Good Enough, Part I

For most of my life – as far as I can remember anyway – I’ve been certain on an inarguable, subconscious level that people don’t actually like me.

I’m not an Eeyore, honestly, no matter how that sounds. It’s just that this has been thorn in my side I’m trying hard to grasp and remove, because it’s hurting my friendships and preventing me from having normal, adult relationships (i.e., anything more significant than Friends With Benefits, of whom I’ve had my fair share since long before the Ashton Kutcher made it cool). So here I am again.

Until recently, I just thought it was the result of obsessive self-analysis yielding less-than-stellar answers to the questions of my human nature and ability (or lack thereof) to surmount it. Like I’d gotten to know myself a little too well and could no longer sustain the illusion that I was anything but a lazy, sullen, self-absorbed, dorky, deceitful, delusional brat banging around Earth on a quarter-century tear to offend and repel as many people as possible while offering absolutely no excuse for the space I occupied. (This is one of the hazards of knowing thyself Socrates kind of skipped. He obviously got the ‘if I look inside I might not like what I find’ part, but next thing we know, he’s all, “and now that you’re not a dumbass anymore, you’re like, super wise about this whole existence thing! Yay!” WTF, dude? Where’s my 12-step program and instructional DVD?)

My poor shrink has been at a loss to explain it to me. She’s handed me charts illustrating how to turn ‘negative self-talk’ into shining beacons of truth (which, once folded neatly into my bottomless purse were never seen again), books about emotional claustrophobia (flipped through cursorily, pronounced pathetic and shelved almost immediately), and head-scratching, helpless observations of, “well, you seem pretty likeable to me….” None of these rang that inner bell that marks actual progress.

I already knew religion had something to do with it. From third grade on, teachers, preachers and youth group leaders had pounded it into my tender skull at every opportunity – often daily – that I was born a horrible person and needed to fix it ASAP. I was Bad, God is Good, the Good could replace the Bad if I just made myself Nothing, and that somehow it would all add up to eternal bliss and a lifetime of personal victory. IF – and that’s a big, nasty, soul-gobbling ‘If’ – I could just hold up my end of the bargain.

I know this conflicts with, as I once wrote, “…Christ’s central themes of grace and mercy,” which I believe are still accurate. What I failed to appreciate, what I was unprepared to contend with, was religion’s central themes of guilt and self-loathing. That one I just lay down and let sucker-punch me until I was absolutely certain, at the tender age of 14, I was ugly, worthless, and stupid (without the blood of Christ covering me, of course, which in my mind always looked a lot like the famous prom scene in Carrie).

I spent most of my teenage years and young adult life struggling to subdue my lustful, hateful, mouthy, ungrateful, sneaky, precocious, sarcastic nature, and never stopped to consider whether a belief system that required me to eradicate my entire Self had anything substantial to offer me in return for the next sixty or seventy years I hoped to stick around. If you’d questioned me then, I’d have told you to “get thee behind me Satan” or whatever before opening my King James Version Holy Word of God and praying for the salvation of your lost soul. I believed without question, and the contemplation of that brainwashing still makes me a little nauseous. My journals from that time are pathetic cries to God for forgiveness mixed with maniacally euphoric outpourings of relief whenever I thought I had my ‘sin nature’ licked. In those triumphant moments I gloried in my ability to dig through layers of healthy self-esteem, budding confidence and potential self-acceptance to finally arrive at my core of disgustingness. And then quickly realized how sinful it was to glory in anything and promptly had to ask for more forgiveness. Lather, rinse, repeat. Ugh.

While it’s not hard to trace the source of my perceived unlikeability to that early and pervasive inculcation of outdated dogma, it would be a mistake to lay all the blame in one place. This is where the ‘until recently’ part comes in.

“I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.” –Al Franken as Stuart Smalley

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