We are Not the Things that Happen to Us
It is not unusual to be someone with unpleasant memories of a time in their life, and high school was certainly a time of loneliness for me. It was also a time when I was incredibly unkind to myself. My inner landscape was bleak and full of toxic soil in which only self-hatred thrived and nothing vibrant could bloom. It was this time in my life when I really started writing. I always had a journal by my bed, but I also wrote on the family computer.
Every day after school I would sit at the computer with a document I named “As that is”. The only purpose of this document was to vent about my day. It was a never-ending document I would open and angrily type for as long as it took to say what I needed to say. I wrote very little about what happened, never more than a few sentences here and there. I just wrote pages upon pages about how misunderstood I felt by everyone around me. Later in the evening, I wrote in my journal.
The writing in my journal was vastly different from the rage writing I did on the computer each day. When I wrote in my journal, I took the time to explain what happened and said what I thought I needed to hear most in that moment. I would tell myself about the traits I possessed that helped me get through that day and how it was a massive bummer that these were my circumstances, but I could always rely on myself. Writing in my journal didn’t change my situation, but it did help me tremendously to navigate that time of my life.
For years my inner landscape remained bleak and toxic, and I carried on rage writing, producing multiple other documents with similar names. I believe it was the gentler way I spoke to myself each night in my journal that helped me most. Even though I was sad most of the time, I did recognize my resilient nature and leaned into that a lot. Through my journal I started to admire myself for my inner traits and, even though I did not find a lot of value in my own life, I started thinking of myself as a character in a book. I began waking up every day curious about how this character, who was me, was going to handle the things that came her way.
In the moments when I felt like I wanted my life to end, which was a prevalent thought at the time, this mindset enabled me to see myself as a strong character in this book, and that alone made me want to keep the story going. I would think to myself how, if this character has so much strength, it’s going to need to be something wicked that does her in. I wanted to make it to the natural end of the story to know what that is. This curiosity kept me going through each day, I wanted to keep reading about this character, but to do that I also had to keep writing the story one day at a time. I would go through my days feeling less than others, noticing the things people around me had that I did not. I felt very alone and thought I was the only one feeling this way. I really did not love the story of my life, but I did come to appreciate myself as a character within the story. A little more each day I saw myself as a strong and resilient character within the story. I believe this was the beginning of my inner knowing you are not what happens to you, you are the mindsets you decide on.
