Today I had a great date with myself. We went first to Le Musee Des Arts Decoratifs for a Japanese picture exposition. Since I started watching anime, Japanese culture is something I’ve been feeling deeply curious about. We then spent two more hours wandering around the museum just to conclude that I prefer going to museums (and some other places) alone to take my own time to process what I’m looking at and what effect it has on me. Then, I was on my way to Ikea because I thought after two months it was finally time to replace the only two cups I had in my residence room, the one they gave me in the residence and one I stole from a bar.
Now that it’s written, I think it’s funny how long I managed to procrastinate spending 2€ just to have decent cups because I was the only one who drank from them. I can see the problem now, I was not interested in spending money on nice cups just because no one else besides me was going to see them or drink from them. What is this telling my subconscious mind? or how my therapist has recently taught me, what is this telling me about myself? I’m no expert in psychology, even though I get asked a lot why I didn’t study that instead of business and I’ll say I just give good advice because I don’t have the pressure of being paid for it, but I think this behavior was telling my subconscious mind one more time “You are not worthy”. I even have to admit that this week I rushed to buy decent cups only because my best friend told me she might come to visit me on the weekend and I felt ashamed if she ever saw those cups. Huh, curious… I felt ashamed at the thought of her seeing the cups, yet I didn’t feel ashamed of myself when I forced myself to use them for months. Oh, and I even bought a cute rug.
And that is just the tip of the iceberg. I discovered two days ago with the help of my (expensive if you are a student) Therapist and my best friend that I tended to put other people’s needs before mine. With a little bit of context on the previous guy I loved, I told her Monday night with relief and pride that I ended things with him and that we no longer had contact. When we started speaking about this guy she asked me “What things did you stop doing or prioritizing out of fear of losing him?” I had to think for a moment about this. After a while, I told her I felt like I stopped saying what I needed from him, that I was always there for him, and that we created a dynamic that I know he enjoyed but I stopped listening to my own needs because I was afraid of acting in a way he wouldn’t like. This was not coming from a place of fear that he would leave me, because I don’t think he would have but because I wanted him to like me.
And this my beloved reader, is where the second problem makes its dramatic entrance to the stage. During this desperate need for approval, I had placed on him, I just started being the parts of myself I knew he liked. I played the role of all the things I knew he liked about me and made our dynamic work. My therapist told me when we want other people to like us, we adapt ourselves to the part of us that the other person likes and there are two ways this could go:
- 1. You can discover new things you like not only about yourself but about life in general and explore them deeper.
- 2. You can lose yourself.
I also want to say that both options can happen at the same time or at least that was my case because he showed me so many aspects of myself that I liked when I was being funny, caring, giver, sexy, and open-minded, but I also started to forget that the things he liked about me were only a part of who I truly am.
That’s the reason I had this feeling my therapist called sadness/non-sadness, because I was both sad for losing this situationship I had with him, but relieved and happy to finally be my whole self knowing that I had no one I could lose by doing that. She asked me, what happens when you take this huge doll and start cutting pieces of her? (I always felt her questions sounded like an open-question quiz, but during that session, she clarified that there was no right answer and that what I say is only my way of interpreting a certain situation). I told her, well if you cut her leg and then her arm and then the other leg it will stop functioning. I consider myself a very pragmatic person, so the answer for me was from a functional perspective. If I start cutting pieces of myself to make not only him but other people like me, I will eventually stop working properly. That was exactly the way I was feeling the week before that session, I felt I wasn’t working properly, or at least not to my full potential.
After this session I received a call from my best friend and after reading to him out loud my whole therapy notes like a proud five-year-old showing work from school to their parents he told me “Yes, but that is something you always do, not only with him but I’ve seen you tend to put other people’s needs before yours” Huh?? I couldn’t believe that not only was he aware of this behavior from years ago because he even illustrated with some examples, but how dare he not tell me this ugly truth I was paying money to be told? So yeah, apparently I was someone who tended to put other people’s needs before mine and that was something I could not unhear, fortunately. As you can see, this is something you can relate to in the previous short story about my new 2€ Ikea cups because If I were a person who puts her wants and needs first, I would have bought myself from the beginning a decent pair of cups.