Freedom

I spent yesterday running errands in preparation for leaving the island next week. It’s the west coast and the lone star state for me for the next two months. It felt good to get out of the house and not just because of the Vitamin D my body was so clearly missing. I’ve got family in town and the house tends to get a little tense during these times.

Relationships are hard, especially when trust is broken. And I can’t exactly cut off frequent flier family members to the very place I live. So, on the road again it is. Meanwhile, I’m doing everything in my power NOT to contract COVID cuz I rebuke that shit in the matchless name of Jesus.

Anyway!

I spent an hour of my day with my legs spread-eagled so my girlfriend could give me a Brazilian wax. I screamed. I cried. I laughed. Good times. The best part about being tortured is the solid dose of ‘Act Right’ I get in the process for my mind.

Yesterday, we had an awesomely revealing conversation about abundance and blessings and while doing so, we discovered we have similar emotional backgrounds. We’re both, in our own way, fighting the age-old voice in our brains that tells us we’re worthless.

For such a long period of time, we’ve each considered ourselves unworthy and undeserving of what we have or what we can potentially have for ourselves and our families.

It’s a cycle we’re trying to break. It’s definitely, if not inherited, learned behaviour.

My personal trigger for feeling unworthy stems from a car accident I was involved in back in 2003. While I’m pretty sure this isn’t the genesis of my feeling unworthy, it sure as hell drove the sentiment home. I wasn’t at fault for the accident, but people got hurt. Badly. I got hurt. Badly. I had to have my left hand reconstructed because there was a gaping hole in the middle of it.

Knowing that somebody got hurt on my watch; knowing that people’s lives had been changed forever, made me feel like I didn’t deserve to have anything.

If someone called me pretty, I didn’t feel I deserved to be. And I didn’t feel pretty. When I got ready to graduate from college, people were still recovering in hospital. I didn’t feel I deserved or was worthy of graduating with a degree, much less three. I was moving on with my life, but I didn’t feel like I deserved to move forward.

I didn’t feel like I deserved to be better than where I was. I thought I only deserved to stay in limbo because if I was in limbo, then I wasn’t progressing, and people couldn’t look at me or see me. I wanted to be invisible. I wanted to not exist because it felt better than the guilt that loomed over me every time I achieved something new.

That guilt had a vice grip on me for a long period of time. In some ways, it still does. It even extends to my weight. I felt that maybe I should stay fat. It’s a fucked-up mindset but in my head, fat equated to ugly and ugly means I don’t get to have what I want or live the way I want.

And I’ll admit. It’s a sad reality. It’s a sad way of my mind trying to compensate or reconcile for everything that happened but here I am, literally 20 years later – now just realizing that this is the wrong mindset to have.

Life happens. I will never forget what happened on that day and I can never forget what happened to those people or myself. It’s something that I live with.

Fuck.

I’m just realizing that the guilt is probably why I never went back for the corrective surgery to fix my damned hand.

SHIT!

Fucking A!

(Focus Nessa)

While I can’t forget what happened, I also can’t continue to be in a space of unworthiness. I can’t let that be my comfort zone anymore.

I can’t let feeling less than or wanting to feel less than, or dimming my light and shying away from the spotlight so others never see me shine – I can’t let this be the rest of my life. It just can’t happen. I need to be fucking free. I need to be ME.

So yeah, the conversation was pretty freeing. It was, in fact, a gut check and a good way to get some release. I don’t think I’ve ever disclosed how I felt to her or anyone before today.

Opening up about how I felt about this situation helped me realize that I’ve been living according to what my feelings were. I let those feelings dictate my course of action, and it has been a very damaging and damning way to live my life for such a long time.

But acknowledging it and being able to release has been good. It’s something that I have to build on. I have to work to make sure I don’t revert to feeling like shit for something I had no control over and move forward with my life.

Because I wanna be free of a lot of shit and I know that I can be. I just need to do it one step at a time. I am going to be free the same way my twat is free of hair follicles and dead skin cells. Just rip out the drama and guilt and self-loathing that I’ve had for the last two decades. Why not let my life be that way too?

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Song: Freedom
Artist: George Michael
Album: Listen Without Prejudice Vol 1
Release Date: 1990