I am committed to being vulnerable with others and creating a space for others to be vulnerable. I am creating a series of blogs that help others to see my humanity. My hope is that by sharing some of my deepest insecurities and vulnerabilities that I will inspire others to do the same. It is my honor to bring you the Humanity series.
One of the ways that I have myself is that I do not matter. No matter how times I’m asked to share my story, no matter how many speaking commitments, no matter how many accomplishments, no matter how many people speak highly of me. I always seem to arrive at a time and place when I feel like my contributions are not enough. That no matter how much work I have done, no matter the successes, that I have failed to make a difference. That my work is not important, and that I have nothing meaningful to contribute to the world.
I look at the history of conflicts and complaints and I consider to myself maybe they are right. Perhaps I am not the hero of my story that I have always fancied myself to be. Perhaps I was just some greedy drug dealer looking to make a profit on other people’s suffering. Maybe I didn’t really care and maybe I was just looking out for myself. Maybe I was the monster everyone else seemed to believe that I was.
Then I look at my relationships- the years of fighting, avoiding, blaming, shaming, pain and suffering. Of never feeling good enough, of making mistakes, of hurting the ones I loved. If I were honest with myself, could I say that there was love or was it just fear and survival. For far too much of my life I have spent my time avoiding pain and disappointment. Far too often I felt like that was what was so regardless. No matter what I seemed to try or do, the result was always the same. Every time I would swear to myself that I would never let this happen again. Over and over and over and over again. Eventually I began to occur to myself as hopeless, and that perhaps this is who I was meant to be. A failure. That is what I called myself.
I realized in these moments that perhaps I am not the only one who feels this way. That beneath the accomplishment, the regards, the esteem, the status, there was just a man. A man who had grown from a boy and never resolved many of the things that still plagued him. A man who, despite all the work he had done, never felt like he belonged. Was still creating from the same poem that he wrote in 6th grade about the Missing Piece. That perhaps this wasn’t my puzzle, that somehow, I wound up in the wrong box. I was born in the wrong time, in the wrong place, to the wrong family. That perhaps this world that was so cold and distant was not truly my home, that it was some other place that I haven’t found yet.
So, in this reality I have drifted, from state to state, relationship to relationship, from homeless to home to home, never truly feeling like I was home. Never truly feeling like I had a family, a place to belong. Perhaps this is just how I relive my experience with my own family, how I was removed from their house and was forced to spend my young adult years living amongst strangers. Living my life institutionalized. Perhaps I will write about this more in #2.
So long as I hold myself in this way, I will never matter to the most important person in the world- to myself. I am committed to being better. I owe it to the ones I love, most importantly to myself. I do love myself.
I will do my best to consider this perspective when being present to others’ celebrations. That perhaps they too need to love themselves. I can relate to that. It has not been easy for me, but that does not make me a failure. I am only human, that is all I can ever hope to be. In my humanity, I am not a slave, I am free. Free to be whoever it is that I am meant to be. In all my imperfections, I am whole, perfect, and complete. That is who I choose to be today.
