My friend Eric and I have a running joke about his status as a “noncon” — a non-confrontational person. It’s not that he’s reluctant to speak his mind or stand up for himself. He’s just not raring for a fight, or eager to push things where they wouldn’t go naturally. It’s a virtue — but that doesn’t mean I can’t hassle him about it.
The other half of the joke, of course, is that I’m a “con.” I’ll push the discussion into difficult places, or ask the awkward question, or seize on a fledgling debate. I’ll even start an argument, if I think that’s what needs to happen to resolve things. Or not resolve them. Either way.
It makes for a good balance: I dig into his thoughts, and he keeps me from flailing when flailing isn’t necessary.
I was thinking yesterday, however, that the funniest thing about the whole joke is that it’s just not true. Not even a little bit.
Sure, I can be blunt.
And yes, sometimes I’ll start pushing on some issue when most people would just let it lie.
But if there is a term for an extreme level of non-confrontational behaviour — the kind of behaviour that places you in a separate time zone from challenges and conflict — that’s far closer to the reality of who I am.
Not that I can avoid everything that would cause me pain. Not that I would even know how.
If I can, though?
I will literally put difficulty and risk so far out of my consciousness that it ceases to exist.
Especially when facing it head on is exactly what I should do.
It never actually ceases to exist, anyway. It just sits like a signal fire at the edge of my peripheral vision, telling me something is needed from me… some sort of action or response or commitment. Letting me know it’s not going out just because I ignore it. Letting me know it continues to burn. Still, I won’t turn to look because then I’d have to put it out, and I have no idea how.
I hate it.
I do it all the time.
In fact, more than anything else, “avoidance” has been the watchword of my life for nearly four years now… maybe more.
I went through my early and mid-twenties as the girl who would do or be anything for anyone who needed me. Nothing made me happier than spending 25 hours a day pushing myself to see everyone and talk to everyone and help everyone and do what they asked me to do. It didn’t matter if I didn’t want to do something, or if it made me uncomfortable. It didn’t even matter if it hurt me.
What mattered was my willingness, my availability, my capacity to step into the waves and keep things together when the water went over my head.
For a long time, I defined myself as a friend and a daughter and a worker before I was anything else. My entire identity was subject to relationships and tasks — the classic Honours student approach to life. If I got things wrong, if I showed reluctance, if I disappointed someone… well, that was anathema to me. There was no greater virtue than self-sacrifice, even if I was actually doing it to make myself feel valuable.
Selfishness cropped up now and then, usually with the people closest to me, because I felt safe to push back a little. The need for approval would win out in the end, though, and my fear of not living up to expectations. If I was an asshole, I could beat myself up far longer and far better than anyone else could.
“Trying hard” didn’t mean I got everything right all the time, though… not even most of the time. I made just as many mistakes then as I do now. I would irritate people and “drop the ball” with great facility. Everyone does, right?
But I would store up all my misfires and obsess over them until I started to believe in advance that people would view me as a failure. Until the list of things I’d screwed up had grown so long it started to colour how I saw the world around me.
If a man rejected me, I believed the next one would, too. It didn’t matter why any of them let me go or if they were, in reality, the worst matches for me on the planet. What mattered was my inability to be what they needed me to be.
I’d mysteriously started gaining weight in my teens after being a tiny underweight sprite of an athlete, and I couldn’t make it go away. I’d find out later why, but the whys made no difference.
And the more those kinds of rejection happened, the more I’d see it as a pattern and not just a series of random, cruel experiences. I made jokes about it when I would emcee my friends’ weddings. I think back to those speeches now, and I want to cry.
Also, if a friend was angry at me, it meant she would stay that way. It wouldn’t matter if her anger was undeserved or short-term or even real… after all, I could easily invent frustrations for people that they weren’t experiencing. I simply expected them to be disappointed in me.
I certainly was.
I don’t know where all of it came from. Perfectionism? A serious mistrust in the concept of grace? A few wrong relationships at moments where my vulnerability was high? Oh yes… I’d had some seriously shitty friendships over the years that had chipped away at my confidence like nothing else ever will again. But I let them do it, so I couldn’t blame anyone but myself.
I know my parents don’t understand it, because they went out of their way to love me and give me the things I needed and wanted when I was growing up. They still do. I cannot tie a moment of my idiocy back to them. Even when they didn’t get it right, I knew I could go home. I actually had a home… something many, many people lack.
But I would still run headlong into even the most dysfunctional relationships, determined to make them work. I would exist in impossible situations, even when the circumstances were clearly inappropriate and irrational. I did what it took to cancel out my disappointment in who I was. To sleep at night.
When I slept at night, that is.
Then everything changed.
I can remember when things started to turn, but after that, everything is a blur. The catalyst was a mistake I made that a few people in my life reacted to quite negatively — but all things considered, quite rationally. I’d essentially lied about doing something I’d said I was going to do for myself, which is nothing to be proud of. I’d failed to apply to a university program I’d expressed serious interest in.
I had recommendation letters and everything. I had huge amounts of support. It seemed like a great fit.
Then I let people down. I apologized, of course, because I always do, but it wouldn’t go away.
