There’s a story I’ve been telling myself for a very long time. And the story centers around how I don’t belong. I’m the oddball, the ugly duckling. The artist. That I’m too …whatever… to be included.
And everyone must already know that I’m unworthy of their acceptance and admittance and that’s why I am alone. It circles and sits in my soured stomach and perpetuates my feeling of solitary condemnation.
Except when I believe this, I also create this. I keep myself from acceptance of or into social grouping situations. I’ll reject them before they reject me I suppose. I’ve uniqued myself right out of their reindeer games.
Self-fulfilling prophecy had me choosing to not be involved and included and then I’d feel alone. I have truly felt stabbing soul pains over this one and I refuse to take part in this anymore. I outed myself wonderfully in my post I Am What I Am.
In unforeseen ways, two recent situations have both disproved and further qualified this self-inflicted unworthiness theory. One was the high school reunion I attended and the other was the blog conference I attended.
First, long story short, I didn’t get to choose my high school situation, it was chosen for me. And I attended a private girls school until I was deemed unworthy of the tuition and was then pulled out after 10th grade. I’d spent four years with these young women getting periods, boyfriends, in trouble, and good and bad grades. And I found myself outed. It was something that I had nightmares about even after I graduated from college. The ousting scarred me and I felt less than, displaced, and unwanted.
Fast forward 30 years and here comes our High School reunion. Even though I didn’t graduate, there was a generous invitation for me to join and I gladly accepted. I knew that attending this function would erase my years of bad mojo and reconnect me with the women we’d become. And I was right.
The other perspective changer was my attendance to the Blog U conference in Baltimore in 2014. Lovely campus, really interesting stories of blogging success, met a couple really kind women, and came away wanting to soooo fit in with them. I tried to keep an open mind in the Facebook group and repeatedly submitted my writing to the Huffington post as we were encouraged to. But I spent a year feeling really disconnected, wanting to be accepted, and ironically feeling more rejected than ever.
Surely my writing sucked. This just didn’t make me feel good. And then I stopped and realized, they were not my tribe. These lovely talented women were not talking about subjects I felt truly drawn to and jazzed about. And when I told my therapist that I thought maybe I’d been setting myself up for rejection, she agreed and here’s why she said. Because you write deep stuff. And most people don’t do deep. They do shallow. Except if it’s about a trauma. And so I stopped trying to be a part of a group and be a person that just didn’t feel like me.
These are huge realizations for me and help me to resolve my ugly duckling story and syndrome once and for all. First, I was responsible for dis-including myself in the first situation until I included myself and reconnected with me. And secondly, don’t ask for the wrong things from the wrong people. You have to ask yourself what part you play in the situation before you can make a choice as to how to resolve it.
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