Confronting my inner bully

I take back most of what I wrote in my previous post. I was having an anxiety-ridden day, and that was causing my inner bully to come out and attack every aspect of me. I call this inner-bully “Malechelle”.  Male (with the “e” pronounced in the end) as in malevolent, bad, and Chelle from my name. She is a dark version of me.

Malechelle is a jerk. I participated in a 30-day blogging challenge where I shared fun photos, shared my favorite things (chorus, Tarot, cool stuff I find in every day life), and my sweet kitty, who I love as though she’s my child. I posted every single day for 30 days, after not blogging for years. And what does Malechelle do on the last day? She puts ALL of that down. She calls all of those posts “shallow”, “lacking in substance”, and criticizes my writing style. Then she tells me the familiar crap — “because you are inferior to everyone else, you must hide. You must not say what you really want to say, because then people will ‘find you out’ and they won’t like you. You must always have 100% outside approval from everyone you meet. Everything you do must be perfect, or why do it at all? Since your blog is not perfect, you must not advertise it. You must keep quiet. Stay quiet, don’t have a ‘voice’, keep everything in,  and all will be well.”

All of that is untrue, of course! I’m not inferior to others, not everyone has to like me, I don’t need 100% outside approval and I certainly don’t have to be perfect. I don’t have to keep quiet. It’s easy to write that, but coming to a point where I believe it is a journey.

Malechelle tries to sabotage me by telling me that I must only post if my writing is perfect, and is a fully thought out work of art. Baloney! This is my blog! My posts and writing don’t have to be perfect! They can be as shallow or as deep as I’d like them to be! Sure, I’d love to be able to write stories and do more crafts and share those, but I may not always have time to do that. In the meantime, why not keep posting “less perfect” stuff? Why take life so seriously all the time?!

Malechelle does not represent the real me. I’m still trying to figure out who the “real me” is, but it sure as hell isn’t that jerk. I would never say those things to a friend, a family member, or anyone, so why do I say those things to myself? Malechelle is like my version of the Big Black Dog of depression that comes out whenever I’m full of anxiety. She is the accumulation of negative thinking patterns that developed due to many factors in my lifetime. She always lurks below the surface, a part of me that is like a Shadow, ready to attack me (and only me) when I’m vulnerable and anxious. She’s like a huge collection of noxious dust and smelly trash that develops in a house if it’s not cleaned regularly. Whenever a visitor comes into the house, all that dust and trash just gets swept under the furniture or hidden behind closet doors. It’s there lurking, ready to come out. The visitor may even catch a whiff of the noxious fumes every once in a while and wonder, what the heck?!

It’s easy to hide this dust, this trash, this inner jerk. It’s far more difficult to confront it, to fight it, and to be rid of it. By writing posts like this, by personifying it and giving it a name, I’m fighting mine. One day at a time. She is no longer welcome on my blog. I can’t guarantee 100% that there will never be days where she won’t make an appearance, but I can 100% guarantee that if she does, I’ll just come back the next day after she’s gone and write a post to take that jerk DOWN. 🙂

In other news, I met my father for the first time since I was two years old last night (I had expressed anxiety about our upcoming meeting in my last post). I may or may not blog more about it later, but let me just say that our first meeting at the airport went as well as we hoped it would. It’ll take some time for me to process this immediate change in my life. I have to figure out where and how he fits in. When you live your whole life without the concept of knowing your dad (or any other relative) in the flesh, it can be quite a change to suddenly live a life in which they do exist. It’s a journey, and we will take it slow and let things unfold organically.  🙂