What if I am the problem?
I've had to sit with that thought for the past couple of weeks.
Like genuinely sit with it.
No noise. No distractions. No comments. No people telling me I'm being too hard on myself. No people reminding me of all my good qualities.
Just me.
Sitting in my shit.
And when you sit in your shit long enough, you start noticing things.
I've noticed three.
Sometimes, to be honest, many times, I am the problem.
I self-destruct. A lot.
I avoid accountability by looking for validation.
That third one hit me the hardest.
My friends are great. I love them deeply. But I've realized that in their eyes, I can do no wrong. Or even if I do, they know my heart. They know my intentions. They know I didn't mean to hurt anyone.
So they tell me it's okay.
And they're mostly right.
Things do eventually become okay. I eventually become okay.
But that doesn't erase the messed-up things I've done.
I want to be clear: this is not me blaming my friends. I have a wonderful group of people around me. Some of them tell me when my shit stinks. Others love me enough to sit beside me while it does.
But that's not their responsibility.
That's mine.
Recently, I've allowed myself something I haven't allowed in a very long time: boredom.
No constant scrolling. No filling every quiet moment with noise. No distractions.
Just silence.
And in that silence, I realized there were parts of myself I had been avoiding.
That's the crazy thing about getting older. You don't just gain wisdom. You gain awareness. And sometimes awareness feels a lot like grief.
Because for the first time in my life, I haven't been able to ignore what I see when I look in the mirror.
And what I see isn't always pretty.
Sometimes I see someone selfish.
Sometimes I see someone afraid.
Sometimes I see someone who hurts people without meaning to and then spends more time explaining why she did it than taking responsibility for the fact that she did.
That's a hard thing to admit.
I never thought I would be here.
I never thought God would bring me here.
But maybe this is exactly where I need to be.
I've been thinking a lot about my relationships lately, both platonic and romantic, and how many of them ended.
For years, it was easy to focus on what was done to me.
What they said.
What they didn't do.
How they hurt me.
What wasn't so easy was looking at myself.
Looking at the friendships I didn't fight for.
Looking at the apologies I should have made.
Looking at the times I expected grace but struggled to extend it.
Looking at the energy I poured into a man who honestly wasn't worth the bottom of my shoe while letting meaningful relationships quietly fall apart.
But that's a different story.
Relationships are hard.
They're even harder when you're carrying around baggage you've convinced yourself isn't heavy.
You don't know how to trust.
You question the good.
You accept the bad.
And somewhere deep down, you start believing that's what you deserve.
So then the question becomes: How do you change?
How do you do better?
That's what I've been working through with God.
And I want to be honest about something.
I'm not writing this as a woman who has figured her shit out.
I'm not on the other side of this.
I'm not writing from the mountaintop.
I'm writing this from the middle.
From the thick of it.
My shit isn't physical. It's internal.
It's deep.
And it's mine.
I've spent a lot of years trying to outrun it, explain it away, blame it on circumstances, blame it on other people, or pretend it wasn't there.
Now I'm trying something different.
I'm accepting it.
And I think that's the first step.
Accepting it.
Then deciding you don't want to live there anymore.
Not allowing it to creep into your future and define every relationship that comes after it.
I'm moving slowly these days.
Intentionally.
I'm seeking God first.
It's hard.
I fail often.
There are still so many moments when I fall back into old habits because they're familiar. Because they're comfortable. Because they're what I know.
But through all of this, I've realized something else.
The people who were meant to leave, left.
And the people who were meant to stay, stayed.
I can think of countless moments when the people still in my life could have walked away. Honestly, they would have been justified in doing so.
But they stayed.
They chose to see the good in me even when I couldn't see it in myself.
And I will never stop being grateful for that.
And for the people who left because of something I did, because of pain I caused, because I was too immature or too wounded or too stubborn to show up the way they deserved...
I am sorry.
Maybe that's part of growth too.
Not just learning to forgive others.
But finally being honest about where forgiveness is needed from you.