Texting a friend overseas today about the life-crushing "disorder" of perceived self-rejection.
It's a topic currently dominating her life and one I am not unfamiliar with in the least.
My childhood was full of love, but I was not a happy child. In fact, I spent the majority of my first 17 years wallowing in a depressive state I could not escape from. I was utterly convinced everyone hated me, thought I was ugly and stupid and were talking about me. I didn't get invited to the parties and, when I was, I was convinced they invited me because they pitied me.
One of my "life philosophies" is the theory of capacity. I've mentioned it before, and it's not complicated or wise. I just think about it a lot when I'm processing past actions.
At each stage of life, though many choices may be available, I believe that you are only capable of making a select few of those many choices based on your emotional/spiritual/psychological capacity at that time. And, unfortunately, it takes making some "life growing" choices to increase that capacity. Good doesn't always feel good.
When I was 17, I saw a sign advertising a new sport in my high school. The word saber was mentioned. For the first time in my teenage life, I went alone: autonomous action. Not one person in that meeting understood why I was there, as they were all band members, and I had no connection to their world. I joined. The next two years were full of spandex, face-hits from wandering flags, and mockery from classmates that I would be involved in something so absolutely ridiculous. For the first time, though, I did not give one flying crap what they thought. Winter guard made me indescribably happy. There was mockery, but there was not shame.
I felt more comfortable dancing in a blue spandex onesie than I ever had in my own skin. My freedom started to seep into my real life, as I was happy. I was truly happy. Clearly, I was a teenager, so happiness is relative to whatever mood swing was going on that day, but it was a marked difference in personhood. I began to believe good things and behave out of that perception. The last two years of high school were fun.
Sometimes, the solutions to problems come in unconventional solutions. I wasn't in counseling or doing any mental exercises. I was doing something silly that had no direct or obvious "purpose."
The devil doesn't always speak to us like a trenchcoated man trying to sell contraband in a dark alleyway. Sometimes, he helps us "focus". And we focus and focus and focus on the problem until we can't see the solution without somehow spiraling deeper into the problem.
Alleviate. Escape. Breathe. Do things that scare you, that inspire you, that refine you.
Stop trying to force a solution and start letting yourself live your life.
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