Insecurities: Naming the Thing

Everyone's insecure about something. No matter how confident a front they put on, everyone's got something. Me? I got a whooooooole crapload; and the funny thing is, even after you reach supposedly landmark events in your journey to adulthood--like getting married--some of those same insecurities still rear their ugly heads. Only they take on a more insidious form because they directly affect someone else now, and not just you. I battle feelings of inadequacy all the time. I have felt that I am not pulling my weight at home. I am here almost all day every day; I should take better care of the house. I have felt like my Masters degree, the one semester I have nearly completed, is a joke, a walk in the park compared to what my husband is doing and I feel silly. I can't feel proud of what I'm working for. There are many other things that I have felt at one time or another.

As this time of year rolls around again, it is hard for me not to draw parallels to last year. Last year at this time, I was, what I thought, a silly girl with crush. And I did silly things because that's what happens when you have a crush. It is hard for me not to feel embarrassed about some of the things I did or thought even a mere year ago. I once lectured my then-friend Travis over g-chat, this time last year, about how he shouldn't be so physically affectionate with girls he only intended to be friends with. At the time, I thought I was being grown up. But I was also nursing a little bit of hurt pride. I had begun to fall for him, had recognized belatedly that it was not reciprocated, and was pushing back in the only way my pride knew how: by pretending like I knew all along what everything was about. Covering my naivete by affecting urbanity.

Like I said, at the time I thought I was being grown up. Now, I feel supremely foolish about it. I say, "Travis, how did you end up with that silly girl with a crush? That unsophisticated newbie who had never even kissed a boy before you came along? Who thought she knew what everything was about because she'd had her heart broken before?" I cringe when I think about this time last year... even though, even though there was so much good.

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I have developed a system for dealing with the times that I am falling under the influence of an insecurity. I think I am borrowing this idea from my sister-in-law Mary--maybe read it somewhere on her blog, can't remember--and I am certainly stealing it from Ursula K. Le Guin. But there is a certain power in naming something. In the book A Wizard of Earthsea, Ged is endlessly chased through by a nameless shape, a fear, that nips at his heals and threatens to consume him wherever he goes. At the end of the story he turns around, faces the thing, and defeats it by giving it a name. It's a beautiful story, and this same concept works, for me, in real life. Whenever I sense that I am succumbing to the influence of an insecurity, if I just stop, take stock, and name what it is that's bothering me, I am almost immediately freed from its grip.

I find that over the last four months, i have had to do this over and over again as various little insecurities crop up. But they have all been successfully navigate, including the last one mentioned above. The fact is, we all need to go through whatever it is we go through in order to grow up, and it doesn't do any good to look back on our past selves with scorn or with embarrassment. We change--even from one year to the next. We make mistakes, we learn (or we don't) and we move on (or we repeat). True!

And so it behooves us all to give ourselves the benefit of the doubt, yes? To allow that we change.

I'm probably writing this post more for me than for you because, frankly, I'm one of the most insecure people I know. But I'm learning not to let that form of pride--because pride it surely is--get in the way of the rest of my life.

I look at it this way: In spite of my being silly and naive, and in one case just stupid, things turned out as they should with me and Travis. Who cares about last year. It's now that matters. Now and tomorrow and the rest of forever.

So there. I've named my insecurities: Pride. And Pride leaves no room for growth. Or love.