Resilience: We Are Worth Someone Genuine

This will be a blog post about me.

They usually are, but this one's going to be different.

My life, as you may have gathered from the bits and pieces I've let drop since January, has been up and down like a roller coaster. I've had moments of indescribable joy, times where I laughed until I couldn't breathe, precious seconds where I opened my eyes and saw something new, and best of all, the flashes of inspiration that come when I want to make an idea new, when I want to see a story come to life under my fingers.

I've also had bad spots. I've learned about growing comfortable with people, and about the dangers of sharing your soul with someone who doesn't appreciate it. I've learned about betrayal, and I've learned that just because I'm resilient doesn't mean that nobody else is. (That doesn't make sense. Neither did the situation I was in.) I've learned that my words have power- they have a terrible, vicious power, and that I have to be careful when I use them, or I can hurt people.

And I've learned that sometimes, for your own personal health, you have to hurt people.

That's what this post is about.

When I was about thirteen or so, I was in a public setting with the Beauty. I'm about five thousand percent sure she's not going to read this, so I'm okay with relating the story in a mildly censored form. What happened was that we were bickering, like we tend to do, and I was mad so I up and slapped her. In public.

She hasn't forgiven me, but I understand that, because 1) I had no right to slap her in a public setting, whether I was right or wrong, because slapping somebody is a form of humiliation that is only deserved by people who cheat on their significant others or who've committed some other form of betrayal, and 2) the Beauty's scale of forgiveness has a much greater length of time than everybody else's. She tends to hold a grudge. And since it's something of a family trait- she gets it from my dad's father, who was a massive grudge-holder- I understand it.

In other instances, in my relationships with both the Beauty and the Beast, I've been cruel and vicious. I write well; this is a talent I know I have. Unfortunately, it also puts me in a position of command over words, words that have power to cut and slash and hurt and destroy. If I wanted to, I could, in moments, destroy an entire relationship with somebody. Words do have that power- especially when there is rage boiling behind them.

I did that to somebody recently.

Sparing you the details, I was cruel. I was vicious. I was horrid- and I took a positive kind of pleasure, in the way I struck back at somebody who had hurt me. I was a viper, a dog that bites at the hand that feeds it. In that moment of writing it- in that moment of awful amusement- I was something less than human.

I had reasons, at the time. I had been betrayed, by somebody who I never thought would hurt me. I was innocent and guileless, until around December. And then this person kept hurting me- not physically, not verbally, not even intentionally- but slowly and unconsciously, like being poisoned. It was hurting me, sucking my life away. It confirmed every bad thing I'd ever believed myself and made it into some horrible nightmare. There were days in late December and January where I would wake up and feel like I was walking through molasses, like I was trapped somewhere dark and narrow, with a monster creeping towards me, and I couldn't get away. And no matter how much you pray, God can't help when the person who's hurting you isn't willing to change.

Finally I spoke to people about it, and I received some saving advice from Superwholockmarauder, who understood this kind of thing better than a lot of people would ever do. She told me I needed closure.

I hadn't thought about it before. Closure. When you see a couple in a relationship, they're happy, and when they break up, they aren't. But if one or the other of them doesn't have closure, it's going to turn into one of those on-again-off-again relationships where they keep going back into it. You know, those people you see on your Facebook feed who are constantly in and out of relationships by the week. You know who I'm talking about- everybody knows at least one couple who does that.

I was hurting. And the idea of closure hinted at something I hadn't had in my troubled heart since- well, since before I began to get these inconvenient little crushes on boys. It had just a little touch of something warm and soft about it, like the blanket my mother knitted for me when I went to college. It was peace. I had known it in glimpses and flashes- the week every summer I went to girls camp with my church, for instance, or moments when I was playing with the orchestra or band or for the choir or just by myself, when I could throw myself into music and let worlds of sound wash around me like the tide on an ocean floor. Those moments, I knew peace.

And closure, for me, meant peace.

I have been tired, for a long time now, of feeling unwanted, unloved, unappreciated by the opposite gender. I have made blog posts about this before. I won't rehash them now. But understand me to the fullest extent of my meaning when I say that when I thought I had this one opportunity, for a couple of short, but oh-so-long months, where maybe, somebody wanted me like I wanted them. I thought for a brief, shining moment, that I could be happy. And that, too, was peace.

But it was snatched away from me- not all at once, you understand, but every little bit I got, there was less. And I realized that if the other person wasn't going to commit to being in this relationship, it was never going to go anywhere. But they didn't want to give me up, either. It was a situation of Aesop's dog in the manger. They couldn't have me, but they wanted me anyway.

And that hurt just like every other time I had learned that somebody didn't like me that way, or that they liked somebody else. It was like somebody had reached for my chest with claws of iron but instead of scratching out a hefty chunk of my heart, they just raked it, until it was a poor, bedraggled thing with no faith, no hope, no light, no peace. Just the everlasting hurt and rage that I had, and still have, because I'm too nice to say no and not easy enough to say yes, constantly vacillating between self-respect and the heat of the moment.

