Sunday Inspirations – Overcoming our Past

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It has been one of those weeks.  I have felt raw and on edge.  Yet absolutely nothing bad happened to me this week – but I was surrounded by it.  I won’t share, because it isn’t mine to do so, but clients and dear friends have been under fire.  Serious, faith testing, devil working fire.   Which as God sometimes chooses to do,  found that spot in my heart that I guard and protect and never open for fear of what would come out and forcing me to look at myself.

I debated this post in my brain.  Every time the words started forming, I would push them down.  I didn’t want to share.  I wanted to shove it all down and hope it stayed there for a long, long time.

It started when my mother tried to friend me on Facebook.  Yep, you read that right.  That is what started to set me off and then real life events unfolded that just kept opening up that almost healed wound.

I grew up in dysfunction.  Not the mild kind of parents having a spat, one child favored type of dysfunction.  Movie of the week, Lifetime, Hallmark channel kind of dysfunction.  The kind of dysfunction that causes CPS to remove you from the home and people to serve time type of dysfunction.  The kind of dysfunction that you are repeatedly told to never, ever let anyone know or they will think badly of you (I was a kid, people). The kind that will make you feel so less than nothing that for over 15 years of my life I was truly suicidal.

I thought that I wasn’t deserving of a good life.

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I became driven to be perfect.

To have a perfectly clean home, to be perfectly dressed and groomed, to succeed financially. To have perfectly behaved children that followed the rules, were neatly dressed and always used their manners {yeah, right}.   That if I looked perfect then no one would know how imperfect I truly was.  No one would know the demons that I lived with that told me I was no good.  I lived in fear of anyone really knowing the true me.

I remember breaking up with the sweetest guy ever in high school.  The first guy to ever walk me to class and give me a sweet kiss in the gym hallway during a basketball game.  I broke up with him out of fear of him not really liking me if he knew who I was.  And I continued that way for years.  In fact, I spent the entire decade of my 20′s suffering a pain that was unbearable.  A pain I tried to hide through hard work and martinis.

The best thing that ever happened to me was marrying Mr. BP and having kids.  I told him everything the day he asked me to marry him.  He didn’t run or hide.  He held me close and told me it didn’t matter.  In some real way, he probably saved my life.  Yet, after 13 years and 4 kids I still wake up and think that today will be the day he realizes he made a mistake and walks out that door.

I have spent my life in the prison of fear.  That if anyone knew I wasn’t perfect then they wouldn’t love me, want to do business with me, want to be my friend.

You see, in some odd way, I have had a fear of success.  Of opening myself up and letting people truly be my friend, to truly love me for who I am.  Of really soaring to great heights and not stopping or selling myself short.

I thought I wasn’t worthy of it.  My image of myself was that I didn’t deserve it.  That I was less than because of my past.

Source: weheartit.com via Beverly on Pinterest