It’s Not Me, It’s You

A wise someone once said to me that “rejection has a lot less to do with you than you think it does, and a lot more to do with the other person“.

Sadly, as humans, we have a pattern of begging for love and acceptance from those who have nothing to give us. Freedom comes from realizing that allowing rejection to control our emotions and steal our joy is giving someone — often times someone who is no way qualified to make such a judgement — the power to dictate our self worth.

I’ll admit… I spent most of my teenage years and early twenties allowing failed relationships slowly chip away at my self-esteem. Every lie, every ignored text, every breakup caused me to fall back into my pattern of self-loathing, wondering what I did that wasn’t good enough. If I had just been skinnier, prettier, smarter, something, I could have kept him around.

Reality is, the reasons for rejection and mistreatment from others often stem from their own internal battles and flaws, not yours. How can someone love you who does not even love themselves? Someone who does not see themselves of any value will never see the value in you. You will never be enough for someone who is too broken to see how much you are worth.

My journey toward self-love began the day I stopped internalizing rejection from others, and realized my worth does not belong in the hands of those who do not deserve it. My value is not contingent upon whether someone chooses to appreciate it or not. Neither is yours.

Find power in the idea that your worth belongs to you and you alone. Your strength to love yourself for who you are, no matter what is happening in the world outside of you, makes you invincible, unshakable. Knowing that you are enough – now that is true self-love.

 

The reality of being a 20-something child of divorce

Divorce. It’s far too familiar of a word to most millennials It’s a well-known statistic that over half of marriages end in divorce, so the harsh reality is that most of us aren’t going to watch our parents live out their days together.

Some of us had parents split when we were very young, too young to remember, and some of us can remember details, even just feelings, but weren’t quite old enough to completely grasp what was happening in our household.

And then some of us, the very unlucky ones like myself, watched out parents stay together long enough to beat the statistics. We blindly believed that our parents were different from our friends’ parents, our parents had beat the odds, that true love really did exist, and our parents were that shining example.

Even though we were old enough to have gotten our hearts broken once or twice, to have watched a high school romance fall apart or watched someone we loved walk out of our lives, we held out hope for that perfect love story, the one our parents had. It was almost like a modern-day fairy tale, one we eagerly looked forward to having for ourselves.

Then there was that day, or series of days, months, years even, when we started to watch our fairy tale unravel before our eyes. What was worse is we were far past the days of our childhood, the days of blissful ignorance. This wasn’t just a question of why aren’t my mother and father together anymore. This wasn’t “why isn’t Dad living at home anymore?” This was a question of what the hell happened to end 25+ years of marriage? At what point do you fall out of love with someone who was supposed to be your soulmate? And how can I ever trust someone ever again if they could wake up one morning and not give a damn about me anymore?

Then comes the worst part. Even though you aren’t a child anymore, you are still your parents’ child. You’re old enough to know there isn’t a “bad guy” and a “good guy”, and not every situation is black and white. You’re also old enough to find yourself in the middle of your parents’ divorce, and even expected to take a side. You find yourself the subject of one parent’s rage meant for the other parent. You are torn between being there to support your parents and cutting yourself off from the situation because, at the end of the day, you’re still their child, not their mediator.

All divorce is painful, and everyone’s experience is different. But being an adult child of divorce is equivalent of watching everything you’ve ever known shatter before your eyes. It’s seeing your parents hurting and understanding their pain acutely. It’s watching a total stranger take the place of the women who spent so many years in your father’s life, it’s watching your mother struggle to pick the pieces and remember that her anger toward is misplaced and loving her regardless.

That’s being an adult child of divorce.

But slowly you realize life goes on. And although you may be hardened from the experienced, you start to understand that you’ve learned from it as well. You study just a little harder that final semester of college. You find your life start to center more and more around that career you’ve just started instead of planning your dream wedding. You don’t go on the second date because there just isn’t a spark. You’ve got to be sure, not just comfortable, like your parents were. Because you’ve learned from their mistakes.

So while you no longer believe in fairytales, you’ve also a little more skeptical, a little more wary, a little smarter. You still believe, deep inside, that true love exists, but you damn sure aren’t about to find it anytime soon. Because there’s so much more to this life than that.

why she stays

“He won’t lay a finger on you,
He won’t wreck your pretty face.
But he’ll tell you that you’re worthless
Just to put you in your place.”
Little Big Town, Evangeline

They said you can’t truly understand something until it happens to you.

They were right.

When I was young, I remember hearing a story from a friend about a woman and a man who started fighting in the car in front of my friend. The woman ran from the car and the man followed, brutally beating her and a passerby who tried to help, in front of dozens of people staring in shock.

Certainly after that she would leave him, wouldn’t she?

Only a few months later, we spotted the same woman – with the same man – in line together at a local restaurant. I asked myself for years following why she would stay. She was an idiot. She knew better. It was an obvious choice. He had done it once, and he would do it again. She was an idiot.

Now I understand.

Let me be clear – this man never laid a hand on me. But there are forms of domestic abuse other than physical abuse.

“You’re a stupid bitch”.

“You’re nothing but a slut”.

“You’re a piece of trash, you’re worthless”.

These incidences escalated to the point where one night I sat sobbing in front of a restaurant full of people. A table of girls behind me told me that I was too beautiful to put up with being spoken to like that, and that I should leave.

So why didn’t I leave?

With every low there is a high. With every fight, there is a morning full of tearful apologies and promises that it will never happen again. And for a while, everything is perfect. Until it happens again.

And again, and again, and again.

Not until everything was over for good, and I was left alone, did I realize what I had put up for far too long. It was as if I was brainwashed, broken to the point where I believed it was my fault and that I deserved the abuse. Somehow I believed that if I changed, that if I could only be better for him, it would stop. But it never did.

I truly believe everything happens for a reason. This experience has opened my eyes to millions of women in this world who endure and accept physical and emotional abuse. So often society judges these women so harshly when they choose to stay, but not everyone understands why. Until a woman completely realizes what she is experiencing in her relationship is wrong and is in no way, shape, or form true love, she will stay. And you cannot judge her for that.

You may not know why she stays, but I do.