grow the hell up – My Time to Bloom

I don’t pretend to be an expert in self-growth, but I do know that no real growth can take place when it is smothered with self-pity, victim playing, and a refusal to accept responsibility for your own decisions and actions. It is impossible to move forward if you have cemented yourself to the past and insist on begging everyone to feel sorry for you and watch you bleed from wounds you tore open yourself.

I suspect that’s the ulterior motive for some people. If you package yourself as a perpetual victim, then you don’t have to change anything. You don’t have to actually do anything at all. You can whine, complain, sob, whimper, and moan, which is a hell of a lot easier than taking a good, honest look in the mirror and tackling the hard work of change and improvement. You can sit back and wallow in the sympathy and hand-holding of enablers instead of being an adult.

To me, that is failure. But for someone who never intends to change, who only wants attention and drama, who just wants to brush off responsibility by pointing at others and bitching their way through life, I guess that’s considered success, in a pathetic sort of way.

When your heart festers with lies, bitterness, jealousy, and pettiness, it’s absurd to pretend that the real problem is anyone or anything else. In fact, it’s downright stupid. When your norm in all aspects of life is chaos, conflict, and combat, you have got to stop denying the truth: the common denominator is you. Only a fiercely immature and unlikeable person is incapable of self-examination and unaccepting of any responsibility in his or her choices in life.

Again, I don’t pretend to be perfect. I don’t have it all figured out. Recently I found myself slipping back into old habits, and I started leaning on worn-out excuses: I work a lot. I’m tired. I deserve a break. Blah blah blah. I refused to accept that from myself. Have I worked so hard to make positive changes in my life, in me, just to regress to unhelpful and negative choices? I matter too much to me to do that. My loved ones matter too much to me to do that.

I suspect I have stumbled across another key point: when you simply don’t care about anyone but yourself, then you are not motivated to do better or to be better for them. They are not worth the effort. I am grateful that I am not in that position. I am sorry for anyone who chooses to remain in a state of interminable rot, with pity and drama filling their lives instead of true caring or meaningful relationships. I could never settle for that, but clearly, some people can. They will never know what they are missing, but I do.

Run with That

I never understood couples who constantly break up and get back together. Even in high school, I knew better than to join back up with someone after we had split. I didn’t see the point. You already know what you’re getting, and you already know you don’t like it.

In one in a million instances, two people might find their way to each other, having learned something from the separation, and actually be happy this time around. The rest of them, though — the overwhelming majority — simply torment each other, annoy everyone else, break up again in a storm of drama, realize that no one else wants their crazy asses, and go right back to each other in a dysfunctional dance of foolishness.

It’s a dance I never wanted to see the kids leaping into, but I suppose it was almost inevitable. Children learn what they live. Their time with us was fleeting, a weekend here and there. What they lived, day in and day out, has been instability, chaos, maniacally shifting from feigned highs to crash-and-burn lows. Love is not pure and giving, they saw; it is selfish, doled out or withheld based on compliance. It is not steady and unwavering; it is switched on and off, fickle, used like a tool. How were they supposed to learn to seek healthy, happy relationships?

We’ve talked with the kids, of course, but words go into one ear and out the other. We are the oddity. Peace, contentment, and love must be deafeningly silent in the face of screaming, fighting, attention-demanding drama. We were blotted out by hysteria and frenzy, the cacophony of insanity and immaturity that they embrace as normal. Why wouldn’t they? It’s what they are used to. It’s home.

The kids deserved better role modeling, but they are also old enough to realize that something isn’t quite right with that pattern of behavior. It doesn’t take an advanced degree to understand that the actions and choices they have witnessed are not the products of healthy or balanced minds.

I am forced to take the same stance as I do with so much else in the kids’ lives: I pray for better for them. I want them to choose better for themselves. I have talked, guided, and encouraged all I can. They have to take it from here. May they take a deep, hard look at what they have lived, then decide they can do better — and I know they can — and run with that in their hearts, as far as they possibly can, as high as they can. I want them to want more for themselves and know that they deserve better. They always have.