People now often refer to me as either a) the shy girl or b) the snobby bitch depends on how well you know me! lol , and I was never that girl before. Well Snobby maybe, shy definitely not. Where did my voice go? Where did I go? I had someone ask me this past spring what I did for fun...they totally stumped me..."uhhh...fun?... hmmm...ummm" I was racking my brain. I couldn't think of anything that I did just for the fun of it. I remember after we broke up, about a year later, I was pulling away from God more and more, our break up was long and drawn out and painful, and I remember thinking "God, I just want to be happy, I just want to be happy...and I'm not happy, this whole christian thing isn't making me happy..." So I started exploring other options of happiness, drinking here and there, and then pretty much every weekend, smoking first casual, then all the time, sleeping around, dating LOTS of boys,shopping like a mad woman, dozens of shoes, purses, new outfits every weekend, hundreds of dollars on jewelry, there was about 4 months where I was totally off the grid. The more I pursued happiness, the less happy I got. I was pursuing a symptom not a cause. I thought my unhappiness was the issue, but my unhappiness was just a symptom of my brokenness. I was not whole anymore, I had no identity. How can you be happy if you don't know who you are? How can you love yourself if you don't know who you are? How can you love anyone else if you don't love yourself? How can you be vulnerable with someone and let someone be vulnerable with you if you don't even know what you think?How can you be intimate with someone if you are a stranger to yourself?
I gave so many pieces of me to this guy, I wasn't me anymore. Regardless of whether there was abuse or not, I had willing given some pieces of me to him, and replaced them with his. Regardless of the traumatic situations that have definitely imprinted on me, and made it hard to trust, one can't truly trust and one can't truly love if one is not whole. Why am I afraid of sex? Because I don't feel safe. Why don't I feel safe? Because I don't know the truth about who I am. You can lose the truth about who you are in many different ways, sometimes you don't give it away like I did, sometimes it's taken from you, sometimes it's slowly eroded away by painful life circumstances.Sometimes you've never known who you are. Nobody ever told you; you are valuable, you are lovable, I love you because I choose to;because I want to- not because of what you do or what you don't do, you are a powerful person, you are good, you are worth it. We need someone to tell us these things, in every situation we get ourselves in; tell us how awesome we are, when we feel the farthest thing from it. It's hard to find people that can speak life into us all the time, because a lot of people are also working through their brokenness. I think you really need to find your identity in someone bigger, because no one is ever going to always instinctively accept you for who you are. A lot of us have been told that such a person does not exist, that there is no one we can go to without being judged, that there is no one that will love us unconditional, that there isn't someone that will treat you the way you should be treated not how you deserve to be treated. But there is, and there is incredible freedom when you meet this person.
For girls, and even men, who find themselves in relationships similar to mine, or even when you have people in your life who don't aim to bring out the best in you. Don't let those people define who you are, shit can happen to you, and it can be painful and stuff can continue to happen but you can't let it become your identity or even part of it. When you accept lies about yourself as part of your identity, you warp your perspective of yourself, of life, of others, and of God. Then you start building more lies and acting out of those lies, instead of who you are. Sometimes your identity can get so distorted, like mine did, it's crippling.
Right now I'm working through slowly stripping away the lies and finding who I am. It's SO painful, but I think that's why God does it slowly. The closest thing I can describe to how I have been feeling is like I am being dethawed. It stings, but I know if it was to happen instantly, it would probably kill me. Working through this garbage from my previous relationship has been so painful. Removing the lies from my identity is like taking a knife out of a partially healed wound, (I'm not healed, I've just learned to live with the knife in my leg) it's messy, it hurts, and you don't know how you'll survive, but you do, and you heal up, and eventually you start to feel good again. I went through a period of numbness, for years, I think that is how I made all my stupid decisions, I couldn't feel them. Then EVERYTHING hurt, but now parts of me are healed and feel good, and I can recognize when I've got an open wound. A lot of repentance and a lot of forgiveness has been bringing me closer and closer to being alive again but I know I've got a long way to go, it's hard to let go of some of those character defects that have been comfort for us, but safety in freedom is always better then safety in bondage.
1 comment:
"...people in your life who don't aim to bring out the best in you. Don't let those people define who you are, shit can happen to you, and it can be painful and stuff can continue to happen but you can't let it become your identity or even part of it. When you accept lies about yourself as part of your identity, you warp your perspective of yourself, of life, of others, and of God. Then you start building more lies and acting out of those lies, instead of who you are. Sometimes your identity can get so distorted"
In like 20 years when you write an autobiography this quote needs to be in there. It's so true, and that is one of the largest lessons I ever had to learn, and am still learning.
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