I'll Be Good To You

Can I just be honest with y’all for a moment?

I really want to write about everything that I am feeling and processing but I’ve discovered that as I’m going through the healing work it’s not always easy for me to clearly articulate what I’m going through. In my last post I was talking about duality and how thinking through that lens is a hinderance and leaves us tied up in an impossible bind of having to acknowledge only one thing. And if I can be really vulnerable with you in this moment I will say that the root of that post is based on me looking at myself in a more holistic and less dualistic way. What do I mean by that?

I did a YouTube video where I talked about always trying to live up to this idea of being a “good girl”. Though I was raised in a free and loving home I focused on the voices that wanted to box me into respectability. Being seen as good was the most important thing to me when I was a kid. And as I got older that desire to be “good” manifested into deep people pleasing and perfectionism. It wasn’t until recently that I began to ask myself the questions, What IS good? How do I determine what good is? Where did this concept come from? These questions have been hard to answer because they are tied to so many aspects of my identity that I’ve had to cut myself off from.

I started dismantling all the ideas around what is considered good as well as this belief that in order for me to be in relationship and experience connection, I had to live up to a standard of pristine personhood. Then I ended up in relationships where I felt that I was being good for my partner when in fact nothing that I was doing was translating as good to the other person. And while I had to work though a lot of stuff and certainly brought my own bags of trauma to the relationship, the “good” me was never satisfying to my partners.

So what has all of this been for? Where has good gotten me?

I had a partner tell me that I wasn’t actually good or even nice for that matter. When I heard them say this to me my world was shattered. Up until that moment I truly believed that I was a good, nice person. Then to have someone, my significant other at the time no less, tell me that the pillars that I had resting my entire identity on for my whole life was simply a sham was devastating. Suddenly I was reevaluating my life from the lens of being the opposite of what I thought and who I thought I was.

It wasn’t easy work but rather than get defensive and act as if what I had been told was a complete farce, I got deep into my healing work. I didn’t condemn myself for how I had been operating but I did take a hard look at myself. The first thing I did was throw the word “good” away from my vocabulary. Judging myself on some moral yard stick was not going to help me in any way. I discovered deep shame and abandonment wounds. And suddenly the desire to be “good” was of less importance and all I wanted was to be authentic.

The road to authenticity was a bumpy one. I had to go back and offer up amendments to people that I felt I may have hurt as a result of me trying to hold up this “good” identity. I’m currently working on self-forgiveness and integrating my younger self who has felt the weight of that good label and actively rebelled against it every chance she could get.

I don’t know y’all. I’m still processing so much of this and I know I’ve only scratched the surface.