My Story – 5 Steps From Loss of Self to Love of Self

What are you supposed to do when life decides to toss you around? Why do teenage years have to be so horrible? My life felt normal once. I lived next door to my best friend. I fought with my brother. I went to school every day. I was shy around new people and obnoxiously loud around my closest friends. I cried at sad movies and laughed really loud when my friends did stupid things. I was happy with who I was and where my life was going. How did everything go so terribly wrong?

I don't even know what happened to that girl. Did someone attack her in the middle of the night and throw her in a hole? It makes me think of the movie The Ring. Maybe somebody took her, threw her down a well and slid a lid over it. Is she still there buried so deep that I can't even hear her screaming for me to find her? If I ever do find her, will she be the same person or will she be some demented mutation of my former self?

What could possibly have been going on in God's head when He decided that teenage girls should go through this? Was it some kind of sick desire to watch as they destroyed themselves from the inside out? Or do we do this to ourselves and God watches wishing He had never given us the freedom to choose our own futures, so that He would be allowed to step in and fix everything? What would life be like if girls were supposed to be outspoken and confident, loving and kind, happy, beautiful and confident in themselves? Is that even possible?

Loss of Stability

My parents ripped me from my home and my life when I was 15, just in time to miss the chance to actually enjoy high school. I joined a new graduating class that was so wrapped up in their own friends, cliques and drama that even if I had been the most outgoing, lovable person in the world I probably would not have made any true friends. Negating this fact, I am not outgoing, if I am lovable it is only to those people who know me well, and I did not make any lasting friends.

In middle school I had been slightly outgoing, slightly geeky, and I didn't really fit into any social group. My best friends and I had been sort of on the outside of everything, which looking back on it was a wonderful place to be, but at the time it was kind of like my own personal exile. I observed the girls who were friends with the people that I wanted to be friends with and realized before I entered high school that if I wanted to be accepted and to blend in, then I had to be shy and quiet. Thus, I became the epitome of shyness. In an extremely masochistic way, I remember being overjoyed in the spring of my freshman year when the senior star of our spring musical told me that at the beginning of the school year he didn't even know that I could speak.

I slowly lost the ability to introduce myself to new people and to stick up for myself. I forced all of my confidence out because I thought this was what I was supposed to do. Meaning, I was disabled from the start. At my new school I was the freakishly quiet newcomer, who didn't have any friends, didn't dress right, was from an alien country, belonged to a religious cult and wasn't extremely interesting. People began to call me “Eskimo” and “Alaska” right away but that was the extent to which they would allow themselves to associate with me. They had their own friends and did not have any need for my friendship.

I had one friend going into my first day of school and I am still in awe of myself for allowing that friendship to exist. Belsou was from Africa. Her host family lived in the same religious community as I did and had come over to our new house to introduce themselves as one of the other Baha'i families in the area. She was friendly and really nice, but she wasn't my best friends from home and I didn't know her at all. I think it was more in desperation than in confidence that I had the office call her on the first day of school so that she could show me where to go. They asked if I knew anyone and she was the only person who fit into that category.

If it weren't for her, I don't know if I would have survived the move. Belsou had moved from Africa herself a few years before and knew what it felt like to be the new kid. The outsider. She became my closest ally and my best friend, and I think that I may have become hers too. Through the rest of that year and the beginning of the next we took in other new comers and tried to form a group of friends made of people who were in the same place as us. We had movie nights and did things together, but Belsou was really the glue that held us together. We were all very different people and when she graduated in December of the following year, we slowly fell apart.

Thus, I was left on my own, with some acquaintances but no friends in school with me. School became this place where I loved and yet hated to be. I worked hard to get good grades and to blend in and be a likable person, yet I never gained the deep friendships that I so ached and yearned for. The closest I came was a group of sophomore girls that I knew through choir who I sat with every other day at lunch throughout my senior year. Even though I was older than them I looked up to them and was jealous of them at the same time. I yearned to be a true part of their group someone who they really thought of as a friend, yet I always felt like an outsider. I could join their group, but I would never be needed by them. I even deluded myself for a while, but when I graduated I realized that my friendship with them was mostly just one-sided. I needed their table and their conversations and their fun-loving spirits in order to survive high school, but there was little that I gave them. I think this was probably one of the harshest lessons I ever learned.

