#8: please validate my entire life
smile and wave, here's what happened, a writing group, & am I trustworthy?
Hello.
I steer my car outward, making an arch so I can avoid the older couple walking on the side of the road with their dog. They smile. I smile and wave back, continuing on down the road. When I come to the stop light I realize I’m still smiling. A little further on, I make the same arch for someone else, but this time, there’s no smile or wave back. I quickly put my hand down, feeling defeated and confused as my insides are screaming: I did this nice thing, please recognize me for it! And it’s true, they’re nice (these things we do). Really nice, and safe and helpful and considerate—things that we are often taught as children from our parents or teachers or mentors.
I do think that it’s ok that it made me feel good, and the feeling from it bleeds into the next moment, and if I’m lucky, the one after that. But if you, for instance, stop for the person who is not at a crosswalk, and they don’t acknowledge you, you are still allowed to feel good about that moment without the external validation from someone you don’t know. Anyways, I think what I am trying to say is: I often look for validation when all I need to do is ask myself what feels best. And if I really don’t know, then I can turn to someone that I trust, and ask them. And once I find that person that I trust, I must think about what they said, running it through my system, and wriggling it out of my toes and fingers.
I say all of this without really having any idea what is the right or wrong thing to do, I just know that I have spent very little time in my adult life making a decision and not doubting it or turning to someone else with the hope that they’ll point out to me where I am wrong, and how I can change it. I know that this is normal. Or at least I know that I am not alone in this. It’s easy to not trust yourself in a world that encourages us to have such high expectations. We can think we’ve let ourselves down—broken a promise, when really, we’re just figuring it out.
Trusting myself with writing didn’t really happen until a few months ago, which was a few months after my diagnosis. Initially, and for whatever reason, I decided that I wasn’t going to write anymore. I decided that it wasn’t a good idea. That I wasn’t consistent enough. That I didn’t qualify as someone that could write, let alone dream of writing professionally. Before, whenever I wrote it was always the backdrop to something else. A blog that I kept in the distance and was embarrassed to talk about. And whenever I started a new project, which I did quite often, I would make writing a part of the structure, just as long as it was somewhere more hidden. And if it wasn’t hidden, I would try to downplay it. Yet at the same time, I longed to be recognized for the stories I had inside my head, though I never believed that it was remotely possible.
What I think happened was this: I started all these projects and businesses, and with all of these projects and business, I told myself that this was it. That if I didn’t make it work this time, I couldn’t trust myself to do something like this ever again.
It was about needing validation from every single person around me. Validation that the work I was doing was important. I thought hey, this is a way to be seen, and I want to be seen and important. What I didn’t realize at the time was that none of these things were things that I actually wanted to do professionally. I didn’t want to make pottery my full time thing, I just wanted to make it for myself and those I love. I didn’t want to make people’s websites for a living, yet still I advertised myself like I did. I didn’t want to have my physical health be the forefront of a community, yet still I put it there. I didn’t want to make money from videography, yet still I told people, I’ll do that video for you!
A few things that need to be considered: it is normal to pursue a thousand different things before landing on a handful that you trust. That, and I was also undiagnosed, and therefore un-medicated for nearly all of my adult life. Nothing was ever in between. I was always operating from way up here, or way down there. Which made consistency very difficult. Health was also something I had to keep in mind, though often times I would grow too frustrated with my body to even consider treating it as I should, let alone trusting it. As far as I was concerned, things didn’t usually work out, and I shouldn’t pursue writing—ever.
What I didn’t realize was sometimes you can choose to do something for you, or even just because it sounds fun (a novelty, no doubt). Who would have thought just because you liked one hundred different things, didn’t mean you had try your very hardest to make money from one hundred different things? Maybe just one or two. Obviously, I was out to prove something, and as I mentioned before, I was looking for ways to be seen and validated by those around me. Never once did I consider myself to have anything important to say on the matter of myself.
Some days later, I pressed send on a message that read: Hello and happy Sunday 🐾 💕. It was the second Sunday we had been face-timing, and after deciding that we’d try and do this every week, thus began the first official Writing Group meet-up.
She called, I answered, the connection was fuzzy, so we hung up, and she called back. Even though it’s just us, we decided last week that we’d call ourselves a group anyway. Partially because it was fun, but mostly because it sounded official and cool. This week, I was to come up with a writing prompt, and we were to both write a one page response, but before that happened, we spent an entire hour and a half talking about how hard of a morning it had been for the both of us, and what it took to get here. About how often we have to give ourselves pep talks throughout the day. About what it’s like to not feel anything at all. About fake smiles. About not wanting to be social, but going to the party any way (and wishing you didn’t). We talked about the way you eventually familiarize yourself with your patterns. About how you can miss your highs when you are on medication…
It was an important call—a call about what’s going on right now. About when to listen and when to say something, and always to support and encourage and remind one another that you’re doing a good job, especially when it doesn’t feel like it. This wont last, I tell her, and she tells me the same. And for the first time in what feels like forever, I believe it.
Kneeling down on the ground to grab my notebook and pen, I wrote down the prompt that we had decided on. We were to write about somewhere we wanted to go, why that was, and how we would feel once we were in that place. After talking about how cute our dogs were and the planning of a possible future trip, we eventually had our goodbye. Until next week! I said smiling and giving her an air-kiss as my hand lay flat, just below my chin. I’m not one to face-time, and definitely not regularly, so doing this felt new and sweet, and somehow, even though we were talking about really hard things, reviving. I felt like myself. I felt validated in taking the time to start a writing group with two people, while spending most of it not talking about writing at all. Because it’s not really about that. It’s about doing something just because it feels right and not needing to explain why to anyone—not even yourself.
The official writing prompt: Choose a place you’d like to travel to (maybe you’ve been there, maybe you haven’t). Now, how does this place make you feel? What kind of person are you when you’re there?
The part of me that told me that I couldn’t write is quieter now, which means that I get to be here and try this out and write because I really want to write. It wasn’t until after high school, when I said goodbye to teachers that told me I shouldn’t even bother, that my grandpa introduced me to writing, and because I didn’t get much of an education in writing during school, at least not in a way that worked for me, we started with the basics, working our way up. It was years and years before I learned to trust myself enough to write for me. In fact, I’d say I have a lifetime of learning left to do here.
And now I’m here in my living room, sitting on the floor on a Sunday afternoon after just pouring myself some black tea, eating rice and milk with cinnamon, and scrawling out some future post ideas onto the pad next to me. Moments like this used to terrify me because it mean’t that I wasn’t doing the other thing—the thing that would give me the validation I was looking for.
That said, I do still turn to others when I should be turning to myself. And I don’t know if that ever goes away, but I really don’t need it to, just as long as I remember to turn back around and ask myself: is this ok? How do you feel about this?
And just because why not, here is something I wrote on November 20, 2021. Looking back, I realize I was on somewhat of a writing frenzy for the first time in a long while. The kind where you don’t even realize everything you’re putting down until you’re through, and then when you look back on it days later, you’re convinced you’d never be able to write like that again. I don’t feel this way about the poem below, I just like it because it’s gentle, and gentle feels important right now.
Somewhere out there, beyond the cold white crust of the earth, sits a person in a small room. This person is looking at the pink sky, and somewhere beyond this pink sky, sits a moon, full and round and bright in the fading morning light.
Talk soon,
Chloe
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