Grieving

Well as you all can see, I’ve been thinking a lot about my life and the past. I’ve been sorting through things with my adult woman perspective, and it has helped me to see that all of the things I hated about myself were normal. And that I was carrying these enormous mental and emotional burdens that were too much for me to carry. And that feeling the way I felt back then was perfectly sane, given the things I’d experienced.

It’s hard to stay sane in an insane world, ya know?

Revisiting the past with my new, self-compassionate, adult understanding has generated a lot of healing in me, but has also caused me to grieve. I can’t think about the past or the years and years I spent living with daily suicidal ideations without wanting to cry for the girl, teenager, young adult, who had too much on her shoulders and somehow managed to carry it.

I’m so glad I live in the time I do, where we have space in our culture to have these conversations. A generation ago, I would have spent my entire life convinced I was the only one who found life so hard. I would have thought my depression and anxiety were truly evidence that I was weak and broken. We all would have thought this. We all would have walked around with smiles plastered on our faces, thinking that we were the only ones who were breaking underneath all of our mental/physical/emotional/spiritual traumas.

I’m also so happy to live in a time where we are allowed to tell our own stories. When I was a child, I remember feeling like there was a certain way to be black and to be a woman. Not surprisingly, I abused tf out of myself for failing at both. My definition of what it meant to be black was influenced by white supremacy of course–there’s no way to be an American and not absorb that shit, unfortunately.

So here I was, this little nerdy black girl, quiet, shy, terrified of everyone and everything, beating myself up because I was performing blackness wrong. I wasn’t tough, I wasn’t down to fight, I wasn’t…I don’t even remember anymore. Just whatever it was I was “supposed” to be, I wasn’t that. I was a terrified little girl who just wanted to stay in the house because I was convinced that everybody would beat me up/ostracize if I went outside.

And of course, this applied to my womanhood as well. Here’s a pro tip for anyone who is considering having daughters in the future: please don’t teach your daughters that men only want “one thing,” but then also raise them to be extremely obedient people pleasers. 2+2=4 every time.

I grew into an extremely ashamed young woman. My religion, where I sought refuge and guidance, told me I was damaged and ugly and going to hell. And what I absorbed from the culture around “successful womanhood” was bullshit like never being dumped, having men pay my bills, having men obsessed with me–nevermind that that’s the shit that gets women killed sometimes. I took things like not having a stalker as evidence that I’d somehow fallen short as a woman.

Women were supposed to be cool. I was not. I was extremely emotionally disregulated and looking for someone to accept me so that I could accept myself.

Every time I had an issue with a guy I was dating, I felt like everyone in my life always told me it was because of the things that were wrong with me. I couldn’t be so clingy. I had to play games. I couldn’t be so emotional.

I wish that someone in my life had had the tools/vocabulary to say things like “If he brings out these emotions in you, it means you two have a toxic dynamic.” Or “There are intimate partners out there who will accept you for who you are and you don’t have to change a thing about yourself.” Or “The way you think and feel are perfectly sane responses to the life experiences you’ve had until this point. There’s nothing to ‘fix’ about yourself. You’re in pain and your pain is valid.”

I’m sure people have said things like that to me in the past, but memory is so emotional, and the emotion I remember feeling for decades was that I was gross and dirty and broken and crazy and a failure as a woman. Poor little 25-year-old Bryoney, still more girl than woman, already haranguing herself for failing at something she’d barely even started.

Now, that I have finally been an adult for nearly half my life and I have some kind of concept of what adulthood and emotional regulation and trauma mean, I look back and I grieve for all the years I wasted despising myself. I don’t want anyone else to waste decades of their lives hating themselves. As my best friend used to tell me, put down the bat.

Let the anger and self loathing and whatever else you built up inside yourself go so that you can feel what’s really in your heart and soul. I was afraid that if I ever let myself feel all the things I’d stuffed down and covered with shame and self loathing, then I would turn into this out of control narcissistic/megalomanic who would have no parameters for living a “good” and “moral” life. I ignored my true nature, which has always been to seek the “good” and “moral” paths in life. I was always a perfectly lovely human with flaws like everyone else. And my god do I grieve for the fact that I didn’t see this sooner. I hope someone who reads this will begin to look at themselves in a more objective way and begin to see that they are a good person with flaws, just like everyone else. And that they put down the bat and let themselves cry and grieve for all the time they spent thinking otherwise.

