Is it true?

The perennial question

It’s been a wet week here. Humid, sticky air, heavy rain, and so many tears. The humidity and rain were expected. The tears? Not so much.

The waterworks came after I received a message from a college friend. Attached were two pictures of me I’d never seen before.

I have any number of pictures of me from this era of my life— 18-19 years old— and none of them have ever knocked me over like these two did. I think it’s because I’ve had those other pictures all along. My emotional response to the me that is featured in them changed steadily over time, the feelings diffuse and expected. They didn’t just sneak up and punch me in the gut.

But looking at these pictures was like stumbling into someone as a full-grown adult who you’d last seen as a baby, except in reverse. I know that I am her, and yet she feels completely disconnected from my experience of being her, like a doppleganger I’ve never seen before.

When I was her, I felt miserable and lost and monstrous. Is it cliché to say that I was convinced I was fat? Maybe so, but it’s also true. Fat, ugly, dirty, loud, excessive, unworthy, and inexplicably lucky when anyone loved me despite all the obvious reasons not to. The abuse that I allowed myself and others to heap on that gorgeous, precious, sparkling girl— for years and years!

Regret, sorrow, and overwhelm at all the wasted time and potential swamped me as I sat staring at those unanticipated pictures on my phone. On and off, all day, I wept at the waste of it all. I ached to reach through the screen and pull her close to me, cup her face in my two hands just like I have done with my own children, and ask insistently, Don’t you know how beautiful you are? What a gift you are to this world?

I likely wouldn’t have listened to me, even if such a weird, timey-wimey thing were possible, just as I’m sure my own children don’t listen to me at times, assuming that I “have” to love them, to think they are beautiful, because I am their mother. No one has to love you, I tell them. No one has to see how beautiful you are. Not family, or friends, lovers or strangers. If there is anyone that might be required to love us it’s ourselves, and yet we clearly aren’t. I did not see the truth of me at 18. I did not love myself. I did not believe myself beautiful or worthy of good things. I did not imagine myself deserving of anything that wasn’t bought and paid for with suffering.

And I can’t help but wonder, seeing so clearly the disconnect between my story about myself all those years ago and the reality of me, how often in the years since then I’ve been similarly wrong about myself or other people.

This is not performative self-flagellation. All in all these days, I think I’m pretty smart. Insightful, even, sometimes. Body stuff is still stupidly hard. I still get in my own way by doubting my own worth and potential all the time. But from this vantage point the real tragedy, if there is one at all, isn’t the horrible things that have happened to me or the lasting effect they’ve had on my life. It’s that once I finally started telling the horrible stories they became my only story, looping endlessly. The things that didn’t fit in the story— that I was vibrant and lovely, talented and loved— got explained away or simply left out.

I’m still unlearning this tendency to filter out the things that don’t fit my narratives, about myself and other people. Listening to myself, I’ve learned to ask, Is this true? Who in you is being served by telling it this particular way? What are you leaving out? Might those missing pieces be, inconvenient or uncomfortable or messy as they are, the truest thing? The useful thing? The human thing?

I am finally getting some glimmer of understanding that the world needs my gifts more than my suffering. That denying the gifts that I have always had doesn’t prove my stories of the horrible things. It just leaves me feeling beleaguered rather than resourced, and who does that serve? How does that help?

Here’s the true story. Life (certainly mine and maybe yours as well) has been an orgy of horror, success, and good fortune— trauma inflicted, unnecessary suffering chosen, and enormous love received and offered. Moments of piercing clarity exist for me alongside times when I am completely and utterly disconnected from reality. I do my best to practice my integrity, to love my people well, to show myself and other people compassion, but sometimes I fail utterly. And still I am capable and gifted and lovely and loved.

What’s your story? Is it true?

---

Previously…

One year ago:

Two years ago: