Hello. My name is Mary Johnson Heiser, and I'm addicted to the need to make of myself more than I am.
We can get into all the reasons I am this way: my striving, status-hungry mother, my family who spoiled me and convinced me at a young age that I was someone special destined for greatness, my awareness that I'm not beautiful, so I'd better make up for it in other ways. But in the end, it doesn't really matter. I am addicted to inflated self-image, to self-importance, and it's all just an attempt to tile over the weak spots in the floor of my soul. In the end, when the strength and beauty of that veneer was tested (like it was this year), it didn't hold, and all of my illusions went crashing through that weakened floor and tumbled me into the darkness of my basement.
Ugh, that metaphor was redolent of cheap writing. My apologies.
Anyway, I've tried several things over the past year to get a grip and pull myself out of this basement, all while trying to deny the basement even exists. I didn't want to look into the honest mirror and acknowledge that I am not special, I'm hardly even important. Unfortunately, every worthy human life has to start at that benchmark. Accept that you are human, flawed, mortal, and will someday die, then make something of what you have.
I did not start where everyone else started. I was a holy relic once, carried with the same reverence and treated with the same awe-hushed care. I was barely allowed to learn to walk. I was worshiped for my cuteness and I was told repeatedly I had a great destiny. Who can deny that?
Even so, something inside me knew better, and thus began the deterioration of the floor in the chapel of my mind. My doubts ate through the strength of it and undermined any small victory I experienced. I couldn't laugh at myself, and I detested any joke made at my expense, because it only highlighted that rapidly decomposing floor. I told people I was clumsy and forgetful (which I am), but only because I was masquerading as a human being, and I noticed that all humans needed flaws to acknowledge. I did not allow any allegation of fault or less-than-worthiness in to the awareness of the Superego. I searched for beauty in my face, grace and elegance in my form, and when I failed to find it I only said that physical beauty was an illusion.
I glorified all of the things that made me imperfect, then. I was infertile, so I said that God didn't make a mistake when that trait was assigned to me: I could be Auntie Mame, I could be a world traveler, I could be an accomplished, if childless, grand dame with no secret terrors of child-rearing in my heart. I was afraid of men, but I hung out my shingle and offered dating advice to my poor, confused friends in bad relationships, holding out my single-woman status as a badge of pride in my refusal to settle for less than perfect. I was haughty and proud of nothing.
This year, I've been forced to look hard into that unforgiving mirror that's located in everyone's basement. I see myself now as a lazy, fat, spoiled, and selfish girl, railing at the world to tell her how brilliant and perfect she is so she doesn't have to face the reality that she's neither of these things. Even when I'm told this, I don't believe it because I know it isn't true -- but I want the world to tell me anyway, over and over. Maybe the cacophony of adulation will drown out my self-doubts.
That doesn't happen. It only makes the illusion weaker. Everyone has to start with the realization that they aren't special, they are just another human being crawling over the surface of this world and scratching symbols in the dirt.
Because I never started at the basemark of this understanding, because I never allowed it to be a part of me, I was ill-prepared for the things that knocked me off my flimsy pedestal and sent me crashing through the floor and into the basement. Every attempt I've made to escape the basement this year has been unsuccessful -- until now.
Even so, I am learning to appreciate what's happened to me. I needed this year. I needed the violent lessons, the broken promises, the heartbreak and the denial of ego. I needed to find closed doors all around me and the word "No" stamped on each one of them, barring the way to the fulfillment of my selfish, childish demands. I needed to sit in the dark in my basement, alone and un-rescued, and I needed to pay attention to the small voice whispering in my head this one simple secret:
You are common. And there is nothing wrong with that.
I'm still not 100% healed, but I gotta tell ya, I'm getting there.
So hello, fellow humans. I apologize for being a douchebag. I promise, I will try harder to be less of one.
