There’s No Undoing

Share a lesson you wish you had learned earlier in life.

I wasn’t doing it consciously.

Truth be told, I think a hell of a lot of us make decisions with huge, lasting implications for our future before we know our ass from our elbow. Sometimes the decision we make is simply not to make any decisions at all and let life happen to us.

I’ve written before about the mistake we make in thinking we’ll have time later. Some of us figure we’ll get our shit together tomorrow and find tomorrow simply never comes.

This kind of applies to the principle of happiness or self satisfaction by Western standards. We tell ourselves we’ll find satisfaction, meaning, purpose… We will be happy when we have attained and achieved whatever the current dangling carrot is.

Then we set our eyes on some other prize. Though each accomplishment prior has left the same emptiness, surely we will find the meaning we need in the next endeavor.

As a younger person I had a fairly good grasp that a lot of my problematic behaviours and struggles within my relationships stemmed from insecurity and fear of abandonment. I understood the cause of my jealousy but I really had no idea how I was supposed to stop it.

I was missing a really key piece of information. I think of it as a step further down the road that I didn’t know how to take, but one that completely changed my point of view.

The problem wasn’t that I had wounds in my heart already. The problem wasn’t even my lack of self worth, per se. It wasn’t that I have a scar I will always carry with me, nor my desire for constant validation to feel like I am enough.

All of those things are difficult for a person to navigate and they are undeniable aspects of who I am. They aren’t what was at the heart of my discomfort, though.

It was simply that I was looking for a current partner, lover, friend, mentor or whatever it was, to love me enough that the wound in me would be fixed.

I was under the impression that some amount of admiration from my peers was going to make up for what I was lamenting.

This meant that not only was I often laying emotional responses from past trauma in front of people who were not responsible for them, but also holding up a completely unrealistic expectation that another person would fix what was broken. I had this idea that inside romance or close friend connection there was somehow going to be a way of undoing what damage had been done.

I wish I had understood sooner that there is no love on the way that’s going to soothe the losses, betrayals and hurts we have seen in our past.

There may be a white knight or fair maiden who does nothing short of take my breath away. It is possible for someone to see all of the bumps and bruises I’ve collected along the way and regard them as a perfect part of the person I am. I may find a love that lifts me up and holds me steady without a power struggle, someone who I can be my whole self with and know that I am loved.

I could be loved easily or work for every crumb of love I get, it really doesn’t make any difference because some things just can’t be fixed.

It’s a layer I never considered when people said things like, “the love you need is within yourself” or “choose you”.

There was a person who treated me carelessly when I was little, before I really got to have a say. That made me feel like I deserved to be treated carelessly.

I came up against this time and time again and I thought if I could make myself “good enough” I could stop the cycle of being treated without care.

Unfortunately, what I found out kind of sucked.

It’s been me who maintains space for people to be thoughtless and sometimes disrespectful. I hold space and give grace repeatedly thinking if I do better I will earn better treatment.

I’ve been missing the point.

The care and attention to my sensitive heart needs to come from me first. If I’m treating myself with kindness and protection, I don’t return to things and people that are damaging to my peace.

The lessons come when they come, but they come in abundance and rarely leave room for doubt.