Resentment and Repetitive Lies
I’ve been more and more aware of this staggering lie I’ve been telling myself for decades – that I don’t get to be happy until I’m perfect...or at least closer to it.
I’ve been hearing this lie my whole life in different, subtle ways, so it’s no real shock that I've internalized it. If you break down most marketing to women it’s something along the line of “You become lovable when you lose weight, put your make up on just right, and read this book of tricks of how to act like you don’t have any emotional needs of your own.”
Sure, it’s been getting better, but it’s also gotten better at hiding under the language of supposed empowerment, with “loveable” being replaced with “worthy of being successful”.
The power of a lie repeated throughout your whole life is you don’t have to believe it for it to impact your behavior. All it takes is enough doubt to weaken your resolve. “But...what if they are all right, and I’m the crazy one thinking I deserve love/success/freedom.”
You pull back, you fold, you wobble between realities – the one in which you are worthy right now of all the wonderful things you crave, and the one where happiness is always just on the other side of fixing this next supposed flaw.
One of the most obvious symptoms of having internalized this way of thinking I’ve noticed within myself is actually resentment.
A note: This is not to invalidate the conversations we are necessarily having about privilege. Rather, this is looking at the ways we’ve internalized what and who we are allowed to be, perpetuating those systems of privilege within ourselves.
I get reactionary and bitter around the success of people whose paths have been easier than mine. The folks whose parents had the means and flexibility to position them in the right place at the right time. The folks who could afford to go to arts school. The folks who grew up in and around a culture of “you could be whoever you want to be when you grow up.”
While it’s important to acknowledge that it doesn’t have to be, nor SHOULD it be this hard to make it in the arts, when I get sucked into this kind of resentment, I don’t appreciate how perfect my upbringing was FOR ME.
I would not be writing the music I write if my parents weren’t both ministers growing up, if we weren’t having conversations about archetypes and deeper meanings and spirituality. I would be a dramatically different person if I had not witnessed first hand the injustice in this country, growing up in and going to school in inner city Missouri and then rural Eastern Washington. I wouldn’t be so passionate about using my voice and music to open up and purge those old wounds so we could heal them. I wouldn’t have the DIY independent grit I’ve got if I hadn’t tried to quit music in college.
It’s been hard.
I probably need therapy I can’t afford.
The system is rigged and I’m livid about tha. It’s simultaneously true that my past and who it has made me is exactly right.
When I buy in to the idea that I needed the right education, to have access to the right people, that I have no chance without a trust fund, then I’m already submitting to that system. I’m essentially agreeing with this idea that only special people get to have lives they enjoy, I’m giving over and letting myself be made smaller and quieter. I don’t need to be telling myself I’ll never “make it”, I don’t need to be punishing myself, holding myself back, or demanding the impossible of myself any more.