I’m feeling a little blue and anxious today. I spent most of the evening reading through old emails between my high school friends and I, catapulting myself back to a time when the only thing I cared about was being accepted completely, totally, insanely, by my peers. The terrible pain, and subsequent terror, of rejection and abandonment meant I was happy to manipulate people and situations so as to feel in control and, therefore, safe. It saddens me to say it, but I can’t stand the person I was. I think of her as mean, selfish, a bully, a destroyer. She was insecure, unaware, a copy cat, a wannabe, someone who cared desperately about fitting in. A total poser. I’m ashamed of the person I was, but even more so, I am terrified that I am still her.

I can’t bring myself to expand the narrative, either. I don’t want to absolve her nor forgive her. Which does seem a bit harsh, to be fair. What am I so afraid of? That by extending a little bit of love and affection towards her, that by recognizing her as the child she was, I might set myself back on this journey of epanouissement? That seems problematic. You cannot expect self-suppression to ever lead to self-acceptance, for obvious reasons. Nevertheless, that feeling has nestled itself very deeply within me: I must continue shedding layers of myself, destroy old versions of me, in order to become a version worthy of my love. At the root of it is, of course, the fallacy that the “old me” can ever be treated as a separate entity from the “current me”. Even further down in the mucky earth is a fungus that says: there is no “me” at all.

I wonder what it’s like for other people. Does kindness come naturally to them? Does it ever feel like work, like an act of sieving out your insecurities and petty grudges and fears and ego? A choice you have to make over and over again? Is your goodness measured by your instincts, or by the labour you do to suppress them? If it’s the latter, I’m doing well. But I’m tired.