Positive Self Regard..💗[22-11-23]
🤍🎧Slice of Life🍷Confessional🍷Musings🎧🤍
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Dear Chasers💗
There are times when I didn’t love myself but there was never a time when I didn’t love other people very deeply. They usually say to me that in order for me to love anybody else, I should first learn to love myself. It doesn’t make sense to me. I mean for fucks sake, I’d be surprised if I even know what love is or how to do it or if I am even doing it the right way. I don’t hate myself anymore so that to me as a good as it gets.
I love people the way I would like to be loved I guess. Its like when I had a group of little dogs, small yorkshire terriers, about five of them. Above all else they were my babies. They taught me how to love. When I was hungry I’d make sure they were fed well. When I felt cold I’d wrap them up warm in blankets and tiny doggy pyjamas. If I felt sad I’d cheer them up. They loved me so much I had a lot to live up to. I nailed it. I learned how to love and lose and grieve all through those little creatures. My baby friends.
A new chapter in my life was learning to love another human. One that didn’t disappear. One that was there every day. Present. Through good times and nice days and bad times and bad ways and I had to learn how to stay myself. Stay there without running or pushing them away. I had to be present. I didn’t know this kind of presence. I have always loved from afar.
Missed what I have never had. My mum. My dad. I loved my dad more once he died because I backtracked. I lived him back into my mind. I love my mum like I’ve never loved anyone in my entire life and I never had her love me back. She says she does now and I believe her because I am healing and I hate to love someone who doesn’t deserve to be loved so I believe with all my guts.
She was the one who gave me away. She didn’t want this baby. Didn’t want this child. Didn’t like this teenager. Didn’t come to my deathbed when they were planning on pulling the plug. Oh! but I dreamt her on my deathbed. She pulled me up from the hospital mattress to force my bed out of the window.
Blind to my surroundings dying, freezing, freezing cold - I called out her name. It was “MUM” and it felt foreign on my tongue. I was alone and cold and fighting them, the nurse, my mum - the invisible pull trying to drop me and my bed out of the open window above the sea. Little did I realise that I was fighting for my life, dying, slumping down the position I was put in losing touch with the life support equipment.
All the while dreaming of being in an aircraft above the sea, no ocean wide enough for me to see anything but the earth’s surface looking at it from the moon. I wanted to ring that red dial telephone and tell my Nana where I was going. Does she know I am flying? I found out later Nana had been praying for God to take her. Replace my life for hers and later.. when I recovered and we heard the news of lung cancer and organs and brain and heart in her.
My dad screamed blame at me from his psychiatric bed - I was killing my Nana it should be me that is dead. Saying that I had killed her because she put herself up for death instead. I am nothing but a suicidal slut, he said. My brother calmed my father down and all I could do was let the tears fall for my Nana. I didn’t believe in all that nonsense. I believed in science but something else crept back into mind and it made me wonder.
When I was 16 and wanted to quit smoking because it was getting harder to enjoy my exercise at the gym and it made me stink and things like that. I reached out on my double bed to God. I made a deal in my head that if I touched another cigarette ever - my beloved Nana would die a terrible cancerous death. I lay down and slept and slept. Day after day drinking water instead, I stayed in that bed for a week and a half. Until the day I knew I had cracked it.
I could gather myself up and go to work, dodging the clouds of smoke from the living room with everyone else smoking (Nana, Granddad, Uncles, Aunties, Cousins) without wanting to join them. Freshly washed head of hair ducking under the lingering fumes. Ironed suit and new shoes loving everything and not having to choose to join in to still be loved by them. That was the first disconnection. I didn't mind ducking under even though it felt like it was me who was drowning.
I felt the almost invisible divide between my relatives and I. I can't speak for them then but I can now that they’re no longer with us. I can’t speak for them but I can tell you what I thought they were thinking about me. I thought that maybe they thought, as a collective, that I was getting too big above my station with my quitting smoking and legal career and just growing up maybe into a snob of a person.
