A Year of Retrospect

Personal Growth. What does it mean and how do you do it? It never really meant much to me till I had surgery. I started losing weight and my outside started changing and soon enough I was looking at my inside, looking at what things I needed to change. I got fat because I ate, but why did I eat? I wasn’t eating to survive and be healthy but to I guess repress emotions and feelings. To forget the sense of emptiness that has always been there, the sense that I never really felt like I belong anywhere. For years and years I ate, consumed with the desire to fill the emptiness. Along with eating, as I got older I choose to date or meet men that were pretty shitty to put it mildly. Thinking I didn’t deserve a good guy, believing that what I had or who I was looking at was ‘good enough’. I settled. I settled a lot! I think being overweight and having extremely low self esteem most of my formidable years and into adulthood really screwed with how I perceived myself and how I dealt with boys. I shouldn’t just say boys and guys I’ve dated, I really need to say people in general, how I let them use me, abuse me and walk all over me. Taking personal responsibility for my actions I say that I let them….not that they aren’t at fault but I was too.
A year ago this week, God really opened my eyes to many things. Things I have been working on since that day. He put someone in my life that I thought was my forever. He showed me the red flags, the concerns and all the warning signs a ‘normal’ person would be like ‘WWHHHOOOAA’. However, being the kind of person I am, the big hearted loving person, I looked past those things because I loved him. Well needless to say it blew up in my face and it really burnt me. However with all of the things that happened, God saved me. He brought me to my knees of sorts and forced me to look at me from the inside. Its not that all of me is bad, but some of my actions have been less than pleasing. Looking back I can’t believe that that was me, I did those things…I behaved that way….I let them do that. What the hell was wrong with me?!?! My actions have left me wilted and discombobulated in a lot of ways.
The past year has been a toss up of struggles and peace. I have changed, things have changed in my life. Taking those pieces and nurturing them and putting them back together one at a time. Taking an honest look at myself and my actions have torn me down but it is allowing me to rebuild a lot of the ways I had previously thought. I have rebuilt my physical being and now I get the opportunity to rebuild my mind and spirit. It’s a struggle everyday though to be honest. When you start taking an honest look at the people in your life, the situations that surround your ‘friendships’ and when you start to let go and back away to those who probably aren’t your true friends…..DAMN!!!, that is hard. Emotionally, this is the hardest thing I have ever done! Standing up for myself emotionally is a BITCH, let me tell you! Being honest with myself and really learning the intentions of others is gut wrenching. Admitting things and being honest with my heart is the most terrifying emotion I have ever felt. The loneliness that goes being honest with is an overwhelming, drowning, can’t breathe sort of feeling. Setting standards and watching the people around me drop like flies is scary, because what is left? Who is going to be left in my life? What honest, good, caring people will be left when I set my standards of dating and friendship to the place it should have been all along? Learning who is the truth and who is the fake is still taking some time to sort out. There are a few that I thought I knew but know I’m not so sure. I am learning to listen to my gut instinct more, though sometimes I think it gets confused with the emotional scars that certain folks have left in their path of destruction in my life. Learning to not pick up the phone or to not answer the texts back when I know that it is not really for ‘me’. Learning to be a little more selfish and a little more of a bitch. Trying to heal the cuts, bruises and welts of the past is painstakingly and earth shattering hard as FUCK!!! There are things that still stop me in my tracks. There are flashbacks that haunt me and but yet teach me. Trying to keep your head above water and not feel like your drowning in the loneliness is . . . .well there are no words for that feeling. To believe in the positive, to have faith in the things unseen is crazy mad hard. I know I will falter in my search for peace but I feel like I have mad a huge step in just admitting things to myself that my head has known all along.