Acceptance

I'm going to be starting work again, and I am terrified of succumbing to depression, binge eating, or worse. I don't want to lose myself in a job. I want to be me.

I want to have energy to work out, do my laundry, keep my place clean. I am afraid I won't once I start having to leave my apartment every day before 8.

I wish I could get my sleep sorted out. I wish I could get everything sorted out. Why did God let me have so many problems? Some people seem to have very few. I seem to have enough for two or three people.

I get angry when I think about it for too long. Why me? The classic line of self-pity.

But let me pity myself for a moment, if you will, whoever you are. My mother messed me up. I have spent thousands of dollars on therapy, and there's no end in sight. Add to that my physical problems, financial woes including medical bills from a car accident that I can't pay for, and the mounting anxiety regarding work, and I'm not sure how much more I can take.

Usually when I write on my blog I can feel a release of tension, but tonight I feel only angst. I wish I could cry. Instead, I hate myself for being so weak, for somehow creating all these health problems as a way to get attention.

They're real problems, just like the ones I had as a child. I must have figured out that the only sure-fire way to receive tenderness from my mother was to have a physical ailment. Like the first time she said she felt love for me when I was two.

I had been chasing my brother on my tricycle. As I careened around a corner, I fell, cracking a tooth and splitting my chin open. I remember lying on the ground, seeing someone run up the steps into the building where my mother was in a meeting.

At the doctor's office that day, she gave me a doll. Red Riding Hood on one end, and underneath her skirt, the wolf in Granny's sleeping bonnet, one of my favorite dolls growing up. For years I wore a spacer in my mouth, waiting for my adult tooth to come in, and I still have the scar on my chin to prove that important event in my history.

"You caused me pain when you were born," my mother told me one summer during my college years," and it wasn't until I saw your pain that day that I felt I loved you. I took care of you before your accident, but that day something in me changed."

She, the one person in the world on whose nurture my life depended - my life, my sense of self. As I grew, I had many other health problems - infections leading to a tonsillectomy, mono when I was 10, chronic fatigue syndrome in high school.

I see now that they all pointed to a desire for the kindness I could only be certain of when I was sick or in physical need.

I wish I could undo the adaptive part of me that figured out how to get the love I needed. I wish I could be free from all the physical troubles I have, that I could live my life and not have to worry about endless doctor appointments.

How can I break the cycle? Some people say I should just take it to Jesus. But what does that even mean?

I'm reading a book about self-compassion that has been helpful so far. "Soften, soothe, allow," the author writes. In the face of anxiety, when a workout and a hot shower have done nothing to take the edge off, I turn to scholars who know more than I do.

So I allow myself to feel the tightness in my chest and the burning in my throat. I accept the unknowns of the next few months, and I choose to show myself compassion for all that I have been through. No one will ever know how difficult it was to grow up with my mother, or how painful it has been to try to separate from her.

No one has lived my experience with me. I choose, then, to honor my experience and recognize my challenges as casualties in a great battle - a battle for a self, for an identity, for a life.

It doesn't matter that other people might think my mother is sweet. I know who she is, her brokenness, her rage, her narcissism, and I know what it was like to ache for her empathy and kindness.

As best I can, I am going to show myself the consistent kindness she never gave me.