This is a bit of a different one for me. It’s a bit of a magnifying glass on my more inner thoughts of who I am and who I was. As I am getting older I am finding myself having some thoughts of “what if” and wondering if I could have done more or if I should have done something different. I decided to write my thoughts on this down using a song that I listen to and sing a lot when I am on my own. It’s called She Used to Be Mine by Sara Bareilles and written for the musical called The Waitress. I will leave the video here if you would like to listen to it before or after you read.
Here goes:
It’s not simple to say. Most days I don’t recognize me. These shoes and this apron, this place and it’s patrons have taken more than I gave them.
I sing this song in the shower a lot. It’s a hard song to sing for many reasons. First, I am no Sara Bareilles and secondly because it touches and hurts my soul in so many different ways.
Some days I don’t recognize who I am or who I have become. I once was someone who thought I could do so much. I would be so much. I don’t know who exactly I thought I would be but I fantasized about being discovered at the mall or someone seeing one of my papers from school and thinking “wow she is a perfect candidate for our 30 under 30 article!” But alas, that didn’t happen. Life has been great to me in many ways and I am grateful for what I have but it hasn’t always been kind.
It's not easy to know
I'm not anything like I used to be
Although it's true
I was never attention sweet center
I still remember that girl
I never felt like I was attention’s sweet center. I always felt like I was second or third or just somewhere in the middle. I was never the smartest, the fastest, the funniest, the prettiest. If I was anything I was the nicest. When I won awards they were for being nice. The Service Award was mine almost every year in elementary school. The Good Samaritan was mine at high school graduation. I wanted the highest academic awards so badly but no matter how hard I worked there was always someone smarter. I wasn’t great. I was just nice.
I look back now at this nice girl and I realize it wasn’t so bad. Being the nice one isn’t a bad thing. But I was ambitious, I was driven, I wanted to be the best. I didn’t want people to say “oh ya I know Danielle. She’s nice.” I wanted people to say “oh I know Danielle. She’s amazing. Did you hear she..” and then it would be followed by one of my greatest accomplishments. One of many for sure. And not only did I want this to happen, I actually truly believed that it could. I thought I was bursting with potential and that I was destined for greatness and that any moment someone would see it. If I just pushed harder, got better grades, did more stuff and just tried more, even when I didn’t think I could try anymore, it would happen.
I realize now that this was my anxiety pushing me. Telling me I was never good enough and that I had to be more and I could be but I just wasn’t doing enough. It killed me inside when I thought I had done enough but it wasn’t. Truth is; it would have never been enough.
She's imperfect but she tries
She is good but she lies
She is hard on herself
She is broken and won't ask for help
She is messy but she's kind
She is lonely most of the time
She is all of this mixed up
And baked in a beautiful pie.
Lord knows, I tried. I would try to the point of panic attacks and tears. And I was good, remember, I was nice. I wouldn’t tell people that getting an A when I wanted an A+ would send me into a failure spiral because the 80 percent grades on my papers used to be good enough but now I needed to get a 90 or that meant I failed. So I lied. I said I was happy, I said it was all good, but it wasn’t.
So yes, I was hard on myself. Harder and harder on myself any time I felt like I made the smallest misstep. But I didn’t want anyone to know. I didn’t want to ask for help because I didn’t want anyone to know that I was a failure. I also didn’t want to burden anyone with the pressure I was putting on myself. This was my problem not theirs.
While I didn’t want to ask anyone to help me I was always quick to be the helper. When my friend cried in kindergarten I was called over to sit with her. When they needed grade 8 students to volunteer to be a peer helpers for younger kids at recess I was signed up even though I wasn’t at school that day. I was the helper.
I was the one that most people seemed to like well enough. I was voted the class representative in grade 8 (like the class president), I was the floor representative in my dorm at university and floor member of the year. I had people around who liked me but I was profoundly lonely. This is the thing with being the helper of everyone and everyone liking you but then not letting people help you or letting yourself be more than liked by people but actually be welcomed by people into their inner circle. You can be surrounded by people who like who and who you like back but as long as you are afraid to let those walls down you are just sitting in your fortress alone.
She is gone but she used to be mine
Is this who I still am? This highly driven, ambitious person who was happy and nice and helpful on the outside but broken and lonely on the inside? Yes in many ways but no in others.
