To the 18 Year Old Who Isn't Feeling That Great About Herself and Life
I was thinking about what would have helped me when I was 18 and living a life that had an undercurrent I could not always hear but could always feel in the form of something is wrong. Maybe it is me. The deeper song that played in the hidden recesses of the brain was My mother did not keep me. My mother did not love me. The world that I want does not exist, and so here I am, doing the best I can with what I have: the longing to connect, the seemingly unavoidable need to get in my own way, a knowing there is more, a scrambled brain, a desperate hunger for love, a perpetual fear of being abandoned and of my ability to abandon anyone and anything, including myself.
It's one thing to live your life and do the best that you can. It’s another thing to feel like you’re a train on the edge of flying off the tracks. The body and mind do not do well with this feeling in the long term, just as a school full of kids would not do well on the day of finals if all the fire alarms were ringing. It’s hard enough to listen to your own worries about yourself. If you also carry in your mind what other people think about you, it’s like trying to go through the front door of a house while carrying an elephant.
When you live in trauma, sometimes (often) the most you can do is make it through the next minute, hour, and hopefully, day. How can you hang on like this and also experience pleasure? Not the pleasure of getting high or stealing or anything that takes you away from your brightest, most genuine self (because the price sets you back, and back will get you choking on mud), but the pleasure of scratching that itch on the side of your head. The pleasure of working at an animal shelter and soothing animals who, like you, don’t have permanent homes. The pleasure of telling someone they did a great job and the pleasure of hearing them say they couldn’t have done it without you. The pleasure of earning twenty dollars so you can get yourself an ice cream and put the change in your pocket for another day. The pleasure of running a mile when last week you couldn’t run that far. The pleasure of watching a show on TV that makes you cry and think I love this.
These things feel stupid and patronizing to write. You’re drowning, and I’m telling you to pat a lonely dog. What the actual hell?
I know. I know. I know. I don’t know what else to say to you, is the problem. My parents made the same stupid suggestions to me, and I did none of them. I just wanted to lie on the couch and cry.
The days you feel like you are drowning, even scratching an itch is a luxury. The thing is, if you don’t have hope, life is really, really hard. Can drowning you hear me for a second? Can you find just a little more fight? Picture one thing you’d like to do if you could do anything. Then picture another. Mentally say fuck you to everyone around you and do something solely for yourself if that gets you moving. If all of this is too overwhelming, and if you’re too close to the edge of disappearing, if you are at the very bottom of the well, if you are stuck in the mud, the good news is that you’re at the bottom. You did the hard work of falling. You went where all true heroes have to go—to the rock bottom, to the flaming gates of fear. This is where the invitation to enter life for real happens.
Can you get a piece of paper and draw some stairs? Maybe five, ten, or ten thousand? Each stair is one thing you can do that would make you feel good about being alive. Fill them out like a person who eats hope for breakfast, if you have it in you.
What I’m trying to say to you is that I really, really want you to have a life that excites you. I don’t even know you and I know you deserve that. I want you to go to Camp Fake it ‘Til You Make it just a little longer so you can walk through that flaming gate, so you can make connections with other people, maybe even make a friend, and then not be in the mud all alone.
When your mother leaves you, it can make you feel like the universe wants you dead. It can make you feel like your whole life is you circling the drain, and you are just waiting for the moment when it’s all going suck you down and you disappear. I get it. I feel this, too. What I finally figured out when I was 58 years old was that this is also where the fun is. I get to fight the drain and do what I want. I do not want to disappear. I want to go to the beach. I want to hug my daughter. I want to eat a delicious meal. I want to fall in love. I want to create beautiful things. I want to find clothes that make me feel good when I wear them. I want to be a 60-year-old bad-ass, crepey-armed athlete. (Well, I don’t want the crepey part, but my body is in charge with that stuff. My body tells me I’m lucky I have arms that work.) The trick is not to try to figure out what you want me to do, or what I think the world wants me to do, but to listen to what I want to do, and do these things one right after the other. Maybe I have no idea what I want and end up doing stuff I hate. So what. Mistakes are awesome. They help point me in another direction. I don’t have to do something huge. I don’t have to change the world. I just have to find both the child and grown-up in me who lost their mothers and help them feel heard and cared for. I am the boss and the lover of me.
I think it’s important to realize just how hard this work is so you don’t get discouraged when the things you do feel unimportant or silly. Nothing’s unimportant or silly when you are trying to save your own life. All actions that pull you even a millimeter out of the mud are heroic. Lying in the mud until you catch your breath and remember why you want to keep going is heroic, also.
Continuing to breathe is heroic when you lose your mother. You are a breathing superhero. You stayed alive when the loss you endured would kill the average person. What baby can survive without its mother? Everything else is in the realm of miraculous. You. You are in the realm of miraculous. What are you going to do next? How are you going to delight the universe who created you in its wild, saber-toothed delight just to see what you were going to do next?
What the heroes find is that the things they thought would kill them are often the very things that will save their lives. It’s funny how non-epic this thing can be. Maybe it’s writing your story. Maybe it’s living your life for yourself instead of for someone else. Maybe it’s changing jobs, friends, spouses, clothes.
Who knows?
You. You know.
