Telling Yourself A Different Story

Once upon a time, there was a young woman. 

Only 23,  but old enough to be the worst human who has walked the planet. 

She was ugly….. the most repulsive facial features you could imagine. Her body could make someone vomit, people turn away when they see her. 

You'd think it couldn't get worse. You'd think something about who she is could make up for it -

but she was ugliest on the inside. 

If you can think of the worst acts of humanity, the most repulsive crimes, comparable to but still exceeding Hitler's genocide against the Jews and the torture included - nothing compares to what she's done. 

She deserves the highest of punishments, she has earned loneliness and isolation. She manipulates those who have not deserted her, and the ones deserted her left with great reason. She heinously stole their time, life that they will never get back, and inflicted pain. 

Her mere existence is a crime. She has tricked God into letting her live. She is from Satan, and is destructive to the lives of those around her. She is a hazard to others as well as herself. 

This young woman reminds herself of her story every day, so she cannot escape punishment. 

But there was another story, written by someone else, about the same woman. 

She was in pain. She had been hurt from past experiences. Her outward appearance was reflected from her inward longings. 

She smiled with a feigned hope of people believing she was just fine, that she was making it through this world. There were some scars on the outside of her body, from punishment she inflicted on herself.

The bigger scars were within. Those were healing, so they were still a little bit ugly. She committed some crimes against herself, believing she deserved punishment, but I loved her. I tried to tell her for years and years, that she was okay. Her mistakes were forgiven. She didn't have to do anything to be loved. She was as important as anyone else. She never did anything unforgivable, it was impossible. I would never leave her. Never forsake, forget, disown, misunderstand her. I was in this with her forever. Every time she messed up, I would be there to catch her. She is needed. She is invaluable. She was meant to impact the lives around her. 

She overflows with love and kindness for others. She's so afraid of hurting other people that she will do anything, even if it means making things harder in her own life. She doesn't know that other people want her, love her, that she belongs here as much as anyone else. She's not manipulative, she's real - and is in desperate need of honest and lasting love. She was designed to connect with others in her own beautiful way. Her past has shaped her belief of what she deserves. She has self hatred, and has faced the hatred of others, internalizing the message I'm so desperately trying to tell her is false. Her past, her differences, her hurt, her shortcomings - none of this defines her. She is defined by unconditional love and inherent worthiness.

But what matters in our day to day lives? It's the story we tell ourselves. I can listen to the first story - tell it to myself day, after day, after day. I can live in hell. I can choose that for myself, as I so often do. Or I can believe the story God tells me. That my loved ones tell me. The truth. I can choose hell, I can choose truth. 

We can choose which story to believe about ourselves.

The other night I was sitting in bed, and, honestly, thought to myself, "What can I do to make myself feel even worse about myself so that I have to punish myself?" Like… who asks themselves those sorts of questions?! But I was honestly looking for reasons to hate myself more. Looking for reasons to need to punish myself, to keep myself in this hell, because I believe I deserve it. Because I believe that's the only way I can live an honest life. Because I believe that I can't let myself forget how horrible I am or I will begin to think I'm a victim, become arrogant, lose all of the guilt I believe I need to perseverate over. Really, I am the ONLY person doing this to myself. Sure, I haven't always been treated well regarding mistakes I've made. But no one is forcing me to live in a personal hell, or to believe what hurtful people have said or done to me. I'm living in the worst story I could dream up for myself. A story that's not true. A story I do not deserve. 

When this realization came to the forefront of my mind, I had a weird dream. 

I was in a different world where I was the only person who knew that we were not in reality. The world was fake, but everyone else was in a trance. I couldn't show that I knew that it wasn't real, or I would die. If I shared it with everyone, everyone else would die. I had to subtly figure out how to get help and find other people who knew what was happening without the man in charge learning that I'd figured it all out. 

I don't usually think too much into my dreams - because more often than not I'm fighting with my  friend in my teacher's body and we're in an underwater upside down world with talking fish. 

However, this dream hit closer to home. 

I couldn't tell everyone the truth. I didn't know who to turn to. I couldn't be free, even though everyone else was free to live in blissful ignorance when everything was NOT okay. I couldn't lose my paranoia. It was painful. There was nothing I could do, it was completely hopeless. I couldn't show everyone what the truth was, and I couldn't be free from it. It was suffocating. This is the world I feel like I live in. Glennon Doyle always talks about how she's not crazy for her mental illnesses and all the deep feelings she internalizes and lets out. She says that everyone else is crazy for not seeing how broken the world is and the tragic state it's always in, which is why everyone ends up trying to find numbing ways to cope with it, or not even realize it exists- and here we are, needing to deal with it, the ones who have no idea what to do with all this pain and have no idea where it's coming from, and when we recover, we realize that the pain is still there. Even when we find a secure enough life where we don't need to cope in unhelpful ways, the pain is still there. 

 And often, we internalize all the pain. I've somehow decided I'm responsible for it all, for everyone's pain, that somehow me being isolated is the greatest deed I can do for humanity.

There was more to it that I don't think I'm ready to talk about in a blog post, but I'd be happy to talk more about it with anyone separately. 

All in all, I always like sharing where I am in my journey. This was a huge realization I had - how I'm taking myself down with the story I tell myself and the story I believe. Even if my own story, the dark and dreadful one, has been reiterated to me by past experiences - those aren't the messages I want to remember from those experiences, and from those people. Those aren't the people who love me unconditionally, who have walked with me through life. Those people and those experiences aren't God. The people who love me unconditionally, and walk with me through life, they're telling me the second story. And they are reiterating, with their words and actions in my new life experiences, God's message to me. 

These stories are real on both small and large scales. We tell ourselves someone hates us when they don't talk in the warmest tone. How do we know that's not actually the warmest tone they have and are actually being extremely kind by their standards and capability? Or that they are venting to us and trust us with their feelings knowing we will be able to handle it when they can't be that honest with other people? How do we know if it truly has nothing to do with us?

We enslave ourselves to the stories we create in our minds. There are things we just don't have answers to, and we kill ourselves trying to find them. Unfortunately, the only truth, the only story we need to know, is the true story about ourselves. 

The love story made for us. The unconditional, unchangeable story, that we never have to do anything to earn, and we can never lose. Who we are is inherently worthy, loved, and we are given all the freedom we need to mess up, grow, and be free.

I chose this picture of me when I was 18 - spray painting the snow yellow making it look like pee. I wasn't changing the truth that the snow was snow, white and pure, I was just pretending that it was pee, creating an illusion, a new story in my own mind, but with no ability to actually change it.