Contrary to how I present myself, I have spent a lifetime as an insecure little girl who is too afraid to take anything but physical risks. Irrespective of how my life looks - middle class, white girl who grew through primary and secondary schooling living in the same house with parents who are still married - I've never known security. Although I like to pretend that I am strong and self-assured - which I'm pretty good at - this is far from the truth, for I've never known what it means to feel safe. As a result, even as an adult, I have been merely recreating that which I have always known - chaos and anxiety.
During this now past weekend, I attempted to attend a leading educational workshop. On Friday, I spent the entire day, seated in a chair while, for the most part, a highly paid coach lectured a group of 75+ of us on the language of transformation. Part of the curriculum is to identify "the story" that I, as an individual, operate from. My tale is quite universal. I suffer from a case of "not good enough." This subconscious messaging, however, is so onerous that I no longer hear the words. Rather, I merely act from them - my inefficacy at following through, being timely and organized, to name a few, is a direct example of how my self-doubt stops me, time after time again. Once one's story is identified, the next step is to recall "what happened," or when the incident took place that one started believing in said story.
For our coach, her woes of not being good enough began when she was five years old and her baby brother died. In the light of an early morning, she had entered her parent's bedroom excited to greet them. They were exhausted and grief-stricken and instead of rising out of bed to hug and hold their daughter, they remained immobilized by their pain. For this little girl, all she experienced was the inability to make her parents happy even when she heard the words that her baby brother had died. Over the course of the thirty-plus years that followed, she carried the past around with her wherever she went by believing that she wasn't good enough.
Oh, how neat and tidy it is to be able to trace such nefarious thinking back to primal beginnings. If only my experience were so cut and dry! This past weekend, I didn't get the chance to stand before that sea of strange faces and express my story. Hell, I came out of the womb with both fists up and swinging. I had to, for it was the only way to survive in a home where my passive father played the drunk and where my Dr. Jekyl and Mrs. Hyde mother took her rage out on her young children. Hair pulling, face slapping, mouth washed with soap, beaten with a black, leather belt - the physical abuse wasn't a daily event, but it surely was the easiest to get over. It was the emotional, verbal abuse that stuck around long after the bruises went away, the soap taste dissipated and the sting of the slap was gone. "You good for nothing, lazy lout," would echo from the downstairs kitchen when some minor household infraction set off her anger. "You bitch, you lying, little bitch," would steam out of her venomous mouth.
In elementary school, I dreaded coming home from school and not knowing what kind of mood I would find my mother in. To fend off an early attack, I would play sick to win out on the side of compassion. The first man in my life, my father, was too passive to protect us. Instead, he drowned his sorrows in the bottom of a beer bottle while she emotionally abused him just as equally. The second man in my life, my brother, merely mimicked her behavior. When she was gone, he became mine and my sister's tormentor. He was still physically abusive with me up until I was twenty years old. Even as adults, with his 6'4" stature to my 5'2" frame, he could still render me helpless - even for something as nominal as my throwing a snowball at him. I hated it. Thus, to choose one moment when the thought "I am not good enough" was forever sealed in my little brain is simply not a choice I have. I don't blame my parents for this, though. The chaos is in our bloodline. It stretches back through the sands of time. Hell, it is as human as human gets.
