Getting out of the box
By: Liz Blokdyk
Tags: Love Yourself, Recovery, Growth Mindset, Acceptance, Self Love

The story of how one woman found self-love.

I’ve been so afraid my entire life to be myself, to express how I feel or what I really think for fear of judgement from others. My biggest fear is being abandoned because of who I am. Deep down all I want as a human being is to be loved and accepted for being my quirky and imperfect self. I am finally ready to get out of the box. To jump out of the expectations that have been placed on me since infancy, by my family, by society, and by myself.

As children we are guided by our parents to act a certain way, mostly to fit into society. Most of how we are molded is necessary to be civilized. So where does that education end and being locked in a box occur? For me it was the frequent reminders that what I did or how I looked wasn’t OK. I know my parents meant well. They were simply coming from their insecurities and their limited programming, but it still gave me the message that I wasn’t enough. As a little girl, my not so developed brain took that message and ran with it. What I heard was whatever you think is right isn’t. Go back inside and be different than who you are.

That quest to be not myself has taken me to the depths of insanity, because if you can’t trust your own brain and thinking then what can you trust. I have taken countless drugs, tried every fad diet, different hair color and even every geographic change I could to change my internal circumstances. I have chased and chased the unattainable “different me”. It’s been an exhausting journey of self -discovery that has led to recovery and a new awareness of self.

That old adage that love starts from within sounds simple enough, but how does one love when it is such a foreign concept. I can intellectualize what love is, but it’s such an ethereal feeling that comes from the soul level that it can’t be thought into existence, it has to be felt to be experienced.

I don’t want this post to be a poor me, I was never loved as a child, because that is not the case at all. I was loved a great deal. I was just loved to the capacity that my parents knew how to love. They came from their own broken beginnings and did the best they could with what they knew, all while dealing with their own baggage. As a parent myself, I can completely understand and appreciate how difficult that must have been for them.

It must have been terrifying to be stuck in a situation where you would risk your life and that of your infant’s to brave shark infested waters to get to freedom. That kind of bravery has to be admired and rewarded, so this post is as much for them as it is a journey of discovery for me.

What I have found on this quest was that in order to love myself, I had to forgive myself as well as those who have hurt me. I had to let go of the pain I experienced as a child that I had used over and over throughout my life to prove to myself that I was not worthy. And in that forgiveness, there was a space for love to seep into my being, in that forgiveness I found peace within my heart and let go of the fear of being that has crippled me.

Who am I you ask? That question has baffled me for years, and I can tell you that I have pretended to be whomever you needed me to be. I have molded myself and ignored my inner ideas and desires to please whomever I deem more worthy. On any given day I can be a smooth-talking sales person, and educated business woman, a fun-loving mom, a devoted wife, a crazy sister and daughter. I am all those things but none of them. At the core of my being I am lost as all hell and looking for a way to exist happily in this body God has given me.

I am the oldest of four children to a mother that is only 15 years my senior. Needless to say my childhood could be categorized as a series of misadventures. My young mother was married to her junior high PE teacher and as you can imagine that story couldn’t have had a very simple beginning. My father being once divorced was obsessed with my young mother, she being the naïve young girl she was, fell right into his charismatic trap; unfortunately that relationship turned into a pregnancy and they were forced to marry. As fate would have it that pregnancy didn’t last and one year later I was born.

Growing up with a young mother who was more my sister than mom and a verbally and physically abusive father was definitely not a circumstance I would wish on anyone. We were immigrants, we were poor, and my parents were drug addicts. What benefits can a person gain from that type of adversity one could ask? I would garner to say that resourcefulness was bred into me. Self-will was ingrained into my inner most being. Never was there an inkling of reliance on a Higher Power those were luxuries we couldn’t afford. So, I learned early on that if I wanted something, if I needed something, my only option was to make it happen myself. This lesson, or I’ll call it coping mechanism has cost me countless heartache.

My childhood began in Cuba circa 1978 when hunger and unrest was plaguing its citizens. The Mariel boat lift offered my parents an opportunity for escape to the promise of a better life in a new country. Luckily for me we survived the arduous trip across the Caribbean Sea and made it to Florida in one piece. My immigrant parents barely had a high school diploma between them and neither spoke English, so poverty here we came.

The program teaches us to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand him, but my self will was what kept me alive. I know God has always been that silent guiding force in the back ground, that inner voice that urges silently but eventually yells so loudly you have to pay attention, yet I refused to trust some ethereal being knows what I need to do with my life. Although if I really think about it, what the hell do I really know what to do with my life.

I grew up with a huge resentment about why me? Why was I so poor? Why did I have crazy parents, that were so busy drinking and fighting that they didn’t help me with homework. Why did I get the privilege of being woken up in the middle of the night to tell the cops my dad didn’t mean to beat up my mom yet again. I grew up watching other children have “perfect childhoods”, and I wondered what was wrong with me. I was a good girl, I did everything my parents asked and more yet my life was crap. I think unintentionally that is when I decided that God was great but he clearly didn’t care about me.

I can’t pretend that in that instance I suddenly decided I will grow up strong regardless of circumstance because I didn’t. I grew up resentful and angry. I built a huge war in my head of the world versus me. I couldn’t see it at the time, but a major storm was brewing inside me.

It took years of drinking and falling into self-pity to realize that I was my own beloved victim. I loved tending to my resentments like one tends to a fire. I stoked it now and then to make sure it stayed alive. It became my identity. It took over who I was. I was going to prove to the world that I was better than my circumstances. Clearly God didn’t know who I was. I would show them.

I rarely took responsibility for my issues. In fact, I loved blaming everyone around me. You would behave this way if you had my life, I would say. You hadn’t struggled like me. I carried that bag of resentments with me wherever I went and shared my story of woes with whomever would listen.

It worked until it didn’t. I graduated university with an alcoholic abusive boyfriend, soon to be husband and a worthless diploma. In time my will and determination led me to a successful career in sales. I won award after award, trips, money beyond my wildest dreams; but none of that satisfied the beast within me. There was never enough of anything. There was no amount of money or success that could make me feel like a human being.

I assuaged that demon with lots of alcohol and pills to no avail. The hatred I had been building inside was eating me alive. I finally divorced the abusive husband to fall into a deeper depression than I had ever experienced only to find that the hardest pain I had ever gone through would lead me to the best lesson of my life; self-love!

How did I achieve self-love you ask? Well first I would say there is no achieving it, there is only a daily practice in accepting and loving myself in totality. It started with a very real God moment I had in my bathroom one day when I realized that if I didn’t do something about my drug problem I would die. It started with a simple prayer. “God help me.”

That little prayer opened the door of willingness to take place in my heart. I fessed up to my new normal husband that I had a problem and he very rationally said, “Well then get help.” Why that simple thought hadn’t occurred to me, I don’t know. Get help, sure sounded like quitting to me. It sounded like a very weak woman that I sure as hell wasn’t, but because I was desperate I got help. Low and behold that one prayer on the floor in my beautiful bathroom, surrounded by not enough led me to the rooms of AA and a life beyond my wildest dreams.

In the fellowship I have learned to step out of the box of expectations of my youth, and create a whole new way of living that embraces change and new ideas. That box that I had forced myself to live in, told me I was no good. I needed to do more, give more, make more, but in the program, I learned I’m enough exactly where I’m at, with exactly what I’ve done. I’ve learned to put down the bat and pick up the mirror and tell myself YOU are worthy, YOU are loved, and YOU are OK exactly as you are. Geez! What a concept? Acceptance of self.

The box took away my choice to love myself. Today, I am proud to say, burn the damn box, I accept this fun loving crazy girl exactly as she is.