Beautiful

"No matter what we do
No matter what we say
We're the song inside the tune
Full of beautiful mistakes."

--Christina Aguilera, "Beautiful."

My mother is someone I admire very much for reasons inumerable, including her unfailing love and support for me. But, she did something that really impressed the heck out of me, and I mention it often: she went to graduate school at age 56, earned a Master's degree in Educational Leadership, and ended a decades-long career as a teacher to become an elementary school principal. And she rocks at it. She kills herself at it, but she's amazing, and her students and teachers love her.

My mom did her research and wrote her Master's thesis on bullying and relational aggression (the kind of bullying that doesn't involve hitting). As a principal, she has implemented bullying awareness programs, bullying policies, and has intervened very adeptly in active bullying cases. She recently told me a story about how she got a young boy to open up being bullied by his big brother and how that made him think it was okay or motivated him to bully another kid. He agreed to stop, and he also agreed to talk with her about the situation with his brother. Amazing.

My mother has done all of this because of me.

I don't really know how it started, but when we moved across the country from Wisconsin to Utah when I was 9, my life changed, and I became the target of a variety of tortures. It took on many forms over the years, but it never ceased from 4th through 12th grades.

There are a lot of stories I could tell about that. But, not right now. Right now I'm interested in, well, right now.

Right now, I've been bit in the ass by Insecurity. Insecurity brings lots of fun friends when it visits: Anxiety, Self-Doubt, Fear, Anger, Loneliness, Sadness, Frustration, Exhaustion. It doesn't just drain its main target (me), but it drains the people around me, too. It weighs on life like a ton of bricks. And then I get the wonderful spiral affect of "It sucks that I feel this way... AGAIN. Why am I not just OVER this already? Agh! I'm (however many) years old and I'm still thinking about (whatever happened that one time however many years ago)?"

Thankfully (thankfully? really?), I've been through this before. And, what lifts my spirit is knowing that the wave of peace is on its way. I have a good bit of experience beating the crap out of Insecurity and all of his pals, and I know what it feels like to have my feet firmly planted on the ground. The wonderful thing about Self-Respect is that once you find her, she never leaves you (or rather, you recognize that she's been there all along). Insecurity might try to hold her down every now and then, but Self-Respect is one tough cookie.

And as for Forgiveness: I won't lie. There's not a lot of benefit from trying to convince myself or others that I "forgive" those people who treated me badly. The truth is, I kind of don't. But, I work at forgiving myself for being human and for getting caught up every now and then in the remnants of a past that I can't change.

Addendum: I recently shared my experience with bullying with some friends who didn't know me then. One responded "You're amazing!" and the other "That happened to me, too." Sharing this experience and not hiding from it has helped me see that I don't have to be ashamed, and that I should give myself a little credit for not just surviving but triumphing over abuse.

Well, snaps for me, I guess!