Everything's Poop

 Today as I was organizing my computer file, I came across this writing.  I want to share it on my blog because I would like to share my insight with you and hope that you might also identify with these thoughts.

  Today is March 29, 2010 and everything’s poop.  The reason that everything is poop is because when I begin to compare myself to other people and their, what I believe to be better than me circumstances; I see everything in my life as poop.  Any progress I may have made in my life falls into the abyss of nothingness because it is now nothing compared to what I perceive to be the great life of someone else. When I compare, I am suddenly fat, unsuccessful and going nowhere.  These are feelings that I do not like.  But mostly, I don’t like it when I don’t like myself.  Which leads me to another school of thought, why don’t I like myself?  It’s funny that I like most people except me.  I think little of myself and highly of others and then get angry at them because I think they are better than me.  That really makes no sense at all.  How you can like someone else more than yourself and you are the one that you have to live with everyday?  Maybe that is why I have felt so disconnected from myself and others.  Like I am a word that has no definition and I rely on other people to define me, because after all, they are so much better than me they must be privileged to that authority.  How crazy is all of that?

You know it’s funny.  I will spend so much time and energy in getting to know someone else and liking them and NO time or energy at all getting to know and liking me.  When I was growing up, talk about liking yourself was akin to vanity.  It was something you just didn't do.  I felt like I was just there and I didn't know and wasn't really suppose to know who I was.  I was just there taking up space and my identity was who my parents told me who I was based on my reactions to what was going on around me in my family.  If I cried all the time at things that were happening, I wasn't sensitive; I was deemed a cry baby.  If I didn't like losing at games, I was teased and told I was a baby and that me winning wasn't important, it was more important for other people to be competitive.  I could go on, but I feel like listing all this stuff makes me feel more like poop.  I have always just felt like I couldn't trust myself to determine who I was.  I never could believe myself, because I was an immature baby who was flighty and easily teased who could never hold an interest in anything.  Funny part is, when I DID hold an interest especially in drama, I was only doing that for attention.  I just couldn't win and really couldn't win because I could never believe in myself, the negative person I saw myself as.  I mean, how could I trust someone who was a stupid baby that felt like nobody wanted to be around her? 

So I guess the key is beginning to see who I really am so I can believe I am a person I can trust to do well in this life.  I know that the Lord is helping me to see who I am, but I do not just trust myself to know that.  I have to treat myself better.  I treat myself so lousy and other people better.  However, I do see that I set up jealousy of other people.  I set it up.  That’s the worst part of it.  I SET IT UP by putting other people above me.  It almost feels weird to spend time taking care of myself and treating myself as well as I am treating other people in my life.  Another thought is that I probably end up treating them as crummy as I treat myself because I resent them for my own treatment of them.  That really is poop!

Cheryl needs me to spend time really getting to know her and liking her.  I have treated her badly for so long, no wonder she has hidden so deeply inside and has been afraid to come out.  She is afraid of me, the person who right now at this time in life treats her like crap.  She deserves better treatment from me than that.  I have put everyone else first and her last.  I have berated her for wanting something better and have worked at convincing her that she is selfish for wanting to be treated better by me.  That energy has always gone into other people.  I have given them all the benefit of the doubt and done nothing but doubt Cheryl.  I have treated Cheryl like she is an outsider whose opinion means nothing I do not take her seriously.  I make her sit in the background and this makes her feel very helpless.  I worry more about what other people think instead of what she thinks.  I have been wrong to treat her this way.  This is most definitely poop.  I have made her feel bad, I have told her she is fat and can’t accomplish anything because she is not as talented, gifted or committed as anyone else.  I am wrong, wrong, wrong in the way I have treated her all these years.  Right now in life it doesn't matter anymore where I learned to do this.  Right now in life I need to take the responsibility to change it and treat her like the fabulous person she knows she is, not the loser I have convinced her she is.