I never felt beautiful or girly or worthy or smart or talented. I felt big, unsuccessful, manly, talentless, stupid, and unworthy. Why did I feel this way? Why couldn’t I feel like everyone else did? Why did I continually make bad choices and fail at the choices that I thought was good? Could I blame my childhood? Could I blame my overbearing and insensitive father? Could I blame my first husband, who violently abused and cheated on me? Or could I blame a culture that encourages us to be self-deprecating and therefore saying the negatives meant they were true? I didn’t know who to blame for my failures and inadequacies. I didn’t know where to go to make it better. All I knew was that I was a lost little girl in a 42 year woman’s body and it was horrific.
I have suffered from clinical depression and anxiety since my early twenties. Were these the root of my problems. Was my unbalanced head to blame for my short comings? Or were they simply an excuse. Were all of the violent words that were hurled at me for so many years to blame for my lack of success? Or were they true since I lived up to all of them at some point in my life and I just couldn’t face the fact that I was fat and nothing and ugly and stupid and would never make anything out of myself? (insert scream) I hate feeling like this. I hate feeling like a fraud. I hate not seeing what other people see. I hate thinking that this attempt at changing the world won’t make a real difference in anyone’s life and that it will simply be another failure to mark down on my log of unsuccessful attempts to make something of myself.
I put on a good front. I do. I appear strong and confident. I appear as if I know what I’m doing. But I don’t. I don’t. I question everything that I do. Everything. Every single day.
Will this magically stop? Will I wake up tomorrow and not let the ugly words from my past affect me?
Probably not.
And this is not attempt to solicit complements or praise. This is an attempt to reach out to other women who feel this way. This is an attempt to be raw, to be truthful , and most of all to be vulnerable to a world that is most of the time determined to take everyone and everything down.
This is how change begins. With the truth.
And I hope that you will take this journey with me. So I can not only share my story with you but hopefully that you will share your story with me.
I Am... Magazine 