A Journey to Myself

Originally published at Amy M. Young. Please leave any comments there.

One thing writing has done for me, is force me to find out who I really am.

 

To dig behind the facade that all of us get as we grow up - the rights, the wrongs, the slights, the highs, the lows - to find my passions, to find out what makes me happy, to find what makes me tick along like a happy little train. 

 

It hasn’t been an easy trip, and it isn’t done by a long shot. We’re all works in progress, the only time that the work is finished is once we shuffle off this plane of existence. 

 

Friends and family keep telling me to find what makes me happy. This, on paper, is a great thing - find what makes you happy and work towards doing that as your life’s goal. Problem is - I don’t know what makes me happy.  Hurdle one is that I was brought up with the JOY paradigm (Jesus, Others, Yourself). While the J may not be there anymore (more of a G for Gods/Goddesses), I still put others before myself. I will willingly give my last dollar to a friend who needs it and live without (no, this is not self-aggrandizement). The guilt that comes when I put myself first is almost unbearable, and has taken a very long time to learn how to undo that, to learn that sometimes we need to put ourselves first, for our own mental and physical health. 

 

Writing has been in part a way to take those emotions and issues and funnel them into something that is useful, in part cathartic. It gives me a non-destructive way to deal with negative and positive. 

 

Though it will never see the light of day, some of my writing is clear author insertion (not Mary Sue shit either). Seeing myself through a filter of words has helped me dig past the layers that have grown up in my psyche to please others. Others are never going to be one hundred percent pleased with me, and in the end I’ve got to please me first to be happy in life.   While, like everyone, I want to be loved, I want to be cared for, I’ve come to the point where I recognize that, to borrow a phrase - Haters Gonna Hate. There are always unhappy people who want to bring you into their unhappiness. There are people who aren’t going to like you for reasons you’ll never understand if you sat for a millennia and thought about it. 

 

So, here I am, on a journey to myself.