When I saw that chance at something like peace, I closed my eyes to the consequences, wrote a very, very nasty email, and waited.

And I got what I wanted, in the end. I am alone, unattached, drifting free on the wind. My heart is not yet healed- but it is mostly intact, and that was what I was looking for.

I can wake up in the morning and grumble to myself about how tired I am, about how I want to sleep some more. I can shower and sing songs for my manly alto voice as I scrub myself clean of the illusions of yesterday. I can walk to work and pretend I'm in a music video as I sing along to my MP3 player, and pretend I'm not singing when people pass me on the sidewalk. I can scoop twenty-five chocolate ice cream cones for a field-trip's worth of kindergarteners and their teachers and smile at the genuine joy in their faces. I can go to class and color on the cover of my notebook and revel in the wild amounts of color I'm using. I can walk home and listen to exactly three songs before I get to my apartment, just in time to relax. I can go to the public library and check out seven books and read two of them the same evening, and get all my homework done. I can practice speaking in Russian. I can watch episodes of Supernatural and get upset about things happening to my favorite characters. I can admire Jensen Ackles in a suit and fedora. I can laugh at what's funny and cry when I'm upset and eat ice cream whenever I want to, and for a change of pace I can walk down the street and buy myself frozen yogurt. I can close my eyes and see, for a blessed change, nothing but blackness interspersed with warmth, instead of the face of somebody who makes me feel both good and bad about myself. I can drift off to sleep and wake up dreamless.

For once, I am all right. I'm not languishing- but then, I've never been the languishing type. I've always had a remarkable ability to fake my own happiness. That sounds pathetic, but sadly, it's true. I can be cut deeply in an instant but cover it up with a laugh and a smile, and you'll never know the difference, not even when you look into my eyes. Or you might. I wouldn't know. I'm always on the true side of my own hurt.

I don't regret severing my relationship with the person who hurt me. It was poisonous- I would probably admit to the nature of it as being abusive, if pressed. I regret a little bit that I was so cruel, that I hurt them.

Of course, they bounced back pretty quickly, too. You observe things, even when you don't want to- pictures, conversations, things that indicate that for them, life is also going on.

I don't know quite what I want to say here. I was vicious, yes. I was cruel. I regret being unkind because I don't like how I have the power to hurt people. It's a dangerous power, and I shouldn't have used it so liberally.

But the important thing is that I came out unscathed. I am moving on, seeing the world with fresh new eyes.

The other day, I was driving with Superwholockmarauder to Smith's to buy groceries and things. The sun was just setting, and I was seeing the trees against the sunset, which is my favorite kind of way to see trees and sunsets, and I recalled that I had always seen it as looking like black lace. And I just enjoyed that black lace, over the golden-rose sky, and I breathed in and out and remembered that I am strong and beautiful. I am vibrant and maybe not so much ladylike as vaguely womanly. I am intelligent, I am creative, I am healthy, I try to be kind, I try to respect others, and I am a person worth being, a person who deserves more than somebody who will treat me the way I was treated.

If anything, I would say of this period in my life that it was like having an addiction. I had one, and it thoroughly messed me up. And now I don't have one, and though it's certainly left its scars, I am going to take care of myself a little better than I did before. I'm not just going to give my heart out to anybody who's polite and has a pretty face. I'm worth more than the superficiality required to present either of those things to me. I'm worth someone genuine.

And the thing is... so is the person who hurt me. He's not a bad person. Not really. He just has no idea what he's doing. None of us do. We're all clambering blindly about ourselves in the darkness, looking for something to hold for the sake of security. I got trampled in his efforts. And when the lights came on, I'm sure he regretted it- briefly- before the lights went out again, as they always do.

Everybody is worth something genuine. No matter how much you hate somebody, or are angry at them, they are worth something genuine. They have lives and feelings and they do matter. And once you know how to take care of yourself, how to understand what you need and what you don't need, you can help take care of them. And you should at least try and help other people before you have an idea of who you are, because often, doing is the journey.

My life since October has been a mess. It's not how I ever imagined my life going. I never imagined I would have the power to break somebody's heart. But in the end, I don't suspect I actually did. We are all human. We are all resilient.

I'll close with this, the immortal words of Draco Malfoy, as adapted by the Starkids: "Do you know who I think is the ugliest girl in school? Hermione Granger. You know what I'd give her on a scale of one to ten, with one as the ugliest and ten as the prettiest? I'd give her an 8... 8.5... or a 9... but not... NOT over a 9.8. Because there is always room for improvement. Not everyone is perfect, like me. I'm holding out for a 10. Because I'm worth it."

Maybe we're not all as perfect as Draco Malfoy. But you are worth it. You are. I had to go through a whole lot of pain and mess to figure out that I was worth it. I hope you won't have to go through the pain and mess to figure out that you are worth it. I'd tell you to take my word for it... but I never believed people who told me I was worth it, either. I don't expect you to believe me. I'll tell you again. You are worth it. I am worth it. We are all worth it.

Never settle for anybody who doesn't make you feel like a whole, complete human being. Because you are worth it. We are worth someone genuine. If you remember nothing else of me, remember that.