On seeing myself in an entirely new way
I used to try to "audition" to gain others' acceptance. I finally realized I don't need to change or heal anything in order to be valued, included and treated with kindness.
It’s been a long time since I’ve posted here, nearly a month. I keep starting drafts and finding myself unable to complete them. I wasn’t sure why until now. (I normally don’t suffer from writer’s block.)
All the drafts had similar themes: my stories of how badly I’ve been treated by others my entire life, since earliest memories in infancy.
Mistreatment by family members, teachers and classmates, bosses and coworkers, neighbors and landlords, friends and lovers.
The stories are all “true” in the technical sense. I have spent a lifetime enduring harm and abuse from hundreds of people.
Fortunately, I am blessed to have a handful of truly genuine, open-hearted and loving friends and relatives. A couple of my true friends are here in St. Pete. (Yes, after a decade in the Tampa Bay area I have only a couple of local friends.) Most of my handful of true lifelong friends and loving relatives live in other cities and states, and we keep in touch regularly. They consistently make it obvious that they value me as much as I value them. They are my safe space.
Yet here in St. Pete, for several years and as recently as a few months ago, I was regularly showing up for gatherings of local “friend” groups in which I was frozen out in a hostile manner at worst, and merely tolerated at best.
Here in St. Pete, and also at many other times in my life, I’ve often found myself playing the role as the one in the “friend” group who was talked over, left out of inner circles, forgotten about, the one whose birthday was usually all but overlooked while others in the groups were lavishly celebrated, the one whose life updates were rarely asked about, the one who was least valued and sought after within the groups.
In one of the most recent of these painful experiences, I joined five or six other women from the friend group I was technically a part of for a walk in a paved trail through a forested area. As we strolled among the trees, the dusk sky darkening, I found myself walking alone as the others buzzed with animated conversations among themselves.
Being left out — it was such a familiar feeling for me. I felt tears spring to my eyes.
By this point I had already been …