Ensnared by Self-Doubt
By: Tara L. Campbell
Tags: Women, Personal Essay, Self Love

Ensnared by Self-Doubt

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

You wake up and realize, “I do not love this person. I do not like them, in fact. I resent their very existence, the one I’m bound to simply because I cannot financially stand on my own.” You decide something has to change.

Young and steeped in naivety, you take a breath and step off the cliff, hoping something keeps you from falling into the abyss. Somehow, you manage to hit the tight rope strung across the chasm from the known to the unknown. You claw fist over fist all the way across, your most precious cargo strapped across your back, but you make it to the other side. And there you persist for a few years in the unknown, trying to make your own way, doing everything to keep your small children in good health and not wanting for too much.

The stability you manage is tenuous. Soon, stagnation sets in and you’re forced to realize something else: through all your efforts over the past three years of going it alone, doing your best, doing more than your peers for the chance of success, you are not making any headway. Your two small children are now inching closer to adolescence where the truth of poverty is cruelly recognized among their peers. No longer is it easy to entertain them with the simple and free availability of nature, or the cheap fares of the dollar store. Your children start to feel the sting of judgement, the pain of rejection, for something fully outside their control.

And you, the party who is fully in control, the responsible parent, must evaluate current circumstances of the stagnating unknown against the fading memory of the known.

Was it really so bad before? You ask yourself. There wasn’t physical abuse. You know how bad that can be, having endured it before. Is all this struggle that your children are facing right now worth it? Free from the deeply imbalanced workload of a bad relationship? After all, here on your own, you are still overworked.

In the end, you decide the needs of your children must come first, and you concede defeat. You take the steps to reconcile, to make it work, fully burying the dark but faded memories in favor of the handful of good ones that may or may not have happened as you remember.

You go back. You feel the relief from financial burden. You tell yourself that you really want to make this work. Think of the children, a refrain you echo.

For eight more years you live this new/not-new reality. Six months into reconciliation, though, you felt deep in your bones what a mistake you’ve made, but by then it was too late. No one would accept your change of heart, no one would understand that the change of mind wasn’t born of sudden indecision or flightiness, but the sudden flood of all the bad sprung to the surface after the honeymoon phase ended.

You have made a grave mistake and now you must live with the consequences.

Until one day you wake up again and have come to loathe who you are. You do not love you. You are shamed on a level never reached before by the actions you’ve taken to cope with so many more years of grinning and bearing. You are so disgusted by you who have become in order to survive that you question whether or not there’s a reason to continue trying.

But there are reasons, and more than the obvious two. The reason above all else, that must come first, is you. You take a deep breath and give yourself permission to think, and then believe: You are important.

And like that, you flip the switch. You matter. You are enough on your own. The pain you sought to shelter your children from, a different but equally painful experience found them anyway. The hard truth is that the only way around in this world is to go straight through.

You rip off the mask. You vow never to be that person you hate again. You drop every bit of the life- and energy-sucking rationale on the floor as you leave.

Life will be hard in the unknown, isolating, with far fewer resources than before, but you will know who you are and who you will never be again.

The cargo is now on wheels, pulled behind you with a little more ease, but you know you can do this. You’ve born the much heavier load of the known for too many years. Now you know that you are enough because you matter.