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It's really no wonder my older sister & I simply could not resolve our conflicts when we were young.
Her fear of failing to conform to the norm collided with my fear of not being seen & loved for who I am.
She kept trying to tell me that the way to be accepted was to conform, but conformity only ever took me farther away from the thing I needed & wanted most.
I did not want to be accepted for appearing to be someone I was not. I wanted to be myself & be loved & accepted.
I wanted to be known & loved. Without being known, I cannot feel really loved.
She kept trying to get me to stop being me & start being "normal" (I guess), & that made me feel SO incredibly unloved & unwanted.
So many people in my life kept asking me to lose myself, so I've had to fight very hard to keep myself whole in the hopes of finding real love & acceptance.
My fear was that I couldn't be me AND be loved. Attempting to conform does nothing to relieve that fear. It just makes it worse & worse & worse over time.
The more I was pushed to conform, the harder it was to feel that I could be loved.
But I never quite gave up hope, & it turns out I was right all along! I can be known AND loved both. They DO go together. I knew they did! I knew it in my bones! I knew I could be loved.
@artemis I relate to this so much. Although, I’m still not sure if I can be loved or not. I’m too prickly
@farah @artemis tbh my question is how much of that "prickly" is the authentic self you've been struggling to hide, and how much is the defense mechanisms you've put up to hide yourself? I know it's not that simple and it's impossible to really distinguish between the two, but it's still worth thinking about. The people I find myself most conflicted about are those who are very easy to love when they show me who they've been hiding, but very hard to be around when they're fighting to hide
Really the thing I am most proud of myself for is keeping the faith somewhere inside of me that someday I would know what it was like to be really seen & really loved.
I think what drove a lot of my depression was the fear that I couldn't have both. My sister putting so much pressure on me really seemed to confirm that fear. If my own sister judged me so harshly & even expressed disgust when I tried to display my real, earnest, authentic self, then I had to wonder if I was unlovable.
I was timid & scared for a long time, fumbling around & trying to get the courage to show people as much of the real me as I could, always afraid I would be rejected as somehow faulty.
But some part of me has always refused to actually shrink down & mold myself to a prescribed size & shape. Just...no. Either I was going to be loved for who I was or I was going to continue to look until I could find that.
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