Speak your mind even if your voice shakes

I feel like I ghosted my own site for a couple of days last week.  My apologies to all of you.  That is mostly due to letting a text I received earlier in the week get to me in ways I never wanted something to affect me.  Feeling vulnerable is not easy.  People make feeling vulnerable out to be this easy task, but the truth is it’s not.  I did not want to speak about the majority of how I felt because admitting those feelings made them true.  But the truth is as good as I was feeling, just like that I felt worthless all over again.  I felt, and continue to feel, as if I’m not good enough in certain areas of my life.  People’s words are far more degrading and condensing than they might intend for them to be and the receiver is often left wondering how to take them.  We are left being told that everything will be okay ultimately because the same person who just made us feel this way says so.  If only.

This past week I have struggled to face the fact that next year will be the tenth anniversary of my mother’s passing.  This is not an easy fact to comprehend.  In many ways I cannot help but wonder where the time has gone and if she would be proud of the person I’ve become.  My gut tells me yes, but something tells me she will be prouder of the person I want to be rather than who I am currently.  I say this not because of the cliches of feeling like I should be more in life, but I want to get to a point where I am working with people who truly consider me an equal.  In many ways I have consistently not felt that way for a long time.  I yearn for an accepting peer group. Titles come and go but mutual respect is not something that we as a society should forgo to make others feel better about themselves.

With that said I realize that not everyone is going to like me.  I’m mostly okay with this. To say I’m completely okay with this is something that is difficult to say as I am a human.  I still remember being told that another student quit taking classes with a professor of ours because he coddled untalented students and dismissed the ones with true talents.  I remember the lovely critique day where I was told by that same person that he had seen better representations of what I was going for online. I remember when writing for a site that paid me having people who commented that destroyed my faith in myself. After all, if the site hired me they had more faith in me than I did myself.  I also remember writing for a site for a short time period that did not pay me, but gave me no guidance to grow, but was quick to criticize my writing style. I cannot grow without constructive criticism.  Just telling me how I’m wrong and I essentially suck does not help me.

Since then I feel that I have grown, but I do not know everything there is to know.  Unfortunately, as my friend and I talked about yesterday, being an adult does not come with a manual.  Adulting ain’t easy as another friend said to me recently. And that’s the truth.  I recently came across a ton of memes that spoke to me, but none other than how I entitled my post and my featured image.  We are not door mats.  You should not be someone’s door mat.  You are a human being.  Unless you have done something to be treated with disrespect you should be respected. We should respect others.  We should not step on others to get ahead. I understand the attitude of having to think about your circumstances and your families circumstances.  However, when did we get to a point where we are living in such a cutthroat world we are so willing to throw people under the bus or off the cliff to get ahead? Where has morality gone?

I do not have those answers.  I wish I did because then maybe I could understand how someone who thinks the Nazis were right won a primary for the Republican party in Missouri. Yes, you read that right and you can read more here. My point is I want to be a person who stands up for myself.  I want to be a person who speaks my truth even if my voice shakes. I find that a comforting thought because of my anxiety, which has ravaged my body the past couple of months and to the point that early Tuesday morning I woke up and could not go back to sleep. There’s a difference between standing up for oneself and being mean.  There is a difference between standing up for oneself and being disrespectful.  My feelings should not be downgraded because someone else has a different perception.

Instead of trying to see different perceptions now we automatically jump to that person is wrong because he or she does not share my opinion. I hate that all of a sudden we live in a world that seems to be dominated by others who so willing push people’s feelings aside as if they are invalid. The only true thing we have in this world are our words and our actions.  We have to speak our truths. We have to let it be known who we are as a person and we have to stand beside those words even when saying them is truly terrifying and there might be consequences.  We have to live our truth because if we lose our identities then we are nothing.

Individuality is our truth and that means something at the end of the day even when we don’t believe in ourselves or even when others do not.  The truth is if we surround ourselves with toxicity we get and give toxicity in return.  The key is to have others who believe in you when you cannot.  I’m lucky in that regard to have those reminders.  Even when one of them reminds me that if Sharknado can get made into a film my writing can go somewhere.  I can go somewhere. We can go somewhere. We must continue dreaming and reaching because without that we lose ourselves and that’s unacceptable.