Becoming Me - Letting Go of What No Longer Fits

 I recently talked about a book called Butter and discussed societal expectations and how they change and effect you as a person.

There are so many influences on us, from a very young age.  It takes a very strong person not to be influenced completely and many of us fall by the wayside, by deciding to, or simply conforming to fit in to have an easier life.

Now that I am at a stage of my life where I feel open to being myself and who I am without feeling the need to confirm, I have the chance to discover who that person really is.  More than that, what I really want from life.  It is important to realise what a rare gift that is.  But I have worked hard to get here.

Throwing off the constraints of society and the people around you, including sometimes the people you love; is a little like taking your clothes off when you come home from a winter's day into the warmth of your home.  You start small with the hat, the gloves, the scarf.  Then comes the coat, which you think is the most complicated part because it is so bulky and has many zips and fastenings.  But then you realise that the jumper that is by now stuck fast to your body is actually the hardest.  But every layer thereafter is much easier.  Until you get to pulling off your socks...

I think that this analogy works well because when you are working to heal yourself and find your peace, you are never quite done.  The things you think will be easy, are not and the things that you thought would take forever, don't.  You can never tell until you start.

I decided to try and make a list of some of the things that have shaped me, looking back with clearer eyes, in the hope that I can make new choices now.  

I was a fat child.  This was why I had few friends in primary school.  Let's be honest here.  Personality is secondary when you are fat.  You know it and I know it.  The only thing that can save you is being funny, and even then; you tend to get typecast as the fat funny one (hello Hollywood) but people know nothing else about you.  I am not particularly funny.

I tried everything to make friends and was “friendly” with some; but what I learned from primary school is that it did not get better. no matter how you tried.  You just had to be not fat.  The rest would follow.  The fact that I was naturally shy did not help.

This carried forward to secondary school.  Although I did eventually find a best friend there.  But I was still an oddity. 

The are two sides to being fat though.  One is being fat in school.  I do not believe that my experiences of being fat at school shaped me other than to point out the obvious.  Children like to find the odd one out.  Someone to pick on.  Children are cruel.  But even at primary school they know that staying in the pack and picking off the weaker ones is the best play.

The other side of being fat is the fact that you are not holding up your end of a bargain that you did not know you had agreed to.  At least in my case.

The bargain was, so I was told for decades, is that you have to be attractive to the opposite sex.  This is paramount.  Otherwise, why do you even exist.  

Attractive means not fat.  Especially when you have an attractive parent.  You must follow suit.  I did not.  This means, you are not good enough.  You have not made the grade.   You are not good enough even to be on the starting block. 

Another thing that shaped me was being the last in line.  My thoughts, my opinions, my feelings did not matter.  They were the last straw. So, I simply started putting people above myself and believed that I, on the bottom rung of the ladder, deserved nothing.  This has been a major controlling factor of my life, or was.  I never put myself first, never bothered making a plan for myself, or my life.  Because I simply did not matter.

One thing about writing that I love is that it is a little like real time therapy.  Except you are making the suppositions to yourself and answering them while you write.  Thoughts occur to me as I type and I discover new things about myself.

The last paragraph is a prime example.  A raw truth that I have never realised before or never fully understood.  I never made plans for my life, because I believed that I did not matter enough to make them.  

These days, I believe in focusing on the here and now.  Not looking back and using reasons from the past to interfere with my future.  But I can learn from it.  It needs no longer to cause me  pain.  Now there is so much that is positive about my life.  Finally. I love my life.  I am working every day on trying to love myself.

For me, my healing started with love.  A clear, true love that could not be denied.  From a person who could see right through me.  To parts that I could not see for myself.  Now, I can.

That love was the beginning.  I was finally on the starting block.

Now, I am excited.  Because now, I know that I matter.  I believe it.  That I deserve space in this world.  That I can create a world for me, of my choosing.  That world includes the person that I love and includes our wants and dreams.  But I have a person who wants me to find my dreams and go for them.  What could possibly be better than that?

