sugar glazed
Others with perfectionist tendencies may relate to feeling like a failure on days that you can't hold everything together and can't help but succumb into a puddle of overwhelm and grief.
This shame feels crushing, and it inflames all of my insecurities of being inadequate and unworthy of love. What happened to the badass that walks through the world with confidence, measuredness, and fearlessness of speaking her mind? I know she's me, so where did she go? This is a different me, a me that I wish I could shove away into a closet.
Shame is a nasty little emotion, and it thrives in darkness and in silence. What should I do about it, then? Let's cast a spotlight on it.
Where is this coming from, I wonder?
I recall the more recent times that I dared to peel back my armor and reveal my inner layers to somebody I thought I could trust. This only earned me a puncture wound straight to the heart and re-affirmation of my greatest fear: abandonment.
“Why can't you just be happy? We could've had a good day and you ruined it.” "You're not the person I thought you were after all,” the deeper voices echo.
And so, I have internalized that I'm not lovable when I'm not a completely put together boss lady with sunshine radiating out of my ass. My pain is an inconvenience and causes people to run.
The objective analysis I have of this recurring theme is that these people only wanted me when I was easy, at my best, in my 'cool girl doesn't give a damn about anything' energy. I could be more generous in my evaluation, too: They had limited capacity for handling a three-dimensional human being because they hadn't yet learned how to reconcile their own difficult emotions. They especially could not handle it when their very own actions were the direct cause of my distress. That's typically the catalyst for being discarded in my experience.
One person in particular told me he needed somebody "rock solid", and that's why we weren't romantically compatible. At the time, I remember feeling deeply shamed for my own humanity as I wept before him on my couch. In retrospect, I wonder if "rock solid" was code for "unshakable perfection that will put up with endless amounts of my juvenile bullshit and won't hold me accountable for any of it."
I have to accept that I'll never know for sure.
I am struggling to emotionally unlearn this sentiment of conditional unlovability, even though rationally I know much better. Rationally, I know that I am capable of being loved when my emotions are inconvenient, because I have the capacity to love others in that way. The problem is that my brain and my heart are often out of sync and don't really communicate well with one another. That is the grandest problem of my life that I'm still trying to solve.
I look back on older entries here and realize that when I publish, it's often in the aftermath of processing, the conclusions I've come to with a positive "glaze" on them. I'm really good at glazing as it turns out. I guess it's one of my strategies — glazing the donuts, turning lemons into lemonade, whichever metaphor you prefer — except that I'm so good at it that I tend to dwell in it much longer than most people probably do, looking to scrape away any last ounce of meaning.
Do I do this purely for my own integration and processing? Or is there an unconscious ulterior motive, to make myself look “presentable” and “palatable” to an outside audience so I can redeem my lovability?
It's a question I'll continue to ponder. For now, here I am without the glaze, without the sugar. Yeah, I'm trying to be okay but I'm not. Will I ever be? I don't know. Doesn't feel much like it now.
That's the nature of life though — ebbing and flowing, highs and lows...
... Oh, there's the glaze again.