I spend a lot of time second guessing things in my life. "did I do the right thing? Am I doing the right thing? Should I have done...could I have done." I live on this planet of constant movement in my head, thoughts constantly running, wondering what would have happened if I took the other path.
And yet I continue to take my own journey, making decisions based (far too often) on what others think is best for me rather than what I think is best for me. At what point in my life did I become this person that sat back and let everyone else make decisions for her?
I think I kind of know...
If you spend your life working in an industry where you are trained to take care of others and "leave your issues at the door" this becomes your mantra. You work at the same place for year after year after year, walking into the same door of the same restaurant talking to the same people about the same things. Never did I tell someone what I was going through behind the closed doors of my house. I was taught, no, I was TRAINED to become this stepford rendition of myself once I was in the public eye. It became that way when I was home too, nobody could know I was sad, hurting, sick, upset......all they needed to see was happiness!!
All they WANTED to see was happiness.
"Snow White never has a bad day" is what my boss said to me one afternoon. "What is that supposed to mean?" I said to him, he turned to me with his corporate infused smile and said "you never see Snow White having a bad day, she is always happy. That is what I expect from you." And so I walked away from that conversation with this ludicrous expectation of myself that I was never allowed to have a bad day again ever.
Year after year, I lived that thought process. I even taught it to my staff. If they were having a bad day, they needed to get over it. Or they needed to think of good thoughts. If my son was having a bad day, I would look at him and say "you can choose to be in a good mood or choose to be in a bad mood, it's up to you." I was already training him, at such a young age to push the negativity away...just like I had done.
But where does it go? It's ok to push it away, but what if you don't have anywhere to PUT it? What if you just smash it down with your emotional fist and let it pack in like wet sand until you are standing there on a perfectly normal day and you are overcome with the fact that you have all this emotional crap inside of you that you don't know what to do with? You have spent so many years of your life just pushing it away "Snow White never has a bad day" echoing in my head like a skipped record that could not be stopped. Snapshots of moments in my mind of "don't let it bother you" and "you will be fine, just get over it"....
Where do those thoughts go?
I will tell you.
They leak out of your body on a random Wednesday evening when you are on the phone with someone you love, talking about dinner plans and you lash out at them in a way that is like an out of body experience. You throw out your own insecurities masked as THEIR issues. You poke and you pick at their every last word they say to you and use it as a chance to finally lash out at all the anger you have had in you because you are so overcome with packing it away for so long. You yell into the phone or at the person in front of you because of all the pain you feel in your heart.
You start to remember all the moments of pain....the pain of your divorce, the pain of the choice you made to give up on your marriage. The memory of that horrible day you sat on the hard bench in the courtroom and heard his footsteps coming toward you. The memory of him with his head down low holding his shoulders in a sense of defeat that YOU created. That YOU are responsible for.
The moment of hurt during those first few months you lived alone and your son would cry out for his father. Those times you could not give him what he wanted because you did not have enough money to do so. And the anger at yourself for the years you would spend trying to get yourself out of debt because the apartment complex you could not afford finally took credit cards for rent.
The months you spent trying to fill holes in your heart with other relationships. Searching for love as if you were in a grocery store roaming the aisles for that missing ingredient, only to find that the store did not have it and you had to take some sort of crappy substitution that was "close enough" at that moment.
The shockingly empty feeling on the day he gets remarried, and your confusion on why you are sad that he moved on and you haven't. The frustration you feel that you cannot move past the feeling of failure and making yourself live in this constant "purgatory" of guilt.
All of these feelings happen in the blink of an eye. In one quick moment when someone that you love attempts to reach their arms around you and embrace you, yet you quickly put your hands up as you cannot possibly endure one more moment of emotion. That cap you put on your negativity popped like a cork and now they were pouring out everywhere and you cannot control them. You begin to feel them all over again and with more severity than the first time they came around. You open your mouth to tell the person you need to just "go away" because you know you are about to lash out at them in a way that is not meant for them. But instead, that person that loves you so much wants to fix you and listen to you and help you, and you just want to be left alone. Left alone to deal with the mess you have created in your life. You want to sit on the floor, like a child and sob until you can't breathe anymore.
But that person loves you, and they can't leave you sitting there hurting. They cannot just walk away with a movement of their hand and say "nah, she'll be fine." They can't, and you end up screaming at them to "go away" and "leave me alone" and you notice all the pain you feel moving toward them. How much of a relief it is to finally let go of all of it and throw it at them because they are there. You can even make them feel worse if you yell more. You can let them really have it because you are so angry of what is coming out of you FINALLY after all these years and you have the power to make them feel just as bad if not WORSE if you say something like "I don't want to date you anymore" or "we need to break up and I don't deserve to be with you, you deserve better." All these words of hate dripping off my tongue like venom, and so incredibly out of control with my emotions.....I am ready to get rid of these feelings and I will hand them off to this person that I love, but will not realize I am doing it.
Instead, I slam down the phone, huff and puff about the conversation we just had, not even realizing what really happened. Not really even getting what I just did.
Until a month goes by, and you are sitting in your house writing at your computer and the light goes on. Your "aha" moment where you come to realize that you did it again. You gave up to quickly, you didn't deal with any of your emotions, and you allowed them to erupt all over the place leaving someone else to clean them up. Now, you are left to sit here alone, with the memory of someone that loved you, friends that have already given up on you, and you are asking yourself what happened....