I have always been a person who stayed stagnant, whilst occasionally making huge leaps.  I made a leap into plus size blogging, I made a leap to pushing myself to do things on my own (like travelling to London which I have talked about here before); I made a leap into commercial writing; I made a leap by giving up commercial writing in order to write about what I believed; I made a leap back into online dating.  My last leap was the most important, I tried a new way to heal, and in doing so, discovered myself, waiting there to be found.

So, after all of this time, all of the soul searching, all the time I have spent healing; who I am?

What I found is that I am the person that I thought I was.  I am, under it all, a happy person.  I see the good in people.  I am silly, I love to laugh.  I like to take care of the people that I love.  I know that that this is my nature, and is no longer just done in the hope of love.  I have a thousand opinions.  I love to write.  It gives me joy.  

I like to cook.  I want to learn more cooking.  I maybe want to study something.  I want to write more short stories.  Maybe a book. I want to travel more.  I want to go on this adventure in life with my partner at my side and see where it ends.

The future is mine and what I make of it.  The only limits are myself and I am done with limits.

The Curved Opinion Short Stories Part 8: A Witch's Curse

Today's theme I found to be an interesting one, here is what I did with it.

Write about a witch’s curse:

The woods next to the village of St Aubrens were dark and oppressive.  Sadness and pain seem to radiate out from the branches of the trees themselves and whether it was summer or winter, the leaves were always black.

The village itself was also a strange place.   There was a section in the village with rows of cottages that no one wanted to pass.  Misery seemed to hang in the air like an ever present cloud and the residents always looked like the weight of the world rested on their shoulders.

Whenever there was a celebration within the village, the festivities never reached those cottages.  Decorations were never hung, the brightly coloured lanterns were never lit, the people never seemed to smile.

Newcomers to the village never stayed long.  People were actively discouraged from buying in the area and the children who lived there moved away as soon as could.  This was not a happy village.  Because decades earlier, the village people had made a mistake, they had crossed a witch.

The villagers had always known about the witch who lived alone, or so they thought, in a tiny cottage in the woods.  Uneasy at the thought of a witch in their midst, the unspoken rule was that they left her alone and in turn, she would stay away from the village. 

After several years particularly bad harvests, the villagers started to mutter about the witch and about how she was bringing them bad luck.  One night, fueled after a night at the local tavern, those mutterings turned to anger, and the anger turned to fury.  The men of the village tore through the woods with torches alight, intent of burning the witch out of her home and getting her well away from their village.

It was only when they had set fire to the witch’s cottage that the villagers heard screams of “My children! My children!” coming from behind them.  The witch raced through the trees towards the cottage which was now fully ablaze.  There was no way anyone, even the witch, could have saved anyone inside.

The men had raced back to village, horrified at what had just occurred. 

The next day, the witch had appeared in the village square, stricken with grief at the loss of her children.  The smell of the fire was all around her and black smoke seemed to follow in her wake.   She proclaimed that every man who had entered the woods that night would suffer, that he would never know happiness again without pain.

The witch was never seen again.  Too afraid now to pursue her, the villagers never entered the woods again, and with good reason.  All the men who had entered the woods that night soon felt the consequences of her curse. 

Any feeling of happiness was followed by strong physical pain.  The sensation was described as having your heart pulled from your chest.  From a chuckle from a joke to a feeling of love or happiness caused hours of excruciating agony. 

The men soon realised that in order to survive the curse, they had to cut all happiness from their lives.  Their loved ones were sent away, they chose their food from the scraps left by others and they now each lived alone, on the same row of cottages in the village.

No one in the village knew exactly how long the cursed men had actually lived.  The years and decades passed and yet they still lived on.  Some said that they would die when the witch did. When her pain had died, so to could theirs.  

No one ever entered the St Aubrens Woods again.