It was never a conscious thought
Instead a drive, a compulsion
To be good, useful and helpful
Because if I was more of those things
Maybe if I was the most!
Then I would matter

***

When I was about 11 years old, I was riding in the car with my dad. He must have been mad at me for something, because he looked over at me and said, “If you’re not careful, you’re going to grow up to be a bitch just like your mother.” He went on to predict I’d have multiple divorces because of how intolerable I was.

He was a deeply wounded individual, my dad. But I won’t make excuses for him. He chose to pass the hurt on.

And when I tell you that poison seeped into every aspect of my life over the years, I feel it with overwhelming regret. From the small things, like being unable to send back food at a restaurant when it was wrong. To the big things, like the number of relationships I stayed in for too long, because I felt so much shame in failing. The number of times I stayed quiet when something wasn’t right at work or in a friendship. When I have felt deep anger and been so paralyzed by it, because speaking it would mean I was a bitch. Or worse. The times I have been so disappointed by benign neglect but have known, deep down, that it was my fault. Because it must be.

The years I spent trying to be…unobjectionable. From my grades at school, to my appearance. It wasn’t perfectionism so much as it was self-protection. So no one would notice I wasn’t good enough.

I’ve learned to let go of so much of it. But the way it still screams inside my head at unexpected times stirs up an inner panic, that when the rest of world around me is so calm, shouts, ‘you must be doing this wrong.’ So I practice yoga and I climb mountains and whatever else I can to be taken so far away from my brain and so far into my body, there’s no room for the noise.

Thank god for friends who can hear me say, “I feel too many things right now” and know how to hold space for all of it when I’m just not able to.

Originally published on Instagram on January 15, 2025.