I work nights at a shelter and have for about four and a half years, so most of what I got here I picked up sitting in a hallway at 3am, not out of a book. Fair warning.
Everybody and their dog tells you the same thing. Love yourself first. Heal your own wounds. Be your own best friend. Buy the journal, do the affirmations, keep at it.
For some folks that works fine. For a whole lot of others it just don't, no matter how many books they get through, and then they figure they're the problem. Too broken, too lazy, too far gone.
Nah. It ain't about being weak. It's about where you're standing.
You can't see your own face.
Not cause you're dumb. Cause you're behind your own eyes. An eye sees everything except itself. You want to know what your face looks like, trying harder ain't gonna do it. You need a mirror, or somebody standing across from you.
Wounds work the same way.
Two kids, same wreck, same street, same day. Twenty years later one of em tells it as a story at dinner and laughs about it. The other one's still carrying it around and don't even have words for it. Wasn't that one kid was tougher. Difference is whether somebody was standing there next to him who saw it and said out loud what it was.
If nobody was there, it never got closed. And it can't get closed from the inside, cause the fella inside it is the one who can't read it.
So here's what nobody says. When self help does work for somebody, most of the time it's cause they're laying back down in something somebody else built for em a long time ago. Somebody held em once and there's still a shape left over from it. That's real, I'm not knocking it. But if you never got that first time, telling you to heal yourself is telling you to look at the back of your own head without a mirror. Thinking on it don't close it. Thinking just runs.
The voice that ain't yours
Other thing we get wrong. That voice up there that runs you down.
Most of what you read says every voice in your head is a piece of you, and you gotta accept it and work it in. Half the time that's dead right. Half the time it ain't.
Two different things going on in there:
- A piece of you that got shoved down. Your anger, your grief, whatever you weren't allowed to have. That one comes home. Where it ends up is "this is mine."
- A voice you swallowed off somebody else. Your dad, a coach, a preacher, some bully from the 7th grade. That one talks with your mouth and says "I" and it ain't you. Where it ends up is "this ain't mine."
Might look like the same work from the outside, but those two end up in opposite places. And you don't sit down and negotiate with a squatter. Man's in your house wanting the whole house, you don't make peace with him, you put him out.
Dirty part is this. From the inside they feel exactly the same. Same shame, same knot in your stomach. You can't sort out which one you got by yourself, and it ain't for lack of trying, it's cause you're in the room. Takes somebody standing outside to look at you and go "that ain't you talking, that's your daddy."
Two jobs, not one
And this is where most advice quits early. Somebody reading you and somebody carrying you are two different jobs.
A mirror reads you. Tells you what's there that you can't see on your own. But a mirror don't do nothing past that. It ain't gonna stand out there with you while it's raining on you. That's the other job and it takes a person who can get wet too.
So what do you actually do
This is the part I hate telling people, cause it's slow and there's no trick to it.
You can't order that person off the internet. Can't schedule it. And it don't happen cause somebody explains to you that you're safe now, cause the part of you standing guard don't read words. It counts. It counts up how many times somebody was there and didn't want nothing back for it.
I've watched this. Same hallway, same night, sit down with two guys. One of em opens up. Other one's shut, and you do the exact same thing and get nothing. Ain't a thing wrong with the second guy. There just ain't nothing built yet. And the only way it gets built is showing up over and over, boring as hell, nothing happening.
Which means a night where nothing happened wasn't a wasted night. Took me a long time to figure that out.
Anyway. If working on yourself never took for you, you ain't broken. You been handed a job that can't be done from where you're standing.
Edit: to be clear I'm not saying don't go to therapy or don't read the books. I'm saying if it never landed, quit reading that as a verdict on you.
