Doubt

Something odd happened today. Something that, for the first time in my life, has given me a rather massive regret.

I ran into someone I went to high school with today. She hasn’t changed much, she still has gorgeous blonde hair, and green eyes, she is married, which is certainly different. She has kids. In that aspect she is like me, getting old, moving on in life, doing the things that people expect people our age to do.

She saw me before I saw her, because frankly I was focused on finding a cold beverage and getting the heck out of dodge, when she came over and asked me if I was there to get the stuff to make a baby blanket for her, as she is expecting her 4th baby in October. (I have made the comment several times that I’m working on finishing up a baby blanket for a friend’s baby on facebook. I know I know, I spend way too much time on facebook.) We stood and chatted a few minutes, and then went our separate ways.

On the drive home I got to thinking about the friends that I had, and the friends she had and the things we did on Friday nights. Taylor and I weren’t close friends growing up, but we did start in kindergarten and worked our way through until we graduated. We had gone to school for 13 years together, often sharing similar classes. So I knew her as well as you know someone whom you have spent your entire life with. Needless to say, our paths rarely crossed, we had different friends and did different things. I figured that she saw me as the band geek with the strange friends. Most of my friends were nerds too. Sorry guys, but we were.

As I left and drove home and put away the groceries, I wondered how different high school and JR. high would have been, if I had tried harder. If I had put more faith into some of the other kids at school, kids that I secretly wanted to hang out with, but figured that they saw me for the loser that I was so sure I was. Then it hit me.

It wasn’t that I didn’t have any faith in them, I didn’t have any faith in me.

And that hurt.

I have always thought that I have so little to offer that why would anyone want to be my friend. I have never been the partier, the drinker, the dater, or the wild child. Instead I loved to read, and even at 12 and 16, loved to cross stitch, and work on the farm. I wasn’t interested in playing sports. I actually wanted to play a few but my own lack of faith in myself stopped me from doing it. My fear of looking stupid and the teasing that I was so sure would come after I screwed up.

So instead I did band, because in those uniforms you all looked the same. I did UIL in accounting. I said I was a nerd. I went to an occasional basketball game, because Amber would beg me until I relented. I went out on Friday and Saturday nights and made the drag, in my awful first car. But those kids, who weren’t really the popular kids, instead of getting to know them, of seeing if we really had anything in common, I let my own insecurities make me friend-light.

It has been the same thought process with this blog over the last few weeks. My husband and parents keep heaping on the praise, and I have let that little inner voice tell me that they are lying, that they really don’t like my writing, that I sound stupid – LOSER!!

I have tried to write posts, and the words just won’t come. Well actually they have, but that little insecure person in me wouldn’t let me save them. I started dozens of posts, but none of them were worthy. None of them were good. None of them were thought provoking. They all sucked.

Realistically – I probably deleted some really good stuff. Do I regret that? Absolutely. I regret that I let any moment of doubt make me think that my writing, therefore my life be unworthy of anything. No, not everyone is going to like it, it might not mean as much to one person as it does to another, but that’s OK too. God knows who needs to get the message and who doesn’t.

I regret that I walked through JR. and High school thinking that I had nothing to offer to those people. That I wasn’t worthy of their time of their friendship. I regret that I didn’t find a way to squash that inner voice sooner. I wonder how different those years would have been if I had put more faith in myself instead of in believing that doubting voice.

I can only imagine.

Then I realized that, as an adult, I have only 2 friends, and while I adore them both, we aren’t really close friends anymore. We go weeks in between talking, and most of that is done via email; and months and years between visits. I then realized that I’m friend-light by my own choice. While it isn’t subconscious, it is still by my own doing. And that hurt even worse.

You know what the kicker is. I bet to a certain extent they have that same little voice. That same voice telling them whatever they see in themselves when they talk to me. They just manage to tell it to shut up before it takes over.

So instead of putting my faith in all the things I see wrong with myself, like the overweight, the nerd, the bookworm, the cross stitch-aholic. I’m going to try putting my faith in me. So I’m overweight, I am an amazing cook. So I’m a bookworm and a nerd, it means I can have a cool job that no one really understands and make jillions of dollars at. So I’m a cross stitch addict, I can make absolutely beautiful pieces, that most people wouldn’t have the courage to even attempt.

This all kinda makes me wonder how much less stress I would have in my life if I would have faith that I CAN do it, instead of just waiting for that little bastard in my head to cheer when I fail, to tell me “I told you so”.
So instead I’m going to put my faith in me, and if the first 100 don’t like, if they don’t think that I have anything to offer, then I just haven’t met the right person yet. Maybe I’ll find them in the next 100.

~You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover is yourself. ~Alan Alda

~All men should strive to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.
~James Thurber

~The man who views the world at fifty the same as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life. ~Muhammad Ali