Singles Awareness Week

Hey everyone! Happy singles awareness week 🙂 How will you spend this weekend?

This year, I’m not just single, I’m single single. I went on two dates recently and both dudes are leaving the country for a few weeks now, which is fine for me anyway because I don’t want to be on a date with someone I don’t know and don’t GAF about on a day of love.

Valentine’s days have been hit or miss for me. In 2017, my boyfriend whom I “loved” didn’t do anything for me because he didn’t believe in giving gifts for holidays (pfft). In 2019, I started up a relationship with the first human male who would have me so that I wouldn’t be “alone” on Valentine’s day. In 2020…I genuinely don’t remember what I did for V-day last year, I think nothing? Probably got drunk?

And then that brings us to this year.

Happy love day yall. Do you show yourself love? Do you ever thank your body for the way it regulates itself and heals and keeps itself well in spite of you?

Do you show yourself compassion? Do you take the time to sit down with yourself and understand why you are the way you are? How do you speak to yourself? Are you nice to yourself? Would you call your mind/body your friend?

I ask this because I was always told I should love myself, but I didn’t understand how to. Like, I literally didn’t know which actions I should perform or which thoughts I should think or which thoughts I shouldn’t or which thoughts belonged to me or which thoughts were shit I picked up and should have discarded long ago.

The rhetoric of self love and self care surrounds us, but I did not know what that meant. I would take baths because you’re “supposed to” for self-care, when I can’t really stand baths for long. My body runs hot all the time, so a bath is just creating an internal sauna for me. I can handle it for about 5 minutes before I drain it and take a cool shower.

I say this because here I was taking baths but calling myself an asshole all day every day for the smallest of infractions. I was getting massages and going to yoga and obsessed with finding a way to blame myself for all “badness” that existed in my life or the lives of those around me.

I was journaling, but I was bouncing between lying in bed for days because I knew in bed I couldn’t “hurt anyone” (whatever that means) there, and spending hundreds of dollars each weekend getting fucking blackout drunk and chain smoking so that I could get past the monumental terror that I experienced as my baseline daily emotion.

Doing “the work,” learning to love yourself, means being able to show yourself compassion. It means looking at yourself and your life from an outside perspective and saying, OK. Whether or not I like these actions I’ve done, I can understand why I did them. Out of that compassion, you’ll eventually approach something like self-forgiveness.

Doing “the work” means apologizing to yourself and thanking yourself and learning to trust yourself. We can sometimes think of 1000 reasons not to trust ourselves, while overlooking the fact that we are our own A1-since-day-1s. Your digestion, your skeletal system, your lymphatic and endocrine systems, your lumbar spine, your pre-frontal cortex, your neurotransmitters, your hippocampus, all of it, every bit of it was designed to be team you. The execution might be poor, but the intention is sincere: You were designed to keep yourself alive.

With that in mind, you can be a teammate or partner to yourself. OK, you have some destructive habits. Ask yourself how they are trying to help you.

In my own case I’ve noticed that I cannot say anything nice about myself without my mind immediately going into the archives and pulling out Bryoney’s Greatest Misses 1986-present, with an eye toward the future. It’s a relentless form of torture, but it’s a habit that I picked up a long time ago because it motivated me/kept me safe when my circumstances were beyond my control. I asked myself how this thought pattern is meant to help me and the answer was it’s meant to keep me grounded, accountable, and honest (do not point out the speck in someone else’s eye without removing the plank in your own type deal).

Now, although the thought pattern still exists, I can work with it. When I notice myself getting ready to tear down the love I’ve generated for myself I just say “hey. I know what you’re trying to do here, but remember that we’ve figured out a kinder and more effective method to keep me grounded, accountable and honest. So we can let the old way go.”

Maybe this sounds like a small example, or maybe I’m going on about things that sound really trite, but my inner world used to be a dark and cutthroat place that told me all day every day that the price of my life was perfection. I needed to be all things to everyone without expecting any kind of love or support in return because I was a burden; an inferior and broken human being who didn’t deserve to live in the first place.

Now, my inner world is a community with lots of different aspects that come together to make me, me. Obviously there are still loads and loads of imperfections within me, but it sure feels better when I feel like all parts of me are on the same side.

So happy Valentine’s Day yall. I hope this bit of writing helps you to love yourself a little bit more.