There was one girl in this group, in particular, who had the most beautiful voice and was one of the most amazing actresses I had ever met. She brought out a side of me that I hadn't shown since I had moved and thus I wanted so desperately to be friends with her. But in reality, she did not need my friendship. She was nice, and she is still a friend of mine to this day, but regardless of what she told me, I never felt that she needed me. I never felt that I was more than a burden to her and I put a lot of effort into a friendship that never seemed to give anything in return.

Teenage girls face this same thing every day. The disappointment of not being needed or wanted. Or perhaps the opposite, being desperately needed but never being given anything in return. When do you cut a friendship off? When do you realize that you are just being used? When do you come to terms with the fact that you are putting everything that you can possibly give into a friendship that it is not giving you anything in return? These are questions that I have grappled with a lot in my life. Ever since I was very young, in fact. I think it is in most girls’ natures to want to be needed by the people that you look up to. Yet in most cases these are the people that will never need you.

Loss of Family

I have always been very close to my family. My mother had been my best friend up until she decided that she hated my home and the place I loved and moved us to an alien planet. My father and I shared a freakishly similar thought process and thus he had always been the person in my life who explained me to myself. And my brother and I were typical brother and sister. We hated each other sometimes and loved each other at other times. However even close families have their years when everything goes wrong.

My relationship with my mom took a downturn just before we moved. She was the person who loved me more than anyone in the world. She cared for me when I was hurt or sick, comforted me when my heart ached and listened to me when I was confused. Yet sometime around 14, she hit menopause and I became a teenager and we grew apart. Not in every way, but we kind of stopped understanding each other. It felt like she hurt me constantly and could never understand why. Slowly overtime this lack of understanding grew deeper and deeper. I am sure that I hurt her as well, but I couldn't understand this either and didn't feel that it was my responsibility to try to understand, because she was the parent and I was the child. Sometimes I would dwell for days on the unfairness of her actions. When I tried to talk to her about the things going on in my life she never quite understood, and she was no longer able to help me with my problems.

The same thing happened with my dad, only it took a couple more years, and it happened for a very different reason. My brother was away at college the year that we moved, and so I had a year, I'll be it a very disjointed year, of being an only child. I really enjoyed this. There were very few arguments, and to my own surprise I actually enjoyed life, even though I hated the place I was living. For the first time in my life it felt like my dad wanted to spend as much time with me as I wanted to spend with him. We would go for breakfast every Saturday morning and we would stay up late at nights talking. He began to fill a tiny bit of the hole that was slowly being created by the lack of understanding between my mom and me.

However, my brother hated the school he was at and moved to our new house about 4 months after we moved here. He came back pretty messed up. College life had not been a pleasant experience for him, and it had left scars. All of a sudden my dad's time was thoroughly taken up by him and very little time was left for me. All of our time was suddenly invaded by my brother and within a couple months I had been thrown out all together and what had been our time became his and my brother’s.

It felt like I turned around one day and my foundation, the thing that kept me centered and grounded, had been ripped right out from under me without me even noticing. I had lost the people who made life make sense. It hadn't happened all at once, it happened slowly, so slowly in fact that I don't think I recognized it until about December of my senior year.


Loss of Friendship

I stayed friends with Belsou even after she graduated from high school. We saw each other often at Baha'i events and celebrations, and we did many other things together too. She became a part of my family and one of my best friends in the world. However, in February of my senior year she moved to Canada to live with her sister. Life changed after that.

Right around that time, it seemed as though people were slowly trickling out of this place. People were graduating from high school and moving to other cities or graduating from college and going back home. I became good friends with a few other people I knew who were also in high school, but they were all younger than me and didn't go to my school. I eagerly filled the void left by my parents’ inability to see my hurt, and Belsou's disappearance by building what I thought was a deep bond with 2 girls. Our friendship grew throughout the end of my senior year and the beginning of my freshman year in college; however they both disappeared around the middle of that year.

One of them began to like my brother, and would come over to our house to hang with me and then disappear into his room. At times she left me feeling so betrayed, as if my friendship wasn't good enough and I was just being used as an excuse for her to come over. I finally called her on this and she felt really badly, but our friendship wasn't the same until many years later. After that we went months without seeing each other or talking.

The other girl's best friend had been away for a year, and she had promised me that when this girl came back things wouldn't change. However, regardless of what she said, the minute her friend returned, I ceased to exist. That was probably one of the most difficult experiences of my life. I don't think anyone who hasn't experienced this can comprehend the pain of realizing that the person you put so much faith in, who you poured your soul out to, who you thought was your best friend, was really just using you to fill a hole that someone else had left in them.

