The Dark Night

 

“You Either Die A Hero, Or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain” - Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight

 This quote has summed up every experience that I have gone through and it is a quote on life that I live by.

I started my healing journey at the tender age of 19. At 19, I knew I had a lot to heal from and a lot to change about my life.

My life was pretty perfect as a young child but I have always been extremely self-aware. 

Being self-aware meant I have never truly been comfortable with who I am because I could pinpoint my wrong doings. For that, I punished myself if I was anything less than perfect.

Being perfect to me meant being a little bit of what everyone wanted and forgetting what I wanted that was deemed "bad" by society, family or friends.

Perfection came at a price - my mental health.

I have been struggling with my mental health for many years since I was a young child because my people pleasing survival skill that I had taught myself had become a coping mechanism to escape being me.

I thought being me was never good enough and no matter who told me I was good enough or tried to show it to me, I didn't WANT to believe it. The voice in my head was never nice to me, I was never nice to me.

So that made believing people a non existent skill I had because if I couldn't even trust those closest to me, how would I ever trust anyone? 

I also looked everywhere I could for an answer as to why I'm not happy, if I'm so perfect and my life is so good.

There was so many people and things to blame but I never looked at myself.

I thought I am the kindest, happiest, luckiest and most friendly person that I know. Turns out what I thought about myself was not, in fact, reality.

Turns out, I am an angry, withdrawn and judgemental person who is also kind, happy and friendly.

This is where the quote starts to make sense. I believed I was the hero in my story, but I was in fact the villain. 

Trying to save everybody meant I was abandoning myself. Making me the villain in my own story.

And this can be true for other stories as well.

You may be the hero in your own story but the villain in other people's stories and only the amount of time spent in those stories can reveal which role you play.

We do things for others with the intent of showing our care, love and gratitude yet these things can be misconstrued.

Others don't see us the way we do and they don't take into consideration what we are intending to do because why should they? They are the main characters in their own stories and this means they see things front their own perspective.

Perspectives can be skewed depending on our experiences.

If we have constantly have negative experiences related to a specific person or group of people, our perspectives become skewed towards negative thoughts about them and this means everything associated with them will be negative.

 I learnt this from my husband - as I was crying one night about feeling like I had been abandoned by everyone because I wasn't good enough for them and I had somehow made everyone upset because I was me and I was never good enough. 

A stupid way to think yes but rooted in so much insecurity and pain from things I had been telling myself all these years. 

"If I can't be what people want, nobody will like me"- these were the kind of thoughts, I had.

As I was complaining about feeling lonely, he brought to my attention that perhaps, I was the cause of my feeling lonely. I had friends and family who were on a weekly basis requesting my time and presence and I would be too lazy or too tired to do it. At first I blamed it on the timing, then I blamed it on money, then I blamed it on work. Everything but myself is the problem.

So I had to sit back and think and shift my perspective from my little victim space to see reality. 

That meant that I could now see it. All the effort I had thought I put in, was false. I had become the villain.

With months of work and I mean hard work I had finally started to see a small change in myself. I was genuinely happy, not as depressed and lonely and being truly kind. 

I am back to being my own hero in my story because I can now see that it is actually MY story and that means it is about myself and nobody else.

I have saved me. I dont need to save the world.