It's not what I asked for
Sometimes life just slips in through a back door
And carves out a person
And makes you believe it's all true
And now I've got you
I don’t know if I was to tell my younger self that this is who I have become if I would be happy or not. Like I said, I thought I would be famous and my accomplishments would be recognized and I would be doing something amazing. I am not famous and I don’t know how recognized my accomplishments are outside of my friends and my family and I think being a mom is pretty amazing but maybe not the type of amazing that ambitious ball of anxiety had anticipated. But life came as it came. I made decisions, I took paths and opened some doors and closed some others. So now I am who I am. Now I got you.
And you're not what I asked for
If I'm honest I know I would give it all back
For a chance to start over
And rewrite an ending or two
For the girl that I knew
I wouldn’t give back my family. I wouldn’t give back my kids or my husband or my house or what I have or even who I have become. But I would give back some of my experiences.
There are many I could go into but i think I would first give back my first relationship with a boy who never loved me though he did everything he could to convince me he did (short of actually treating with respect of course). Then I would give back those nights laying in the dark crying because I felt like I wasn’t good enough when I see now that I always was. I would give her the confidence to go after what she wanted even if it meant it wouldn’t work out and not let things pass her by because she was so afraid of what it would mean if it didn’t go exactly how she wanted it to. I would give that young girl a chance to start over so she could dump that guy a lot earlier and to gain confidence in herself to know that grades and accolades and the opinions of people who don’t care about you don’t matter. I would give her a better story.
Who be reckless just enough
Who can hurt but
Who learns how to toughen up when she's bruised
And gets used by a man who can't love
I would let myself be more reckless. I would have gone to the school further away and got the degree I wanted and not let fear of the unknown hold me back. I would have applied for those jobs and tried out for those teams. I would be reckless to the point of not letting my anxiety and my fear hold me back from doing what I want to do, saying what I want to say and be who I want to be.
But truth is I was hurt. I can’t blame everything on this “man who can’t love” but I can trace back the start and the ultimate growth of a lot of my insecurities and anxieties and the dimming of my drive and ambition to this part of my young life. It took a lot of bruises to my ego and my sense of self and a lot of time being beaten down to get to the point when I stopped being scared that I would be a failure, to truly believing that I was one already. I didn’t have to be afraid of failing, I already did by just being me. He would remind me on the daily how I wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t that pretty, I wasn’t that smart, I was nothing special. If I wasn’t with him I would be alone because no one but him could love someone like me. I was 17-19 years old when I was being told this all the time. When he did everything he could to stamp out my light. This is a tough age already without having someone confirm all your worst fears about yourself.
I can get more into this if anyone wants to hear one day as well as my other colourful experiences but I won’t go any further with this story now. I will conclude this section with saying, I wish I didn’t let him stamp my light out for so long as I did. I wish I had realized earlier I was being used by someone who didn’t deserve me that I would have toughened sooner. We can’t go back, we can only learn.
And then she'll get stuck and be scared
Of the life that's inside her
Growing stronger each day
'Til it finally reminds her
To fight just a little
To bring back the fire in her eyes
That's been gone but it used to be mine
This part of the song has taken on different meanings while I was pregnant and when I was not. When I was pregnant with my first I was so scared that I wouldn’t be a good mom or ultimately a good role model for a young girl. How could this woman who has let herself be kicked around and who wanted so much but then let so much pass her by at the same time raise a strong, confident and healthy kid? How could I make sure she doesn’t feel the fear and the anxiety that I feel?
The only way I could be the mom I wanted to be was to fight. Fight for myself. Fight against the fear and the anxiety to come out stronger and to bring back that drive and ambition and that stubborn belief that I could do whatever it was that I wanted, if not for me then for her. To bring back that fire and that fight that I knew still burned strong inside me if I only let it out. To bring back that girl that I knew before I let life and circumstances bring me down.
Used to be mine
She is messy but she's kind
She is lonely most of the time
She is all of this mixed up and baked in a beautiful pie
She is gone but she used to be mine
I am who I am because of the experiences that I had; good, bad, happy and sad. I often look back on those bad experiences with a sense of wishing they didn’t happen but I also wonder if I would be where I am without them. I am still a mess of anxiety and fear but I am trying to embrace it and see that it doesn’t have to stop me.
I now strive to be the nice one and the helper because I can see that kindness is not a weakness but, in this world it is a much needed strength.
I still find myself feeling lonely sometimes. Anxiety thoughts can do that to you. They can make you feel isolated and alone. This is when you hug the ones you love a little tighter and do your best to let them in.
But all of this is mixed up and out comes the me that I am now. The girl that I knew may be gone but she is not forgotten. I wish I could go back and tell her that it sucks right now but don’t worry because it comes out ok. Don’t let them make you believe your fire is gone, hold on to it. It was quiet for a while but it is still mine.
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