Born Loser?

This is how I used to feel.

An Excerpt from my journal two years ago, what happened to my identity as I was healing.

"I used to write every day, or at least it seemed like it. Like I couldn’t help myself. I used to be younger, I used to have more teeth.

In the past year, I have had three teeth removed. I am only twenty-seven years old and my teeth are falling out like I smoke meth for breakfast. Do you think certain people are born addicts?

Or maybe not addicts because I know that that’s true, but I wonder if some people are born to lose?

I know there are plenty of motivational movies and books about the people who have overcome, about girls who lose their arms to shark attacks only to surf sixty-foot waves in the pacific a couple of years later. But were they born to win? Because how many more one-armed people are there out there dying of opioid addiction in their mother’s basement? Aren’t they more common? Survival of the fittest, I want to be the fittest. But I am always afraid that I am not.

Maybe I am supposed to be settling for the middle, I don’t know how to find the center. Do I still want it all or nothing? Why are teeth falling out of my head? I don’t want to be superstitious but I feel fucking superstitious when things break and my teeth fall out of my head.

Is it because I try things half-cocked?

Because I don’t commit all the way, couldn’t commit suicide, couldn’t be a Christian, couldn’t be a mistress, couldn’t be a drug addict.

I am happy I couldn’t commit to those things but what do I actually want to commit to?

To being a writer. That is literally all I have ever wanted, and yet in the past year, I feel paralyzed when sitting down to the keyboard or opening up my journal. My thoughts scatter like dandelion fluff, you can tell me all day how great I am, and deep down where I thought the belief in my self lived I feel that I have discovered nothing but a gaping hollow where my courage should have been.

Like the gaping hollow in my mouth where my tooth used to be,

How do I do this? I think I thought I was the winner acting like a loser for years, now I feel like an actual bonafide loser. "

This was the feeling that washed over me as I had begun to heal, as my identity was stripped away. I realize I was going through an identity crisis. I was no longer the broken, the dying, the victim, the tortured soul, I was just Chris, and then I wondered who she was without all that extra stuff. I am still learning how to let her be without shoving her into a box or demanding she fulfill some goal.

I want to address this because sometimes I think people hit this point in their healing and they get scared, they wonder what will happen when they give up certain identities, certain struggles. We see it all the time with convicts released from prison finding themselves reoffending, drug addicts relapsing and victims of abuse finding abusers.

Stripping all that a way and telling someone they are worth more can be TERRIFYING, you can find yourself, as I did, feeling lost.

I'll never forget our Weiner dog Oliver that we had when I was in high school. My mother had put a leash around his neck that she never took off, it wasn't attached to anything so it dragged behind him like the train of a sad wedding gown. She would use it to catch him in case he tried to go for the door. One day my sister came home from college horrified that the poor little thing never got break from this restraint. In true Mancari fashion she made a show of liberating him from his bonds, unleashing him and proclaiming his freedom.

Oliver, not one for drama that he was not the author of, placidly began to walk away making for his bed, until he realized his leash was not coming. He turned around, his little head cocked, and trotted back to his tether, picked it up, and carried it with him.

damn.

Ya, we all do it, we get so accustomed to our restraints that even in the unfamiliar taste of freedom we shrink, saying "ya but I am not me without my pain, without my baggage."

But guess what YOU are.

Though it has taken me some time and there are moments I still wrap myself back up in my leashes (and yes, there are multiple) I have learned every day to be more present, more me, outside of expectation and judgment.

Understanding acceptance and impermanence a little better so that I know that in each moment I get to choose to not pick up my leash. If you wanted more, to be told how to surf six-foot waves with one arm, this is it. If it sounds simple then why don't more of us do it?

Because it takes practice, a practice I begin again each morning.