I spend a lot of my day working.
I remember when I graduated high school, I truly believed that my summers would be full of sun, swimming, and snow cones.
This summer, my days are full of sweat and smelling like fish from serving at a restaurant when I get off of work at my internship. I easily work about 50-60 hours a week, not including all the time I think about work or school or what I should be doing for my future. A full time internship, and then a part time job. “Why not?” I ask myself. “What else am I doing, aside from being in an online class?”
Self-care. That’s what I’m not doing, because I don’t feel like I’ve earned it, and I definitely do not feel like I deserve it.
A lot of people do it. We hide.
I’m hiding behind my ‘achievements.’ I’ve replaced my emotion with work. Some people hide behind drinking. They go out every night and have a good time to compensate for the not good time they have when they are sober. Some people literally hide from other people and stay at home on a computer all day.
We tell ourselves that we are hiding from dealing with work, or dealing with people that annoy us, or even getting away from traumatic experiences in our lives. But in reality, while some of that may be true. It’s not the main thing that we are hiding from.
We’re hiding from ourselves. We’re hiding from the way we feel when we are sober. We are hiding from the way we interact with other people. We are hiding from facing the reality that it is easy to put our bodies through hell, than to sit down, and think about changing what we don’t like about who we are.
I remember a pivotal scene from the HBO series "TrueBlood" (don’t judge me, season 1, episode 7 spoiler alert). Tara is one of my favorite characters. She is loud, abrasive, angry, and says absolutely everything that comes to her mind – good or bad.
Tara’s mother, Lettie Mae, is a ridiculous religious drunk. Upon being tired of hiding behind alcohol and being the worst mother alive, she comes to the realization that she has a demon inside her (take that how you will, figuratively or literally). So she does what any normal person would do - she goes to gets a $200 exorcism from a bald lady who lives in a broken down trailer out in the woods.
Upon finishing Lettie Mae’s demon expulsion, the weird bald lady looks at Tara, a vocal skeptic of the entire process, and tells her that she has a demon within her too.
The gem in this story comes when the weird lady tells Tara, “Next time you’re alone, stand in the mirror and count backwards from 10. If you can get all the way down to zero, then I’m wrong. But if you can’t stand your own company for 10 seconds, how you gonna expect to do it for the rest of your life?”
To our dismay, Tara couldn’t get down to zero.
Sometimes, at different points in our lives, I don’t know if many of us could.
The point of this article isn’t to tell you how to fix yourself, because the truth is, we already know. We have to confront what we are hiding from, and get to the true source of our strength, and not the defense mechanism that we seek solace from.