This mistake became representative of so much more than one thing I hadn’t done, or a short period of dishonesty. It became the “final straw” in breaking bonds I hadn’t even known were at risk. Suddenly, I was hearing lists of other things I’d failed to do, things I’d promised, things I’d put up as personal goals.
The funny thing is, they were all things I’d said I was going to do for ME.
My choices. My wants.
For whatever reason, I’d shoved them aside, either because I was terrified of failing or because I wasn’t willing to put the work in to make them happen or because I’d become obsessively focused on something else. And in not doing them, I’d somehow managed to radically disappoint people I loved… disappoint them to such a level that I can remember one of my friends telling me I would need to work to “get back her trust.”
Looking back, I know she said that because she couldn’t stand watching me put my life off anymore to devote time to my screwed-up priorities. She said it because she loved me. She said it because she had faith I would see that this was not the end of the road, but just a bump along the way.
Long story short? I didn’t see it that way.
I could barely see a thing, really.
And that’s right about when I stopped trying.
I took how I believed people saw me — a non-starter — and I embraced it. I could crack jokes for hours about all the guys who’d wanted only to be my “friend.” I could recall ad infinitum all the things I’d said I was going to do that I didn’t do. I could remember every friend who’d ever told me I’d somehow missed meeting their needs. I could call up every single time I screwed up anything, even if I’d put in more heart and effort into the process than anyone could possibly require.
I took all the positive qualities people told me I had — hard worker, solid writer, devoted friend, “life of the party”, “big potential” — and I decided that my mistakes defined me far more.
The leap of logic it took to go from making a mistake to developing a whole persona around mistakes looks just as crazy to me as it does to anyone else I know. But I embraced it with gusto. If people were going to be angry at me for not doing things for myself — even when I’d worked hard to do things for them — I would live down to their expectations.
What I was forgetting is that friendship is not based on how much you do for people. No one who really cares about me has a checklist waiting to be worked through, and if they do, well… those are people I would do well to leave behind.
At that point, however, I figured if my actions weren’t earning me the love and trust I wanted, then nothing would. I was also completely missing the point.
I was trying to earn affection with self-sacrifice, when people were actually begging me to take care of myself– not them. I’d used all the energy and strength I’d put into my friendships to completely sidestep responsibility for my OWN life.
Again, I’m not sure why. Oh, I wish I knew why.
The saddest thing is that it took years of abandoned relationships and feeling self-pity and shame and regret before I realized this was the case.
I had avoided things I’d loved, people I’d loved, opportunities I should have tried for, risks I should have taken, plans I should have made, tests I should have submitted to, problems I should have solved… you name it. Even the moves I did make were somehow tainted with fear.
I left a job behind that nearly broke me in half. But instead of accepting the instability that followed as collateral damage, I saw it as evidence of my own lack of potential.
I took a job to delve into a whole new area of writing and challenge myself. But instead of bracing myself for a learning curve, I would let the wind get knocked out of me every time I had to go back to the drawing board.
I let myself fall for someone. But instead of being honest with him and me and seeing that it wasn’t going to work for eight thousand reasons, I blamed how I looked above all else.
I finally made a series of choices to face up to my health concerns. But instead of realizing that this was the first step to actually feeling good, I was shell-shocked by the news of my infertility and backed way off the process.
I let some friendships go that had been utterly toxic for me. But instead of digging deeper into the ones that fed me, I put up absurd amounts of walls to make sure it wouldn’t happen again.
I became accustomed to disappointment. I grew things I called “boundaries”, but they were really just long books of excuses not to try.
And that brings us to now.
Not quite the coffee-swilling optimist I try for. Not quite the natural product of my own potential. Not quite the woman or daughter or friend I intended to be.
Just… not quite.
And I cannot tell you how sick the ten year-old girl who got all A’s and starred in the school play and won the soccer championship and ran track and passed notes to “boyfriends” and had a thousand dreams of a thousand different lives is of this 33 year-old woman who has made the effort to do approximately .001% of what is possible in her life.
Because she’s still in there. She knows what her plans were. She has no idea how they got derailed so badly.
She wants them to get back on track.
So.
My name is Meg. I’m overweight, I have crooked teeth that make me not want to smile, and I have lots of health concerns. I loathe these things about myself.
I am disorganized, I am a procrastinator, and I have not lived up to my potential.
I am a somewhat shoddy friend to many people I love, and I have been selfish with my time and my emotions. To know what this has done to them breaks my heart.
I am a wicked, wicked girl to try and get to know if you’re a guy — I’m waiting for you to hurt me before I even lay eyes on you.
I make excuses like most people breathe.
And I have let these things be “me” for a long time now, with few other additions to the picture.
I’m done with all of it.
I am setting myself up for a hell of a road back to the real Meaghan Cassie Fowler, the one my parents named and loved and raised, the one that I can see waving at me from the stupid pit I put her in, and the one that all my friends miraculously still manage to care about.
I’m completely terrified.
But you see that girl up there? The one smiling WITH TEETH for the first time ever on her blog?
Yeah. Keep watching.
Because this is going to be good.