Not that I blame her for this, I honestly don't think that either of these girls meant to hurt me, but nevertheless, they did. They left me feeling like the most unworthy, stupid, lonely, uncared for person. I didn't know how to pick myself back up. I didn't trust my mom or dad to help me anymore, or even to care in the right way. My relationship with my brother had always been much more of a competition than a friendship. And I honestly had lost all of the friends that I had. I didn't know what to do. I tried to reach out to my friends from high school here but it was just thrown back in my face that they really didn't need my friendship and just like I had always felt that I had to ask permission to sit at their lunch table in high school, I felt that I didn't deserve to talk to them about my problems. I couldn't see why they should even care.

Loss of Self

Thus, I was left alone with the most excruciating, unbearable pain in my heart. More painful than I think I have ever felt. I didn't know what to do. There was no one to explain it to me, no one to tell me what was happening, no one to tell me that it was okay, and even kind of normal. I was terrified to tell anyone how I truly deeply felt because I didn't want to find out that they didn't care either. I didn't know if I could take it if I found someone else that I thought I could trust only to find out when I finally did trust them and share a little of myself that they didn't really care about me at all either.

I figured there must be something wrong with me, that I repel people so outrageously. By this time I had completely and thoroughly lost myself and had no idea who I was. My foundation, the thing that made me, me, what defined how I reacted to situations, what I liked and didn't, and who I cared about, had slowly crumbled away. It was as if the world beneath my feet had been ripped out from under me and I had fallen into a black ocean, with no idea of what direction was up.

I was terrified and paralyzed. Unable to call for help and untrusting of any help that was offered. I prayed over and over that someone would see me struggling, see me drowning and save me, yet no one noticed. Not my parents, not my “friends,” not my brother, no one. I felt as though I could have committed suicide and no one would have cared. Somewhere deep inside I knew that this wasn't quite true, that my parents would have been devastated if I had died, and that there were people who did care about me. However, it felt like I was dying, yet the only way for anyone to wake up and notice it would be for me to truly die.

If I had been anyone else, I very well might have tried to kill myself. I can't say that the thought never crossed my mind, because it did, quite often. I just felt that God puts us on this earth to learn, and it would be like I slapped Him in the face and said “take back your gift” if I were to kill myself. This kept me from doing anything drastic, but it didn't stop me from biting my wrists. Sometimes I would bite them so hard that I would have red marks on them for days. I prayed that someone, anyone would notice and would offer me a hand out of the misery. Yet, after I did it, I would hide my wrists, ashamed of my own inability to fix myself.

My own pain led me into a downward spiral of shame, guilt, anger, loneliness, hurt, pain, and more shame. I felt so hollow, I was amazed that people couldn't see right through me. I had never been a good actor, and so I couldn't understand how it was possible for anyone not to notice my pain unless they didn't care enough to look. Thus, my insecurities and feelings of inadequacy fed off themselves. My soul screamed out for help, but I couldn't reach out for it because I didn't see why anyone should help me. I couldn't see how anyone could care enough about me to help. Over time I grew so numb to the world that I almost enjoyed this bone-deep, heart stopping pain because at least I knew that I could feel something. I grew to enjoy being sad, confused and lost. Even if at that point I had had the power to pull myself out of my depression (which is really what it was, although I did not realize this till years later) I wouldn't have been able to. I didn't know how to be happy anymore. I didn't know how to be anything except a fake.

I had always been somewhat of a pushover. I learned (incorrectly) in high school that if you want to make friends, you have to change yourself to be whoever they want you to be. Thus, even if I hadn't lost my home, my family and my friends, I still would have lost myself.

Girls in our society are constantly being told they're not good enough, pretty enough, skinny enough, outgoing enough. They're not enough. And this comes at a time in their lives when everything is unstable and everything is felt 10 times more powerfully then it ever was before. It seems almost impossible for a girl child to grow up in our society without feeling inadequate. Why should childhood be so treacherous? And it's not just teenage girls facing these issues, it’s almost every child growing up here female or male. The TV, the news, books, magazines, commercials, ads, other children, parents, friends, the community, everyone is sending out mixed messages.

This constant struggle is begun in every child's mind to decide who they should be, how they should get there, what they should look like, what they should act like. They are not allowed to simply be themselves. They are told that they need to change this attitude and that outfit, and somewhere in their teenage years they lose who they are. They stop being themselves and become who they think they are supposed to be. Sometimes this is a good thing, often it isn't.

