My most complimented attribute is how much I put myself out there- it’s inspiring, people are jealous of it, it’s the one thing I hear more than anything else and yet, it’s like the bane of my existence.
A friend of mine said a few weeks ago that she would like to work on our friendship. That led me down a rabbit hole of trying to figure out if something was wrong , how it went wrong, my role in it and if there was a way to fix it. That then led me down a different rabbit hole of thinking about my relationships, my self confidence and self belief.
I have no self-belief. I am more concerned about what other people think than I realise. Those are two separate things that are both true. Those things are connected by my choice of relationships.
From a young age, people/ media/ everything and everyone gives you the cues about the markers for a good romantic relationship but all other relationships are the wild wild west. As I grew older, I was able to fashion my own set of standards for romantic relationships and got better at picking romantic partners. The rest of it was the wild wild west.
I’ve always been too something- too loud, too talkative, too much of a thinker, too intense, too emotional, too bad- and all of that left me with a very confusing and also negative picture of myself. I constantly sought out people who affirmed those negative things, even though it took me many more years to realise that. That meant that I was myself to only myself. Everyone else around me thought of me as too something and that was my kind of comfort zone. Sometimes I even leaned into those characterisations of myself.
Most of why I started blogging was having a space to be myself – even if that was over the top, or rambly or boring or just whatever. (There is no reason for this sentence to be in this post)
That’s not to say, I made bad friends- I’ve had a lot of amazing friendships, it wasn’t about people being bad more like bad for me specifically.
And somehow I suspect that in relationships where I wasn’t getting what I needed, they weren’t either- It’s a two way street in a shitty city.
Okay, I’ve found my train of thought again. Basically, what I’m saying is, in order to build the self belief I need to move forward and in order to have the healthy relationships I so crave, I need to learn to let the shit go- the stuff I don’t know and can’t know. It’s impossible to know everything, every thought process, every variable. It’s impossible to stop people talking about you or hating you. It’s impossible to always know why something didn’t work out and most of the time, it’s a combination of so many things, it’s impossible to pull those things apart.
The thing is if I get stuck on wondering what’s going on in everyone else’s head, I don’t have space to fill my head with affirmations like “you can do it” “you are better than average at some things”- Let me tell you something incredibly sad- I don’t even really feel like a failure because it’s almost like to feel likeI failed, I needed to be hope that I would succeed and I’ve never really had that concrete hope- obviously I’ve said things like “I need to have money” and “I can so do this job”, but I haven’t ever really believed in my ability to determine the course of my life. I haven’t been able to visualise myself as the one that impossibly good things happen to- it’s so much easier to think of a process and focus on that because if you ask me, what do you think you can achieve? What do you think is possible?
Here’s the truth? I don’t know.
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