I was not the cool kid. I was an outsider. It’s just my personality…I’m an introvert. I’m a bit (OK, a lot) weird, a nerd, have eclectic interests. I don’t quite fit in with any group, and the way my brain works doesn’t always jive with other people. I’ve been called a Stoic. If you enjoy the Myers-Briggs personality types, I’m called an INTJ, and we female INTJs are pretty rare.
Despite growing up in a loving home, I faced various social obstacles that wore me down until I decided I did NOT need friendship, and I did NOT like myself. All the pain I endured I blamed on myself and allowing myself to be open to people who would only hurt me. I built solid, impenetrable, very tall walls to keep everyone and everything out. They kept me from reaching out to other people for help, and they kept other people from being able to help me.
Things changed when I went off to university. I met new people. Good people. Once my walls started to break down and I learned that it was OK to be vulnerable and allow people to love me, I started to learn to love myself. One of my early experiences was a morning when I missed my alarm, slept late and missed church. There were several voicemails on my phone from church friends who had the AUDACITY to worry about me. How DARE they worry about me! I wasn’t worthy of such a thing!
These friends, with time and patience, chipped away at the walls surrounding my heart and taught me that I was a person worth loving, and that I needed to love myself as much as they did. That if God loved me then who was I to question that? Being the INTJ, the best way to reach me is through a good rational argument, so they had me beat on that one.
Throughout the years since then, it has been an ongoing journey learning little bits of how to learn to love myself, one piece at a time. How to stop hating myself. How to embrace my weirdness and learn to love it and use it as a superpower. I have been learning to love myself with new and different identities…as a wife, a mother, a housewife, someone with depression, a working mother, someone struggling socially, someone with chronic pain and disease, and learning to accept and love myself through all of these things.
Someone once told me that grace is when you do get what you don’t deserve and mercy is when you don’t get what you do deserve. At the end of the day, the biggest factors in learning how to love myself are giving myself grace and mercy. It’s easy for me to extend these things to other people who may have offended me, and to remind people to give the same to themselves, but to practise what I preach and allow the same for myself is also my biggest challenge. I also think that it’s what our society needs.
I’m still not a cool kid and I’m still an outsider, but now I know how to love, how to be loved, and how to love myself, and at the end of the day, that’s what truly matters in life.
Thank you Deborah, for sharing YOUR story!
Who else would like to share their story?
Please get in touch and I will be happy to share…because SHARING IS CARING!