i don’t know who i am; i just know who i’m not

One time, in kindergarten, my teacher was fed up with how talkative my class was being—aside from me, because with my anxiety and people-pleasing tendencies combined, I was always on my best behavior. That day, I was the only one allowed to participate in our daily “rest” period, where we would relax and snack on whatever our parents packed for us and chat with each other. I was usually always silent during these, not really having many friends at the time. But that day, at the teacher’s command, the entire room was silent. The rest of my classmates sat there, heads in their arms in the dark, staring at me as I crunched on my goldfish and drank my little water bottle, feeling every bit as awkward as I was oddly proud of being the only one who had followed the rules.

My kindergarten teacher made me out to be the ideal student—because I was always quiet.

This once filled me with pride. Now, I look back, and my pride wanes, replaced with strangeness and isolation, with discomfort and shame.

I wasn’t any better than anyone else in my class. I was simply too afraid to speak.

It took me twenty-three years to realize that I will never be perfect.

But that isn’t the only blow. Not only was I never going to be perfect, but I was never perfect at all. There was never this perfect version of myself that there was return to, like I thought there was. The polite, quiet child from that kindergarten class wasn’t perfect. The well-behaved straight-A middle school student wasn’t perfect. The anxiety-ridden high schooler, so desperate to impress and to please, wasn’t perfect at all. And this adult version of myself is so imperfect that I find myself drowning in it every day. But what’s really, truly changed through all that time?

My child self is not all that different from my adult self, because that child self is me, just as much as my adult self is me. That anxiety, that silence, that desire for validation—I still sit with all of these things. I am still the sole student sitting alone in the dark, eating and drinking and wondering what makes me so different from everyone else—is it truly this sense of being “good”, or is it simply fear that’s stopping me, holding me back?

I am constantly hindered by the expectations of others, to the point where pondering exactly how much makes me feel sick to my stomach. Every text I answer, every person I respond to in conversation, every word, every expression, every breath I take, is carefully orchestrated with the desire for them to think I am normal, because I don’t feel normal, and I never have.

I have a mind that goes a million miles a minute, and a mouth that will not open to share anything that occurs within it.

I have a family who—while they are not by any means perfect—loves me very much. I have a boyfriend who—is also not perfect, hence why we get along so well, perhaps—loves me very much, too. And I love them, I truly do. I can’t always feel the existence and the fierceness of my love, but it is there, and they know it is. But despite having this, despite the blessings of being cared for deeply, I have always felt alone, and I used to like being alone. I used to like to be to myself, with myself, because it meant my mind could delve into all the places it couldn’t when I was around someone else. The way I remember it, I existed almost purely in fantasy.

Memories come back to me now, and they feel wrong, even though they are very much real, and very much me at the time. There is such a strange disconnect between myself and my past, between myself and my current mind.

Now, in my adult life, I can’t quite get back there to that fantasy world, no matter how hard I try, because I always return to me. To my mistakes. To my flaws. To my reality—to the essence of my very core. And that terrifies me.

It makes me resent myself. It makes me think about hopelessness, about loss, about terribly unhappy endings. I dwell in the shame of my own fraudulence and lies and cowardice and toxic feelings, feelings that were bottled up and constrained, feelings that can never spill over to anyone else.

I feel clouded by the darkness of my thoughts, and plagued by the chronic acknowledgment of my own abnormalities. Why did I exist solely in my own mind for so much of my childhood? Why do I crave connection without being able to pursue it in a healthy way? Why do I lie? Why do I not care as much as I should? Why am I hypocritical? Why am I so afraid? Why am I not trying hard enough? Why did I do this? Why did I do that? Do I lack empathy? Do I lack the talents I thought I had? Is it too late for me? Do I know anything about myself at all? Who am I? Who do I want to be? Do I have the capacity to be honest about anything? Or are other people’s opinions and perceptions of me more important than my sense of self?

For so long, I have dwelled in fantasy. In anything other than myself, and my own life. I lived in my own dreams. I woke up every day just to create my own world instead of living in my current one. I bored myself so deeply that I erased myself from my own narrative. I repressed my sense of being, because I didn’t like myself. And I was so afraid of admitting how much I didn’t like myself that it almost killed me when I was forced to. I had to reckon with my reflection in the mirror and think, this is me. This is real. There is nothing else but this. This is it. (BoJack reference, for all my media nerds)

Now, the balance seems impossible to find. I am rooted to the spot, paralyzed by my own dishonest, pathetic nature, by my own horrible mistakes and judgements, by my own skewed thoughts in the past. I feel like the only person alive to think some of the things I’ve thought, or to operate in the ways that I do. I feel stuck in myself. It feels too late to start over. It scares me how willing I would be to start from scratch, to get another chance, to do it all over again.

But then all over again, I would let myself down. I would beat myself up. I would beg and plead for another chance, for another way to turn back time.

Because I was never, ever going to be perfect.

