Acceptance and Being Known

I had something embarrassing to talk to Andrea about last night.  It’s less embarrassing now, I guess.  I don’t actually feel completely resolved about it, but I want to write about it here to see if I can make sense of things.

What’s most embarrassing about it is that it is such a small thing – at work I want people to recognize me for what cool lunches I bring.

I just wrote about wanting to settle in more with Andrea, to experience how much I am cared for.   I think this is somehow all related.  Perhaps it’s related because I actually do know what it feels like via Andrea to be cared for and I want this with these folks, too, in this little way.  This feels right to me.  I want people to know me.  There’s a very young part of me that wants to be known for how cool I am.  This is different from being accepted.  Perhaps this is why I feel so shy about this.  It’s new and different.  It’s not about wanting to be accepted or fitting in.  I think I feel that enough at home and with Andrea.  I feel shy, perhaps, because it’s this new feeling of wanting to be known.

When talking about some of this last night with Andrea, I was also thinking that I want to be known for the crummy stuff, too.  It keeps being a stronger and stronger fantasy that people talk about me in front of me or behind my back about the stuff I am awful at doing and being.  I can picture myself being okay with that.  I imagine myself smiling and nodding.  I imagine myself being content with who I am because I do indeed know that I also have good points.

My husband had a colleague once who would purposely do things horribly that he never wanted to be asked to ever do again.  He would spend too money.  He would do things that obviously somebody else would think you shouldn’t do.  He’s so my hero in this regard.  He’s the antithesis of me.   Andrea and I were talking about him last night and she used the word arrogant to describe him.  Immediately, I laughed because in my therapy it seems like healing for me comes from embracing all the bad, off-limits things.  I so deeply want to become arrogant now.  I want the freedom to be arrogant.  I want it to be an option for me.

Well, that’s about all I can handle of arrogant talk for now.   Well, I will say that I asked Andrea if she would be there for me if I made a mistake and was too over the top arrogant – like I could ever even begin to try to be arrogant!  She said she would, of course.  Anyway, this is a topic for another day.

Maybe things are hanging together.  Perhaps I want to feel experience more how Andrea cares for me (as in my last post) so that I can feel the freedom to not have to be so careful, good, and non-offensive.  Still not sure how this connects to the young part of me that wants to be known for my great lunches except that I think she wants to be seen in more real terms.  I no longer just want to be accepted or to fit in.  I want to be known for who I actually am.  My lunches are a symbol of that.

Before signing off last night Andrea and I talked about how I hope to be able to feel looser in my relationships.  I told her that I go back and forth in believing that it will ever be possible to feel looser, to be able to be known for who I really am and be able to relax.  I said I wondered if I was just striving for perfectionism because where I am isn’t too bad but looser is really what I want.  What if I just am rigid?  She said that indeed I could have looser but that of course it’s so much easier to have what I want when I can accept right where I am.

So I sign off right now remembering how much better I felt a few weeks ago when I could say that of course given where I came from that I would feel ashamed.  Of course, I have felt rigid inside given my past.  Of course.  And this is me.  In my odd fantasy people can talk about me and say that there’s this funny rigidness about me that’s obvious at different times and in different ways.  Because that is simply part of who I am.  Along with making great lunches!