Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/tinybuddha/~3/2pOOvMMHs0E/
“To help yourself, you must be yourself.” ~Dave Pelzer
I spent a lot of my life being someone else. Playing the part of someone I didn’t fully recognize.
Looking back, there were lots of reasons why I avoided being me, my mum’s suicide being one of them.
Her death shaped me, like a rock in a tumbler, and my life, as I knew it, bore no resemblance to the one I once knew.
I was ashamed of being the girl whose mum left her in such a violent way. What would people think? Maybe that she didn’t love me enough to stay? That I didn’t do enough to help her? That I wasn’t enough of a daughter to her?
I started to believe that maybe I just wasn’t enough, period. That I was a bad person somehow. Because if you’re a bad person, people don’t want to be near you. They just up and leave. And that’s what she did.
When you don’t feel enough, there’s anywhere and everywhere you’d rather be than right there, with yourself.
I became a master at escaping myself and putting on an act in order to feel accepted. Accepted by people I believed would think things about me that I didn’t want them to think. I was too scared to let people see the real me because I believed the real me was so obviously fundamentally flawed.
My escape a…