Who am I? [Me: Part II]

So, last poast, I talked about January through June.  This week, I'm going to talk about July through...well...July.  It was a very complex month for me, even outside of Harry Potter.  And it started out with a bang.

At the end of June, events transpired that threw all of this over-time development, all of my personal growth and goals into sharp relief, and I got my first real dose of self-induced shame.  And this is where both disaster struck and the light at the end of the tunnel appeared.  Let me 'splain.  No, there is too much.  Let me sum up.


All my life, I've been told that I was special, that I was great, that the world could tell me that I was flawed, tell me that I had no merit, but that none of that mattered because I was loved in a way that I should never forget.  My mother instilled this belief in me for years, and it was reaffirmed by my Church and my brand of Christianity (which primarily revolved around "God loves me, he's gone to great lengths to show me that, and his love for me is all that matters.").  The only thing wrong with this belief was that I thought (completely subconsciously, in unchangeable ways) that I was loved because I was special, because I was great, and that when the world told me I was flawed and had no merit, the world was unquestionably wrong on all counts.  That is a very dangerous worldview, and at the end of June, I realized how dangerous it had made me as a person.

I'm not going to tell you, Internet, what happened in June, because it's not important to this conversation.  But essentially, I finally did something that, in my mind, was "bad" enough to make me feel ashamed.  Really ashamed.  Not the shame that I've felt before because someone is telling me I should, like when, in junior high and high school, I felt like I was fat and was ashamed that I wasn't able to lose weight and wear clothes like other girls did.  Not the shame I feel when my standards are too high, like when I wanted to take AP physics even though I had no designs for a scientific career or any need to sweat through an entire year of a killer class, and when doing so would hurt me in the other subjects I actually excelled at and wanted to better understand.  Not shame that is in anyway connected with an outside source or something beyond my control.  Shame that I had done something seriously wrong, and now I had to live with the consequences.  Shame that no one I told about my situation would have any reason to feel pity for me; I had brought this upon myself.

Whether what I did was actually as bad as I thought it was at the time, I can't say.  Whether the worst punishment I could have reasonably deserved for it was anything life shattering or shame-worthy, I don't know.  What's important is what I felt in that moment, because that's what changed everything.

The "you're special, you're great, don't ever change" mantra that had been playing on repeat for my whole life sort of skipped for a moment.  Suddenly, I looked at my life, my faith, my relationships, and everything I did and thought and said in a completely new way.  And it was not refreshing.  What I saw was brokenness, complacency, and a dangerous habit of doing what I want because I want to, and then expecting things to work out in my favor regardless.  Most of my life had been shame-free, and it was only this one instance that made me see things this way, but I saw laid out ahead of me two paths branching out from one decision: either I could take my situation seriously and really reflect on what it meant to me and how I wanted to proceed, which would probably involve pain and loneliness and challenges I felt unprepared for, or I could pay the minimum penalty and revert back to comfort and safety where things were exactly where I expected them to be and I could count on my instincts to see me through.

The first path didn't lead out very far.  I couldn't see the whole way down.  But kind of like a real road on a really foggy night, when you can see the glow of the street lights even though you can't see what they're falling on, I could see the satisfaction in that road.  I could see spots of darkness, but I saw a comfort that went beyond the shallowness of my previous comforts.  More than just making myself happy and trying to get to oases of pleasure, walking down that first road would create oases where there were none, would find comfort in places I didn't think it existed, and would end with the happiest, most satisfying destination I could have, though I don't yet know what that is.

I could see farther down the second path, but then it too turned foggy, even foggier than the first path.  It looked easy and familiar, not much different than the path I was walking down already.  But the streetlights were not welcoming.  If I had screwed up already, (and such a small screw up had affected me this much), I was bound to do it again, and there was a huge chance that it would be worse in the subsequent times.  There was no guaranteed warmth down this road and no assumption of a happy ending.  That didn't mean there wasn't one, but just that I wasn't as sure of it.

It sounds cheesy with all the analogies.  But I guess describing my self-reflection during this time is like trying to describe a dream.  Since dream worlds are not the same as the real world, you have to change some details to make the dream explicable.  Since my mind works differently than yours, I have to make analogies to help you understand.  It wasn't cheesy at all when I went through it.  It was very real and actually very scary.  But my decision was easy.  Of course I took the first road.

So that where I was in July.  Tune in next time for the continuation of my journey, which concludes summer.

<3 spadeALLcross