Have been warned.......
I believe I've talked before about my struggle with accepting help, well, I still struggle. I've had a really bad day today, from working overtime to having a client swear at me and tell me why everybody hates me, to literally getting punched in the heart (really hard) by my son.
Anyway, the man I've been seeing invited me to stop in tonight on my way home from work. I will admit, this kept me going throughout the day. Just thinking of seeing his smile, and who knows..... :~}. Well, as I left work I gave him a call asking if he still wanted a visit. He said "No, not really." Well hell, "ok" I say. "Sorry" he says. "that's ok" I say.
Well you know what? It wasn't ok. I needed to see a friendly face. I needed a hug and a smile. I needed someone who cared enough to want to make me smile. But what are those lyrics again? Oh yeah..... You can't always get what you want..... Ain't that the truth.
Well, he asked how my day was, I told him it had been a rough day and that I would just go home and go to bed. He then offered for me to come over and vent. He asked me if I needed a hug, and told me he wanted to see me. So what did I do?
What I always do. I said no. Told him "I'm fine.", because he had already told me he didn't want to see me tonight. Didn't matter that he wanted to see me because I had a hard day, he originally told me no, so I wasn't going to force myself on him and make him feel obligated to see me when he didn't want to.
Was this the right thing to do? It's what I always do..... I think it's one of the reasons my marriage started to fail. There were certain things that I really liked/enjoyed/needed that my ex told me he didn't particularly like, that he only did cause I liked them. So I stopped letting him do them for me. I went without because I couldn't let him do things he didn't enjoy. I felt like it was unfair of me to expect him to do things when I was the only one happy about it. I thought that's what made me a good wife. I did a lot for him I didn't enjoy, but never voiced my dislike over them. (well, I say never, but a couple of times I did, hmmm, never bothered him.)
When I was growing up, and especially after I got pregnant my mother would tell me often that when I had a child I needed to remember that child was MY responsibility. MINE. No one elses. I was not to expect help from anyone. I took this lesson in, I took it to the extreme. So much so that I let my ex dictate his level of help raising our son. I very rarely ever asked my family to help, and even more rarely asked friends if they could help watch him- and only when I had no other recourse than to do so. I mean, he wasn't their responsibility right? Why would they want to help.
This trait of mine can be seen in almost every aspect of my life from home to work I have always accepted that I am not good enough and/or worthy enough of other peoples time. I think I'm getting better, that my self esteem is getting higher but this lesson keeps showing up to kick me in the solar plexus and remind me I'm not where I think I am. I still have such a long way to go.
Intellectually I know that I am worthy enough, that my friends care about me and think I'm worthy of their time and effort (at least the important ones who really count) but in that small {ok, maybe not as small as I thought} part of my heart I'm still an unworthy person who has to go it all alone all the time.
How do I change this? Cause every time I think I have, it's right there again, in my face saying "helloooo". Maybe I need to continue on this path of self reflection and figure out where and when I started feeling unworthy. Why do I almost never call people on the phone? Because I don't want to bother them, I figure they must be doing something more important than talking to me. Why? Why do automatically go to that thought? Hmmmm, I guess it's time to really ponder these thoughts and work on figuring out how to change them.
Maybe I should use a rubber band.......
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