The Charm Quark’s posterous

An email from somebody whose blog I found over the weekend. Pace Smith is all about communication and she is sexy with words. It was she who wrote the line on which the title of this entry is based. I only added the 'expiating', for effect and to prove that I too can play wordsmith when I try.

She had read one of my posts over the last couple of days about my "not being good enough" and how this had become embedded in my identity. Her idea is that this concept of identity doesn't work that well for me. "Not being good enough" isn't actually a part of my identity in the way that I thought. It's extrinsic, an adopted story to which I've become attached over time. The word of the moment is 'smallenating', which doesn't really exist but should.

I've been smallenating myself. It started deliberately and became chronic. Chronic smallenating, until it was so much a part of what I do to live and get on with people, that I don't know how to do anything else. The idea is that if I try to self-sabotage, if I keep making myself small and insignificant, people will like me. Or at least, not hurt me as much.

It's a pattern, a habit, a program for survival. And also a chronic belief that it's bad to even like yourself privately, let alone say something like 'Hey, I think I might not be the most awful and evil and bad person who ever lived.'

People will hate me if I think I do well, that's the basic program, I think. If I be myself, if I let go and allow myself to be and achieve all the things I want, I'll be the ultimate evil.

Move aside Hitler.

It comes from being told when I was very young, over and over again, that I was far too confident and that in fact, I was stupid and useless. You start to believe these stories if you're told them enough.

Pace calls all these things "awesomeness inhibitors", potentially the best term ever designed for dealing with such problems as feeling like this. Much better than calling oneself a perfectionist or having low self-esteem. "Awesomeness inhibitors" fits into the wiring and programming model of the brain I've been working with.

I've spent most of my life trying to do badly, trying to fail without actually failing so badly I get yelled at by my parents. In one light, being anorexic is one very good way to hold yourself back, although it actually does wonders for your mental arithmetic (add up the calories in every meal in that menu in five seconds, and then just order the green side salad anyway). I keep a running tab on how badly I'm doing. A mental voice in my head over the years has kept telling me how bad I am, and it's so constant that it stopped being audible some time ago. It's just a low, incessant buzzing.

Here though, is the thing. Having decided yesterday during my Waterstone's epiphany that I was "okay", in a fundamental, universal way, things started to shift. I start to see myself differently. I can even feel the new neurons connecting up and sparking away.

I happened to buy a book called "Never Good Enough", but by the time I got it home I realised it's no good continually getting things that focus on broken bits needing to be fixed. Just reading descriptions of the people used as examples in the book I felt healthier. Instead, I ended up reading a book about resiliency by Al Siebert.

I have an incredible capacity for resiliency, for survival. This is my first step into awesomeness. For all the decades I put into carefully not doing well at anything, it was one of the few things I turned out to be catastrophically bad at doing. That, and playing the trombone.

There are ways of describing yourself and who you are, what you've been through and what you can do. Perhaps this is why I never liked it when people tried to be empathetic with me over having been anorexic. I wasn't weeping in the corner. To be honest I really am rubbish at the whole victim mentality thing. It's something I do, I see, to get on in the world. If people see me that way, they'll think I'm safe and harmless and won't hurt me. Yet it gets on my nerves a bit when they see me as weak and struggling and helpless.

Everything I've experienced was just an experience. Forgetting the pain of the moment, you can sink back into that moment when you wished the ground would open under you and it just didn't. You had to stand there and take whatever it was you had to take. It takes strength to do that. Some people focus on the pain of what they were experiencing, others on the fact that they were still standing up at the end of it all, and that they kept going. Their heart kept beating, their liver kept functioning. They kept on going even when it seemed like the end of the world. However much their mind hurt, their spleen hardly noticed.

That's where I come from in life. After writing back and forth with Pace I started to think about the strength that I keep tied down and try to hide. I ordered Al Siebert's book on being a survivor personality. It's nice when you see yourself described and realise that all the things you've been through weren't a demonstration that you're a terminal screw-up, but that you have the courage to step out there and do the crazy scary thing regardless of consequence.

That is the start of the breakdown of the awesomeness inhibitors, I reckon.