Growing up I always heard and watched about how you need someone else to feel comforted, validated, and loved. Knowingly unknowingly I too started to believe that I needed my ‘supposed’ better half to complete me. My subconscious started to imagine and fantasize about the need to have a soulmate/ best friend to feel fulfilled. I was more delusional day by day to an extent that I would collapse after rejections and heartbreaks. For days, I would feel as if my whole life was alone in the little bubble I had created with my past lovers or friends.
At this moment, I have accepted what I felt and believed was nothing but fantasy. It was me fantasizing about my own world which was ‘outright’ with someone else besides me. I kept questioning myself, did I feel whole only when with some other person or was I simply running away from myself?
It was both.
I kept running away from myself and chased people like they were everything. I never accepted my flaws, or appreciated my good traits but was desperate for validation and attention. Not in any way did it feel like I was doing something wrong because it was a bubble of comfort and ease. It felt good to have people praise me and treat me well while I was so self-critical of myself to a point that I would sometimes feel unworthy of this life. At night I would be blaming my depression for making me feel worthless and in the day I would enjoy distractions from myself like nothing else.
It took repetitive rejections from one person who didn’t matter at all to me; for me to gather the courage to face my truth that I was quietly promoting a self-sabotaging trait that made me feel worse about myself day by day. It was definitely hard to accept my own truth. I felt numb for days and regretted so many things I did in the past for the sake of running away from myself and my truth.
I am not writing a recipe for you to stop running away from yourself but I am sharing what helped me get closer to self. I started to talk to myself like I talked to my ‘supposed’ close ones. Every day I would ask these types of questions to myself:
- Would I scream at my closed one like I am screaming at myself right now?
- Would I still be friends with them if they were nothing but my critique?
- Am I doing justice to myself?
- Do I not deserve love from myself, by myself, and to myself?
- And should I not treat myself like I have treated my best friend?
These questions were followed by pep talks and affirmations on how I really can be my own best friend, embrace my itsy-bitsy mistakes and correct them without being self-critical. I am still learning, but by now I have been able to accept, forgive and love myself every now and then instead of running away from my own truth/myself like before.
If you are running away from yourself, I hope you don’t. I hope you take your time to find yourself and finally become your own best friend. It’s a process. I will get there some day. Hope you do too.