And I’m really struggling to accept that.

I never really saw myself as a perfectionist until I started therapy. I wasn’t trying to be perfect. I wasn’t even trying to be good. Because I was good. In my mind, I was a good person, and nothing could change that. As long as I lived, I’d be living up to that. I’d always be good. I’d always be mature. I’d always make the right decisions. I’d always get good grades. I’d always push through, and make it.

But the version of me that was trying to achieve all these things—which were, in fact, achievements, not simply a way of being—was not doing it for me. It was doing it for other people. I never once tried to be a perfect person for me. A smart person for me. A good person for me. I never tried to achieve something for me. The only thing I did for me was write, and that was mostly to escape from myself even more. And that’s a scary thing to realize—that without the wants of others, I have nothing.

And the lengths I went to achieve this perfect version of myself were what ended up destroying my already skewed sense of self for good. Every time I messed up, I kept it inside. I repressed it. I lied about it. I denied it. I denied my own humanity, my capacity for wrongdoing. I escaped into my mind. I created worlds to run away from myself. I reinvented my reality in my own head. I concealed it, compartmentalizing it as belonging to someone else rather than face it myself.

For years, I did this. I refused to see the negative aspects of myself. I let things rot and fester. I became an actor in my own life; I was like this for almost as long as I remember, even as a kid. I was so desperate to please that I never developed a real sense of self. I just played role after role. I lived my life at half-mast. I fought as best as I could with what I knew, but it wasn’t good enough. I lost more of myself each time.

None of these roles were able to fully make me me, because none of them were perfect. The pushover wasn’t perfect. The liar wasn’t perfect. The faker wasn’t perfect. The coward wasn’t perfect. The cool, nonchalant version of myself wasn’t perfect. The try-hard wasn’t perfect, either. Neither was the listener, or the cheater, or the empath, or the cold-hearted loner. I committed myself to countless different versions of myself to try to chase the perfect me. Now, I find that I am left with nothing.

Even in this midst of nothingness, I hold onto hope.

I began writing this because I felt hopeless. I felt tired. I felt sad and repulsed in my own skin. I felt shame. I felt a mix of self-pity and self-resentment, and I felt anger, too. I wanted to blame the Internet. I wanted to blame my family, my upbringing, for my lostness and my feelings. And I wanted to blame my past self, for not doing right by the ideals of a perfect me.

But the Internet is a defunct thing that did not know better. My family didn’t know better. I didn’t know better. Everything in life operates as it is meant to, with all that it has. We all exist, and we all try, and we all fail, and we all try again. Some of us succumb. We give up, in one way or another. But many of us keep getting up, keep running, keep trying.

And all of this blame can stand, and it can feel like the end of the world, but it is meaningless in the end. The past is in the past, and it can never be changed. What matters now is what we can change, and that’s the present. And in holding onto hope, I choose to hold onto my present, and onto myself, my real self, for possibly the very first time in my life.

I don’t quite know how to stop punishing myself for how much I have hurt, betrayed, underwhelmed, and disappointed myself in the past. Because I will never be perfect, and that really, really sucks. I even feel sometimes that I will never feel good, or proud, of anything I’ll come to do. I want to prove myself wrong. I want to be stronger, better, kinder, more genuine. I want to be committed to something. I want to publish a novel. I want to leave my job. I want to be someone to myself.

It’s been easy, falling into despair as of late. I am not proud of who I’ve been in the past. I am afraid of my thoughts, of the darkness in my mind. I feel lost and confused when it comes down to deciding for myself what kind of person I am. I feel unsure and ashamed of everything, from my past mistakes that deserve a level of shame to the things as simple as my own hobbies and interests—my hair, my face, my job, my morality, my politics, my taste in music. I try to hide it. I try to come across as confident, but I feel like I fail every time.

In short—I’m ashamed, I’m scared, I feel like I have no clue who I really am, and I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing, and I’m really struggling with understanding how everyone seems to be coping just fine in this shit show of a world. I know they’re probably struggling too, but it just doesn’t seem like it. Every day, I cave. I fall apart. I cry. I’m human, like we all are, and it’s so hard. I’m ashamed to not be doing okay. I am so deeply privileged, but I’m so sad, too. I’m so scared of the future, of change, of moving on, of death. I feel like a child in an adult’s body, stuck and paralyzed and utterly pathetic.

I don’t know if I’m good. I don’t know if I can change in all the ways I want to. But I am putting hope and faith into my present self to put her best foot forward. I’m forcing myself to have that hope, because nothing but hope could triumph over despair.

The optimistic side of me says that I no longer wish for a perfect me, but for my own version of a better me, a me I can feel proud of being. I am not lost. I am not evil. I am human. And I want to get to know myself more, even if I don’t like everything I come to find out, because I have the power to learn and to change. We all do.

And I want to listen to that side a little more.

I love you guys, and thank you very much for reading.