grew up the youngest of four children. I got a ton of love and attention, but I also wasn’t included in all of the things the bigger kids could do. The friends I had in my immediate neighbourhood were all older than me and were allowed to do things I wasn’t, plus I was the young, timid girl and no one really wanted me around; In fact some ‘friends’ had no problem announcing this often. Always giving me reason to feel less about myself and yet knowing I had no where to turn to, I still hung around.
This belief and sometimes fact, led me into a life of trying to be good enough, trying to fit in, trying to just be chosen, liked, wanted, desired. But the same old familiar gut twisting feeling of rejection and heartbreak would creep into the pit of my stomach each time I was let down by what I wanted to so badly be picked up by.
I would get lost in my head wondering what I did wrong, how I let this happen, why I wasn’t enough or worthy. Instead of coming to empowering conclusions I continued to believe that I just was not meant for more, that I was mostly a mistake here and I was going to have to live the rest of my life in the shadows and just hope that people would feel bad enough for me along the way to just choose me, even if out of pity.
What a sad existence. When it didn’t happen the way I had expected, when pity wasn’t enough to pick me, I would lose all sense of stable ground, forget who I was or who I thought I was and fall into a spiral of shame and despair just praying that god would have mercy on me and either take me from this place, or help me find my way.
By the grace of whatever god, spirit, entity or higher power I may or may not have even believed in, for all of the times I prayed for relief it came in some form or another, long enough to get myself back on my feet and working towards building a better version of me. Until the pattern would repeat and years of low self esteem, an absence of self love & a penance for self sabotage would reappear crippling my momentum once again.
Something’s gotta give and with little understanding of how much power I truly had over my own life, I more often than not, just wanted it to end.
But there is power in intentions and with each crushing strike to my psyche, little did I know that I was slowly losing parts of who I thought I was so I could rebuild from the ground I so often found my self curling into.
Most breakthroughs are disguised as breakdowns and I won’t sugar coat the truth of the matter the sun does not always shine immediately after the storm, although believing it will is quite often just the optimism we need to weather it’s fury.
Although one single a-ha moment is what brought me to the realization that ultimately put forever to rest my deepest belief that I was not ‘the chosen one’ it was years of repeating the same patterns, learning the same lessons, dating the same kind of person, living the same life, thinking the same thoughts that accumulated into the powerful ball of light that finally opened my eyes for good.
In always believing that no one was choosing me, the truth came in like a ray of light, I was the one not choosing myself. I had more power over my life than I once thought.
Knowing I was ‘different’ than everyone else my whole life made it difficult to accept myself, in a society that doesn’t quite understand someone who feels beyond the depths of eternity, who expresses truth openly, who cares about where all the animals sleep at night, who feels the despair of a stranger walking by, who doesn’t find joy in seeing others cry, I quickly learned I was a minority. In fact I thought I was the only one and maybe I landed here on a spaceship from another planet or something.
I more often than not wished to just jump out of my own skin, to be somewhere I wasn’t, but daydreaming was hard because I was far too wise to the ways of this world and would always come back to a reality I quite literally loathed.
In always wishing to be somewhere and someone else, I left myself behind. I chose afflictions, addictions and apathy for my entire being and thought I might just coast along until one day someone saved me, mostly from myself.
But my spirit is stronger than that and even in the darkest of moments was always reminding me of the light that shines within. For years I denied who I was, inadvertently never choosing me and instead choosing anything else that I could find some sort of meaning in, which usually meant other people, more specifically guys who didn’t give a care about me, or themselves for that matter.
Ah does like ever attract like!
Even moving 2600km away from home, I still managed to find myself attached to pieces of a past I swore I would leave behind. But as the quotes says: ‘a lesson will reappear until it teaches us what we need to know.’ It only made sense that the one person who, from the moment I met them, had me feeling like I was never option #1 made one last encore to finally wake me up to the biggest lesson I have learned to date.
In the final scene of an act too long drawn out for my own liking, I once again was not given precedence and instead of falling into the hole of self-pity and self-loathing with the myriad of unanswered empty questions I was able to finally see myself in the reflection this person was mirroring back to me. In all of his inability to ever choose, not only me but anything really, I saw myself. I saw as clear as day that he was me, and I was him and for that moment in time before it all came crashing in, every single moment and lesson finally made sense.
I have said it before and it will never get old, people come into our lives to be our mirrors. Some reflect our greatness and others get the dirty job of clearing up the smudged spots we don’t always see past. The wonderful part is, in the end, it all leads to greatness if we are willing to see it as such.
Not all lessons, once learned, are easily implemented. It is a conscious decision everyday of my life and sometimes moment to moment to choose myself. To know, love & accept myself fully as I am, without question or reservation, just.as.is.
As the saying goes “old habits die hard” and when we spend most of our lives avoiding ourselves, neglecting, denying and abandoning ourselves we have created habits that will take time to break. But once the lesson is learned it cannot be unlearned and the beauty is in finally living a life of where I continuously make the decision of loving and choosing myself and in doing so I only attract into my life anything or anyone that also chooses me.
Are you choosing you?
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