We are taught you must blame your father, your sisters, your brothers, the school, the teachers – but never blame yourself. It’s never your fault. But it’s always your fault, because if you wanted to change you’re the one who has got to change. — Katharine Hepburn
I got this email yesterday from a girl. It read, in part:
In a few weeks, I will be going to treatment in California for anorexia/bulimia. I have struggled with them both for nearly ten years. I’m 21. I cannot remember what it is like to look at food without fear of consequence, and I’m finally ready to get help.
I will not have internet access the entire time that I’m there, which will be (at the least) 24 days, and I’ve been told I can bring anything I want to read. I passed this information along to my closest friends hoping they would give me some books they found significant. My best friend, who proved that she knows me better than anyone else, did not give me a book. She printed out, in the order they were posted, with your glorious blog header on the top of each page, each of your “Best of Sweetney” posts and tied them together with ribbon. She knew I wouldn’t be able to access your new stuff through my feed reader or read any of my old favorite posts on your site, so she put your best together for me and gave them to me to take with me so that I could still read your blog in rehab.
Thank you for every single word you’ve typed on Sweetney.com, and thank you for being an inspiring writer and woman who has proved (to me, at least) that there is a chance at happiness in the face of any type of trial.
What do you do with that but feel unworthy? Mute and unworthy?
You sit in front of those words, pulsing like a digital heartbeat on the screen in front of you, and you sob, and you feel grateful. Grateful that someone heard you and that what they heard somehow, miraculously, mattered. A tangle of emotion. You think to yourself: being human is hard. Why does it have to be this hard?
*
I am so very far from perfect. I’m not a person to model your life after, by any means. But then again, who is?
Recent failings include, but are not limited to: split ends and a spreading backside; arguing with my mother and ex over email; impatience and workaholism; laziness and slackerism; not being able to let go or calm my shit down; not being able to admit when I’m wrong though I’m so so wrong; being unnecessarily curt and abrasive; being ungrateful and resentful; lashing out and turning inward; not standing up for myself when I goddamn well should have; being muzzled and choked by fear. I am a morass of failures and mistakes and shortcomings. Sure, I have my bright and shining moments, my triumphs. But like everyone, those brilliant spots are wedged between countless stunning defeats and heartbreaks. This is what it means to be human. And I am so very that. And so are you.
I am perhaps more keenly aware of my defects than anything else. I fixate and obsess over them. Here is how I am not who and what I should be, here is my Achilles Heel, and my other Achilles Heel, and so on. Sometimes in my mind I make lists, pouring out in words every black mark on my record, filling the imagined page until it’s pitch black, wet and heavy with the ink of all my missteps and imperfections. It’s hard to do the same with the good, isn’t it? Not because it’s not there, but because as women we’re trained to make ourselves smaller than we are. We must, if anything, diminish and constrict ourselves. We must never point out our wins, or be visibly pleased with our triumphs. Why, it wouldn’t be ladylike to boast or brag, or to declare ourselves even for just one moment wholly and actually worthy.
This is what we learn. This is what we’ve been taught. This is what we need to fight against, each one of us, in ourselves. Fight, like animals do for their fucking lives with teeth and fingernails, tearing down that looming black edifice of what we’ve been told we’re supposed to be.
*
I wrote back to her and said, in part:
The world is so hard on women, especially young women, it kills me. You are young and beautiful and everything of life is yet to come. Please know it gets better – I swear to god it does. …in time you will see how much you DO matter. How your life has tendrils branching out into so many lives – including mine, now. …You are perfect and irreplaceable and I want you to treat yourself like the treasure you are. Even if you don’t believe it, even if you don’t want to believe it. I do – I believe it. Will you please take care of yourself? Please?
For what it’s worth, I meant each and every word of it. And after I hit send, I read all of it over again. And I thought: I should be saying these words to myself. Because how can I believe this for her, yet not for me? Why won’t I give myself that same care, that same sense of significance and importance? How can I look into the heart of this girl I barely know and feel such empathy and love and be so sure of her worth, yet look in the mirror and immediately begin the tearing down, the dissection, the composing of The List Of Things Wrong? How does that even make sense?
Whatever I’ve been taught, whatever I’ve learned, I have to unlearn it. I have to stop it, make it stop, in me. And I know only I can stop it. Like the girl who wrote to me, who is changing her own life, unlearning fear.
Funny thing, isn’t it — she looked to me as a beacon of light, but her words became my illumination.
Thanks, Bee.
