Strong Enough – Not Just Lyrics to Another Song

I don’t spend a lot of time talking about myself or my personal life/background at work. Not that I am trying to be mysterious, but why would I?

I am there to work, to get a job done and be paid for it. Sure, it’s great to make friends, but there is no organic way to talk about oneself without coming off as a self centered asshole to everyone listening. So I keep it to myself unless someone asks, or it’s relevant for whatever reason.

Today happened to be one of those days. I am minding my own business, getting caught up on the work that was left from before my day off. Stuff just seems to pile up when my teammate is on his own. It was like there was all the same stuff that was leftover from Tuesday, plus whatever extra came in the following day.

Suffice it to say I was busy when this one gal comes over and makes a passing comment that people think she is a mean person. I wouldn’t agree. I think she is super nice, almost to a fault. I don’t think she is mean, and she can be stern and serious when need be, but for the most part she is one of the nicer people on the team.

That somehow segued into her sharing that her father was physically abusive with her and her siblings, and is still abusive to her mother, who is consequently still married to him. She said that to this day she is afraid of her father, which doesn’t surprise me.

I had a friend in high school who had a very controlling father and my friend never naysayed her dad, and I thought her very weak and made fun of her for it. I am not a very judgement free friend… not gonna find a soft landing space here.

I replied to her that I can understand her dilemma, but I don’t know how to empathize with her plight because I hate my father and haven’t spoken to him in more than 15 years. She was like, wow, I wish I was as strong as you.

Which got me thinking, why doesn’t she feel strong? And what is keeping her from being empowered to feel strong?

I mean, she’s married, working a full time job, and a mother of five. What is that if not strong? She’s living her life, she’s raising lives and guiding them to hopefully be good people. That shit ain’t easy. Yet she doesn’t think she has any strength.

We have subjective rulers which we use to measure ourselves. Our rulers make it seem like we just don’t measure up, and holding that same ruler up against someone else’s life, what we perceive of it, it looks like they are measuring up to standards that we feel we will never meet. I live that every day.

I feel I am not a good parent. I feel I was a failure as a mother when my kids were younger, and as a result that I am failing my kids now that they are teens. I feel like I failed at adulthood, like I had several attempts to make something of myself and they have all failed to launch into anything interesting or spectacular.

Other people tell me I have lived such an interesting life, but I look at myself and think, what a fucking joke! That’s how life is. Some people contribute to our overall human experience. Some of us just manage to stop talking to a parental figure because they are human garbage and stick to it. I have the fortitude to cut people out of my life, but I lack the fortitude to finish many things I start. Life is fucked up that way.

I approach another birthday this year with simultaneous dread and ambivalence.

I want to not care but at the same time I mourn daily my misspent youth. I weep that I barely had any time to explore my existence as a human alone, I went and messed that up by getting married and having kids in my twenties. What the fuck was I thinking? Oh yeah, that’s right. I wasn’t.

Do I think of myself as strong? Not really.

I give into my baser instincts and desires more often than not. I have poor impulse control sometimes and make snap decisions based on little to no information.

Does that make me strong? No. I think it makes me foolish.

I try to be a better version of myself, but I sometimes also think that ship has sailed and I may as well just wave it goodbye from the shore, then sit back and watch the sunset.