Finding Herself There

FINDING HERSELF THERE

Warning: This book is full of my opinions, thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. Sometimes topics are random and ideas may seem scattered. This is done on purpose because you aren’t just reading a book, you are entering my mind. Please remember that. Also, I encourage others to have open minds, think for themselves, and challenge their way of thinking. However, it’s deeply important to me for people to know that I do not share my opinions and beliefs in judgment of others. Nor do I condemn or expect to change their beliefs. While I might suggest alternative ways of thinking, by sharing what I have learned through my experiences, the main reason I share my story is with the hope that it might help others to not feel so alone. There’s healing power in “Hey, me, too!” and that sincerely is the purpose of this book. Finding Herself There roughly picks up where my first memoir, Surviving Crazy: A Roadmap to the Scars (2013), left off, but this book is more of a narrated journey of self-discovery and enlightenment rather than memoir continuation.

“None of us can speak the Truth; we can only speak our own truths.”
- Melissa Ross

People are always trying to “find themselves.” That’s why self-help books continue to be so popular. I have “found myself” many times throughout my life. I have found myself waking up in a mental institution, not having any idea how I got there, only to find out later that I drove the two-hour drive there myself in a total blackout. I have found myself waking up from a drunken stupor, in a motel sleeping room, next to a man I hardly even knew and thought, “What the fuck am I doing here?” I have found myself being arrested by the police. I have found myself feeling so excited, so high, so manic that I started developing a detailed plan to jump off a bridge into the river, knowing that I would survive because God loved me and if I didn’t survive, that would mean that He obviously did not love me. I have also found myself feeling so low, so dark, so depressed, so hopeless that I developed another, yet different, detailed plan, which was to end my life, because I couldn’t take the emotional pain and sadness one more minute.

This, of course, is a play on words. I never really “found myself” in any of those places in my past, meaning I never discovered who I truly was during any of those times. I think this is because I wasn’t being or searching for my authentic self. Maybe you’ve heard the theoretical reasoning as to why your rearview mirror in your psychological car is way smaller than your windshield. The saying goes, “Don’t look back. You’re not going that way.” I must say that I do not believe in never looking back. Some people might think that works for them, but I have found that it does not work for me. I have found that it’s important to look back on my life because it can explain so much. It can give me the answers that I need, answers that looking forward would not give me.

I’m not talking about blaming people or circumstances for being the way I am today. There’s a difference between blaming and discovering the possible reasons and causes as to why you are the way you are. If I can see where I might have gone a little wrong, then maybe that can help me from repeating the same wrongs. If I can make things make sense in my head, as to maybe how I got “here,” I can work with those explanations, creating a baseline for myself from which to move forward and grow. Figuring out the possible “whys” of your life can give you encouragement to be different in your future. It’s not about holding onto resentments, which I admit, to an extent I still do. Yes, I realize that I’m “drinking the poison meant for my enemies,” but I am still working on that.

On the surface, I have “found myself” a lot during the 46 years that I’ve been on this earth so far. And really, isn’t that what it’s all about? Finding yourself? That’s, at least, what I believed, because that’s what I had been told. That’s what I had read in all the self-help books, too. The thing about finding yourself, though, is first you must know yourself. You must know who you are, know who you are looking for and who you want to find when you start on any quest to “find yourself.”

Before you go looking behind the couch cushions or take a trip into the wild, it’s important to know WHO you are looking for. I mean, it only makes sense, right? You can’t go looking for someone you don’t know, right? How will you know when you find her? Will she be wearing a name badge? Will she call out to you, amid the crowd, waving her hand wildly, shouting, “I’m over here!” Doubtfully.

So, it feels like putting the cart before the horse, but since you must know who you are looking for to find yourself, you must first know yourself. And I don’t think it stops at knowing who you are, to find yourself. You then have to accept who you are. Because if you find yourself, waving madly in that sea of people, and you don’t accept that that is in fact you, wouldn’t you feel like averting your eyes from your shouting self and act like you don’t know her, turning briskly to walk the other way? Notice I didn’t say LIKE yourself, which is different from accepting yourself. You don’t have to like a person to accept who they are. Maybe she’s an asshole. You don’t like her, but you accept that. You accept her.