Last week, Mom went through a bunch of our photographs, pulling together pictures to make a customized calendar for Julie, for Valentine's Day. I don't know if it was seeing all the old pictures, or maybe something else, but the last few days, I've been in the mood to go through old pictures, too.
For a long time, I've really disliked the way I look. From my twisted body due to scoliosis, and the awful acne I had in my mid and late teens, to the fifteen or twenty pounds I've put on in the last five years, I've never been satisfied with the way I looked.
As I was looking through photos tonight, I came across one from fifth grade. Apparently our school thought eleven year old girls need a charm class. The first day we started, the teacher (who I disliked to begin with) took pictures of each of us, so we'd have 'before' and 'after' shots.
When she got the film developed and we got our pictures back, I hated mine with a passion. The outfit I'd been wearing showed my scoliosis something awful (and this was the year I'd had my second fusion, and had gotten out of the bodycast just months before). With all the teasing I'd endured anyway, I just wanted to crawl under a rock and disappear.
As I looked at that picture again tonight, I saw something I'd never noticed back then: it's actually a pretty good photo of me, from the shoulders up.
When I was ten, I must have already been half convinced that I was ugly, and a monster, like the boys said I was. I couldn't see that I was actually a pretty cute kid. I wasn't to blame for my scoliosis, and if the other kids made fun of me, it was their problem and only showed how mean and cruel they were.
Grownups tried to convince me of that, but of course when you're ten, what you believe most is what other ten year olds tell you. And I did. There are still times when I'll catch a glimpse of myself in a full length mirror, and a voice in my head will whisper softly, "Monster! Ugly!" When I'm having a bad day, it's still very easy to believe.
When something's gone wrong, and Jev and I have a misunderstanding and I find myself wanting to run away or get offline, it's seldom because I'm mad at him. I just feel like everything is my fault and I deserve to be punished (that is, not allowed to have the pleasure of Jev's company), and I feel like he shouldn't have to put up with stupid, selfish, ugly me.
When we first got together, I ran away a lot, and Jev took it very hard. I've gotten better about not running -- though I'll still do it when things get really bad -- but even when I make myself stay, I get caught up in a vicious circle of thought:
It's all my fault... I'm stupid... I did the wrong thing... he shouldn't have to put up with me... I don't deserve him... I should go away and then things would be better for him... his life would be so much easier if I weren't in it... it's all my fault... I'm stupid...
While my mind is stuck in that infinite loop, all other processes stop, and I can't communicate, and that frustration feeds into the loop and makes it worse.
I'm quite the apologist, too. If Jev has problems with his computer, his classes, or his dad, I'm sorry. Even though it may be completely out of my control, I feel like I should make it better. Okay, so sometimes I don't give myself enought credit for my abilities, but making the rain stop falling on someone's parade is a little beyond me still. And that inability to fix others' problems adds to my self-doubt.
So... I think if I want to grow and become the person I know I can be, I have to go back to line one of my internal programming, and start changing some of the code. I have to learn to trust myself, believe in myself, and love myself, and get rid of all those bugs that others have added to my code, that make it hard for me to be truly me.
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