Goodbye
At 3:11pm on Sunday, April 27th, the Moon was new again. I’ve been ready for this one — the idea for the focus came right on the heels of the last cycle’s post. In that last post, I focused on Apologies, and drawing on lessons garnered from an earlier post on Mattering, I came to the realization that at least part of my reflexive need to apologize was rooted in a deep absence of self-worth.
That feeling is pervasive throughout my life. There are many times when I just don’t feel deserving to be in any particular situation. It seems that regardless of how much verbal affirmation I may get, part of me still thinks that people feel some sense of obligation to make me feel accepted, welcomed, or valued. It isn’t genuine — it’s what they’re “supposed to” do. If I trace that back, I can see that is how I felt growing up as well. When I was young, I always felt that I was in the way, that I was an inconvenience. The certainty I felt in my perceptions meant that any affirmations to the contrary appeared more an act of service or social correctness than genuine sincerity.
Because of this, I’ve never done a very good job of advocating for myself. If you inherently feel you don’t matter, there’s nothing to advocate for. Instead, I took the position that I was lucky to have anything, and that asking for more was either greedy or simply inappropriate.
There have been a few times that I’ve deviated from that. There was a time I petitioned to rejoin a band, which led to another 10 years of making great music together. When I experienced an abrupt and unscheduled career change and was asked what my new salary requirements were, I did my best to state my worth. Both of these times, self-advocacy did indeed get me closer to where I wanted to be, but these are exceptions to the rule. Far too often, I’ve muddled through circumstances or stayed in situations long after they had lost their ability to serve me.
But I was lucky to have anything. So just because something didn’t make me happy didn’t feel like reason enough to leave.
Combining a diminished sense of self-worth with a paralyzing fear of abandonment is never good.
So this cycle, I want to focus on Goodbye. There’s a lot of melancholy around this — I’ve done a lot of work over the years to get closer to this point. Many of the truly expendable elements of my life have already been phased out. Everything that’s left is better than I have ever allowed myself — still, happiness is elusive. I want to be clear that just because I am focusing on Goodbye doesn’t automatically mean I intend to say it in any facet of my life. More so, I am allowing myself the freedom to examine my life’s interactions and circumstances and ask myself a basic question: Does this serve me? If it does, then let’s devote more energy to it. If it doesn’t, then I give myself permission to consider Goodbye.
It’s a tough pivot to make — to spend so much time meek and paralyzed, casting my fates to luck or whim instead of definitive direction — but it’s a change whose time has come.
“I was never much good at Goodbye” — but it’s time to embrace the possibilities.
Categories: Blog, New Moon
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