An Honest Look in the Mirror

I’ve tried to explain what’s going on a thousand times out loud, but let’s be honest. I’m a writer. And there’s no other way for me to truly color this in a way that maybe, just maybe, you can understand. 

For the first time in my life, I do not feel like I’m achieving anything, and therefore my life is meaningless and without real value. I am wasting the time I was given. I was the only child left behind in a burning home, and what the hell am I doing to show that I’m grateful? Destroying my relationships so they won’t suffer with me, so they can be happy, so they will not be in this darkness with me. Drowning in self-pity. Telling myself I’ll never do enough in this life to prove that my life was worth saving over and over again. 

If you’re reading this and it is starting to sound like whining, then I suppose I will try to describe what it feels like on the inside, behind the smiles, behind the laughs, behind the beauty: 

It’s like this. 

Have you ever had a papercut? 

Imagine that paper slices your skin. It’s small, and it’s just a slight sting. It takes you off guard, maybe. But it’s not a big deal. You can put a band-aid on it, and it’ll heal. 

But it happens again. 

Next time, it’s a burn from touching a hot stove. It touches the same wound as the papercut, and, and your skin turns red and the sting lasts a few more seconds. 

This time, you put a larger band-aid over it with some ointment and the burn seems to

stain through the beige tape, but, eventually, it stops. And you’re okay again.
Now imagine a thousand papercuts pierce your chest, and the blood doesn’t pool, but bursts through your veins and starts filling your lungs. And now you’re drowning. And it isn’t cold. It’s burning. Like a thousand hot-iron burns from the stove. And you just want it to stop, so you’ll do anything now to make it stop – band-aids, ointments – prescriptions, therapy – but for some reason, no matter how many times you try to heal it, the cuts and burns just keep coming back, and they come back more painful than the time before, over and over and over and over— 

Until you think about the darkest option. 

About stopping it all. Because the prescriptions and therapy don’t seem to make it all stop permanently. Even the love from your friends, family, relationships are simply band-aids that never seem to heal it all fully. And you wonder how hard it must be for those people to love someone who never seems to fully heal. 

So I take an honest look in the mirror. 

And now here’s my message to those people: 

I’ve never wanted to live an ordinary, selfish life because I do not feel like I’ve deserved to be selfish. And whenever I do something selfish or pursue seemingly selfish actions, a papercut appears, and a burn, and another, and another – in my soul, in my heart, in my mind. Because I have believed that, for some reason, God has let me live upon the condition that I live an unselfish life and make sacrifices no matter the cost to my own happiness; in fact, I should derive happiness from such sacrifices. I am not here for me. I am here for others. I exist for others. 

Time? Of course, I will sleep when I’m dead. 

Some money? It’s my last twenty, but I say yes anyway. Because I’ll find a way, and they might not. 

A piece of my heart? Sure. I wasn’t supposed to be alive this long anyway. 

You hurt me. How could you? I’m sorry. You can hurt me back. I probably deserve it. I don’t know what I can do to make it right, but I’d give you everything I have if it’d make you feel better somehow. 

When I lost my family, the only way I could find value in my life was by being this way. Self-Sacrificial. Or an Achiever. By chasing the feeling of overcoming my circumstances and doing more or giving more than what others could, because if I could do that, I could prove that my life was worth saving. That I survived for a reason. That their lives weren’t lost in vain. 

That my life wouldn’t be a waste. 

I think I started believing this because my siblings were killed on Easter Sunday. I was the only one left in the ashes. 14 years. Maybe you can imagine how hard it is to unlearn the mindset I’ve lived in for the past 14 years. 

Sometimes I even feel guilty for just having fun if there’s no purpose to it. Am I having fun to help a friend feel better? Or is it just to make myself feel better? Am I just trying to make everyone else happy because, deep down, I do not deserve to be happy just for myself? 

I’ve felt guilty for being in a relationship where he did whatever he could to make me happy. And I know now, deep down, I was sabotaging it by trying to make him unhappy. So he’d leave. Because I didn’t deserve what he’d been giving me when I was supposed to be giving all of my energy to my work. To the purpose. Because that purpose was the only reason God was letting me live, right? And if I was selfishly happy, he’d take it away from me. He’d do something to the guy I loved and I’d regret it forever. 

Well I accomplished that goal. I made him unhappy and fall out of love with me. 

But now I’m unhappy. Because I pushed his love away when I should’ve just accepted the way he felt in the beginning. But I keep telling myself that I’d rather be unhappy if it meant that God would let him live and be happy. Even if it’s not with me. Just as long as he gets to be. Because I’m not the one who deserved the kind of love he gave to me from the start—so easily, too. And I wait for him to just hate me already. But he won’t. And that’s what makes it harder to think about how I went about that relationship. I wish I could just start over with him. 

But I can’t. 

Instead I’m figuring out what value my life has here. If I even deserve to have someone look at me the way that he used to. Or if I deserve to be on this earth at all anymore. Because I don’t know what good I’m doing for it now. 

So I guess my question for everyone is this: how the hell do you find happiness just for the sake of happiness? The kind of happiness that doesn’t come from making others happy, but just because it makes you happy?

When I take that honest look in the mirror, there’s a girl who has never had a real answer to that question.