Accepting Myself

It took me 3 years and an experience of living outside the US, away from my family and everyone that I have ever known, to learn how to be myself, and even who this person is. I struggled and ached for years, not knowing what was wrong with me. Then, I found myself in a place that environmentally was very similar to where I had grown up. Being thrown into a situation where not a single person knew me or had any preconceived notions about me, allowed me to find out who I really was and who I really wanted to be.

I found my foundation again, only unlike the unconscious happiness I had as a child, it was conscious this time. I know the person that I am and the person I like to be. I am confident in myself in a way that I have never been before. I have grown to realize that if I want deep and true friendships then I need to be showing the real me to those people. I need to trust in who I am and my own thoughts, beliefs, interests and joys. I need to realize that these are all aspects of the person that I am and when I am ashamed of them, then I am stepping on a piece of myself.

I have learned that you are the only person who can make you happy, you are the key to your own happiness. We grow up thinking that the people around us can fix us, make us better, help us to understand ourselves. But we are just giving them power over us that they often don't even want. We push people away or let them manipulate us. The only way to truly be happy is to take control of your own life. Pull the reigns away from your parents, your friends, and anyone else who you depend on, and take control.

This isn't easy, in fact it was one of the hardest things I ever had to do. But I now know what makes me happy and if I have a daughter in the future who goes through what I did, I hope that I don't disappear from her life just when she needs me most. I pray that I can help her to transition, rather than throwing her overboard. I wish I had had a sounding board, someone to tell me that what I was feeling was normal and that I wasn't going insane, someone to listen without judging. I wish I had had the relationships with my mom and dad then, that I do now. I realize that no one could have taken away the pain I felt, but having someone who understood and seemed to care would have eased it a lot.

I pray that the future generations will realize that they are not alone and that my generation and the generations before me will not allow them to be. No child should feel alone, every child should feel worthy of love and worthy of being listened to. I beg you to pay attention to the children and teenagers who are in your life. Let them know that they are loved, that there is nothing wrong with them and that you care enough about them to listen. Not to judge, but simply to listen. Life is about the relationships that we have with each other, and the relationships we have with ourselves. Don't let these relationships slip away.

Writing

I love to write. Not just poetry, but honestly just to sit and contemplate a subject or a person or something completely relevant or irrelevant. I love the feeling of pondering a place or an emotion. I think my favorite piece of my own writing is something I wrote about a year ago called Waiting for Wonder (thus the name of my other blog). It felt like it just flowed out of me. I was reading a kids book about a man who raised sled dogs and did the Alaskan Iditarod and it brought back such memories of Alaska that I simply sat down at my computer and that was the result. I remember how it felt. Like there was this thing inside of me just pouring itself out on paper, yelling for me to write its story. I've felt that at other times too, but just never quite as strong or as eloquent. But I figure if I keep writing I'll have more and more times like that.

I feel as though my poetry doesn't really truthfully tell anything about me anymore. It used to. When I was younger and all my emotions were raw and unhappy, my poetry expressed emotions I didn't know how to share. But now, when there is so much more to me than raw emotion, writing feels much more natural.

A few weeks ago I was thinking about this book that I really love called "Speak" in which the main character is given an assignment in art. Her teacher makes her pick a word from a basket and she has to focus her entire semester to understanding that word. She picks "tree" and has quite a profound experience with it, but I was wondering what would happen if someone made me do the same thing. What would I have to say if I picked my own name out of a basket? What would I learn by trying to to find my own true meaning and nature? I wrote a lot of things down but I'll only share two of them because the list was really long!

- I am deeply and truly affected by nature. Mountains, water, grass, pine trees, snow, butterflies, birds chirping, eagles, dolphins, cool breezes on beautiful days, deep blue skies, dark nights with bright close stars, the moon, rain, thunder and lightning, the sound of wind moving through the trees and grass, the silence you can only hear in nature away from the sounds of human civilization, glaciers, the warmth of the sun on a cool day, the calm of watching snow fall, the chirping of crickets, sitting in a flower filled field of grass, are all a part of who I am and without some of these things in my life, I have more and more difficulty being truly happy.
- I really enjoy being happy and excited. And I love making other people happy.


I feel like everyone should get the chance to sit down and make a list of the things that truly make them happy and keep them sane, because once you know what these things are you will always have something to turn to when your life gets rough. A list of the things that will help you to regain the stability that may have been lost for a while. Happiness is important and someone who doesn't know what makes them happy, will have a lot of trouble in life.

I took this picture in Juneau, Ak at the glacier! This is probably the place in the entire world that makes me the happiest!