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I'm Goin' Fishing
Seek and You Shall Find
Date: 6/15/2007 11:20:02 AM ( 17 y ) ... viewed 2195 times I am on a fishing expedition to fish my self-esteem out of the bottom of the toilet bowl. It is not about to be excavated out of there without a massive concerted effort on my part.
Here is one tiny example of how I am doing this and I must pat myself on the back for speaking my truth and standing my ground. It definitely would have been easier just to give in but that's what I have been doing all my life. If I want things to change, I have got to start behaving and reacting differently in order to get a different result.
Flashback - I grew up on a steady diet of "You'll never amount to anything"; You're so stupid; You're so lazy; You're so slow - yada yada yada.
It's true - I was a bit slow on the uptake. In Kindergarten, the teacher asked that I be evaluated by a psychiatrist because she thought I was retarded. I guess my crippling shyness made me so introverted that she thought something was really wrong with me. Apparently I used to crayon my pictures in black crayon. Doc Psychiatrist's report said that I was intelligent. But the label had been issued and the stigma stuck to me like glue all of these years. My parents never had very high expectations of me and that got translated into my belief system so I began believing I am lacking in the intelligence department. I had tremendous difficulty concentrating, multi-tasking, remembering etc. My older brother, on the other hand, was brilliant in school and they mercilessly compared me to him.
During the course of my childhood, my spirit was broken over and over again due to various reasons (even before I was hit by the bomb about the nature of my conception). By the time I grew into adulthood, I had adopted a real defeatist attitude of "What's the point in trying, I won't be able to do it anyway." Even one of my daughters once commented "Mom, how come you always act so helpless?"
Fast forward to the present - the other day I drove downtown with my husband to visit someone. She lives on a narrow street and there was only one parking spot available on her street. The only problem was I had to parallel park on my left which, for me, is infinitely more difficult than parallel parking on my right. My husband knows I have struggled greatly in the past with coordination etc. so when I didn't make it on my first attempt, he offered to park for me. I stubbornly refused his offer and the woman I was visiting also offered to park for me but I again refused. I was feeling under tremendous pressure to perform due to both of them watching me. This is a throwback to always being criticized and scrutinized in the early days. But I was determined and after a number of attempts I managed to park, albeit jutting out a bit. I felt flustered and a bit embarrassed (part of the shame I am in the process of letting go of). It was a small but important victory.
Then, returning home, I expressed to my husband (correction - it was kind of a tirade) that he needed to give me some space to find out who I really am. I told him that I am well aware that he can fix anything and is very capable and competent in areas that I struggle in. I asked him not to interfere or intervene when he sees me struggling with something (unless I specifically ask for help) as I really want to discover what I am capable of. I want to get out of that 'helpless' mindset and start to build some semblance of self-confidence so that one day I can hold my head up high knowing I have become self-sufficient and self-reliant.
I know I can be so much more than I have allowed myself to be, up until now. I have been steeped in lies and false beliefs about myself. A recent discovery affirmed that there never was anything 'wrong' with my intelligence but rather I was severely reacting to something I had been ingesting all along (MSG). This has really helped put things in perspective for me so I am starting to catch a glimpse of my untapped potential that has been lying dormant, unexpressed, for over 50 years and I am now testing the waters, so to speak. I'm not going to let anything or anyone hold me back now.
Onward and upward....
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