Back to Basics Asshole

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When You Realize You Are Actually Not A Good Person Like You Thought

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This whole year, I haven’t lived. Not really. Was I technically alive, yes. Breathing, standing, and in tiny amounts - sleeping but I wasn’t living. 

Just going through the motions and just counting the seconds until the day ended, every day. That isn’t living. 

While I didn’t want to write a sob piece of my life, my hard year, how much I learned about myself blah blah blah - I do want to touch on the one thing that mattered of all of it. 

I have spent literal years talking a big game about how everyone should be kinder and everyone should show grace and being authentic - how much it mattered and I actually believed myself. I believed I was that person. The kind one. The empathetic one. The helpful one. The “always had your back” one. It wasn’t until now that I realized I actually am not. I truly thought I was but after this year, I realized - I am just a big hypocrite. Before any of my friends who are reading this start sending me a whole self depreciation text (in all fairness, self dep is my favorite hobby) - I must explain myself. 

On the surface, I am that person. I want to be kind. I want to be patient. I want to be authentically me. But I never understood how much of my personality isn’t actually “me” - it is “protective me” which is a very different chic - not one that I am a fan of. 

You see, there were all these little moments in my life where I thought “this wasn’t even real, it didn’t happen to me or around me” so I boxed it up nice and tight and put it on the archive shelf in the very back of the my mind's filing cabinet - never to be opened again. What I didn’t know is every time I put another file away, another path inside of me opened up. It is like playing a video game of subconscious routing. You get one thing, it unlocks another. I was just racking up my unlocked paths left and right - but I didn’t or wouldn’t know it until decades later. Fucking decades. 

All my pain files had changed me, for the worse. I was kind and patient until my anxiety hijacked my body, told my brain that we were in control now and acted accordingly. I had to have order. I had to have peace and quiet. I had to be perfect on the outside because the inside was chaos. I had to have a perfectly clean house. A perfectly organized party. A perfect pantry with all of its baskets labeled by category. The perfect vacuum lines in the carpet. The perfect kitchen countertops with no mail on them. The perfect sink with no dishes. The perfect closet with each section color coordinated and not one mismatched hanger or shirt out of place. No stuff lying around. No signs of real life. Just perfection and control visually around me. I had to control the narrative of social conversations and push ideas at work. I had to be heard and I tried over and over and over again to make sure I was. All because my archives weren’t actually archives, they were my hard drive. 

It took a complete dismantle to find this. I am talking demolition crane to the White House level. It took me realizing that all these beautiful things in my life that I had touched with my heart had wilted. The more I loved, the quicker the wilt. 

I thought of myself as having this amazing superpower. I was so good at listening and being empathetic. Hell, I will go around a store and pick things up off the floor and put them back on the shelf because I feel bad that it was on the floor and not where it was supposed to be. How can a shirt get the same opportunity to be purchased and cared for if it is on the floor and all dirty? But the thing is, it is just a shirt. Why did I have so much empathy for an inanimate object, but not people necessarily? I did for strangers, and for stuff, but the people closest to me? That isn’t something I was great at. 

As with this superpower, I would be that friend who would always listen and be there for you. Pick you up at 3am when you are sobbing because you and your boyfriend broke up or just sit in silence because you didn’t want to be alone. I was always right there. But as it turns out, the one person that I couldn’t listen to was myself. I couldn't hear my own truth. I couldn't see my own scars. I couldn’t accept me for who I am. I couldn’t accept that my hard drive might need an upgrade. It wasn’t like I didn’t work on myself, I really did. But could I have the hard conversations that I needed to have? Could I acknowledge that things did happen and do happen, and they have shaped me for who I am today? It is unfortunate that most people don’t even know how to get to that space within themselves and I was absolutely one of those people. 

I can’t do anything about this year. I can’t change anything about the past. I can’t relive another conversation where I should have said this or that. I can’t remove my hard drive and expect to keep running but I can bring it back to basics. 

I can solely focus on the moments that I captured in a bottle. The sing-a-longs in the car with the kids. The bedroom picnics of snack trays and movies we have seen 100 times. The laughter that still echoes loudly. The less than perfect house with dishes, shoes everywhere, and a whole lot of barking. The energy that I expended just to get myself out of bed some days. All the times I thought “I just need to get through this holiday, or birthday, or date” of something that no longer matters. The hours of writing and crying. The acceptance that not every day will be a good day but it is still a day that I am here. The forgiveness that I so easily shared with everyone else, but this time actually sharing it with myself. The thank yous. The apologies. The awkward new conversations. The realization that I am the only one that was holding me back. The ideology that I get to write the story, and I am doing that every single day. To my strong emoji game and my kickass way of making everything fun - I am hitting the reset button and taking back the reins. I smashed the shit out of that hard drive and with my own two hands, created a new one - one I am improving every single day. 

So what was the one thing that really mattered after all of it? Actually showing my scars. They aren’t a source of shame but a source of empowerment to be authentic to myself - something that I think we could all use a little bit more of.