It was because I didn’t want to be portrayed of just those things that I always wanted to stay the person who was loved and respected as one of them all. I got paranoid. All i was doing was trying to survive and do something with my life and prove the haters who were the same people at times, wrong. People, family used to say that I should never have left school too soon, I’ll never get a job and I’ll never make anything of myself either.
I know they said those things in a loving way, trying to get me to wake up and do something good for a change. “Don’t make the same mistakes we did” - well, this new me, this working woman me, this gym fanatic, non-smoking, healthy eating part of me was my take on showing that I listened to them. That I loved them and I never tried to hide the still fucked side of my life too. The drinking, partying, many ‘boyfriends’ coming and going, the drugs the poor outlook, the fucked up views and a sliding doors type of existence. I showed everything I had.
My cards were on the table. Soon one after the other my family got up from that table and left the game. Taking their cards with them and keeping poker faced. I felt like they thought I was trying to be something else, something better than what my fate intended, something I was NOT and if that’s what they did think - they were 100% right. I was nothing, had nothing, was nobody and had nobody either. I was lost and in limbo.
I thought if I did good nad wholesome in my daytime, my nights would be warm and cosy and my place at the table would always be there, set, welcome. I felt like I was a countdown to being kicked out of the family household to fend for myself and I was right. Luckily, I didn’t let my fears of failing stand in my way. I jumped before I was pushed. Then ended up coming back when I failed and got kicked out after that.
My mental health declining wasn’t accepted as gospel. It was my headstrong coming of age and my previous ‘abandonment of the family’ when I quit my job and went to live over 100 miles away (I think - it was far enough) on the other side of the country. I moved from up north in Manchester to down south in Essex. Everyone had tried to talk me out of starting a new life. I was in love for the first time and had big pound signs in my eyes. I knew that for my skills, experience and newly earned vocational qualifications as a legal secretary, I could earn twice as much money working the same job in London as I had here for six or seven years.
I’m not going to delve into all that business just yet. I’m trying to focus on loving people and what it means to love myself. I think not wanting to die is as good a start as any. Not being perpetually embarrassed of who I am today is the next great place. I used to see all that was bad about me as being exactly who I was. I internalised everything that ever had been said to me.
Especially, about who I was and I believed those people must be telling the truth because the person who I thought I had been had failed miserably. I’d fucked everything up in my life that I had accomplished so far and all because I fell in love. I was lonely. I was scared. I was isolated, some of which was by my own hand, my own insistence. I thought everyone was trying to kill me. I believed that I should just die. I wished for death in order to receive all the love and respect that I so desperately missed and didn’t know it but I needed and craved it.
Having not been through any grief over a human death yet, I naively believed that once I died I would see and feel the truth about everyone who I loved. I would see and feel their love for real. It wasn’t these thoughts that finally tipped me over the edge. It was the voices who wished death on me too. They threatened to kill me so I jumped before I was pushed and attempted to take my own life (twice and both times I needed life support and the potentially third time I realised - three strikes and I’m out).
I didn’t jump off anything. I didn’t cut anything. I took too many things. I ended up on the edge of sanity and cut all ties to those who loved me. I took too many life saving pills that almost took my lights out. I survived and I found out who loved me. It was the strangers who saved me from myself. My neighbour hadn’t seen me all day or heard my constant music banging through the walls (which I used to try and drown out the voices in my head), he had a weird feeling.
I knew him. I used to ask if I could sleep in his bed with him when I was terrified. He didn’t say no. He phoned the police the day I was missing and they found me in my flat unconscious. I lay there for over 12 hours dying. I was released from my coma in hospital and my Dad was there and he said “this isn’t permanent”. He meant all the machines but I thought he means me being alive. I am just happy to be in my skin alone without the voices. I am happy to be able to feel safe inside my own skin and have the man who saved my life still protecting me by my side.
‘There are worse things than being alone, it just takes decades to realise it, by then it's too late and nothing is worse than too late” Charles Bukowski
Thank you for reading me! Big Warm HUGS xxx💗
