Watch where you're walking...

“You can either walk inside your story and own it or you can stand outside your story and hustle for your worthiness.” - Brene Brown

You know when someone tells you something over and over again, and you know it’s true and you get it, but it doesn’t really click until just the right moment? That’s where I’m at with this quote. This is a recurring quote in several of social worker and researcher, Brene Brown’s books, all of which center around her research on shame and vulnerability. I've read this quote a hundred times. It's on my bulletin board at work. It's framed and sitting on a shelf in my room. I’ve read it in each of her novels. It has always resonated with me, but it wasn’t until recently that it all came together for me in that Oprah “aha moment” kind of way.

So if you read my last post, you have gathered that I have been feeling a little lost lately. I would say I am feeling just like a good bit of that late-20s existential dread that makes you question what the actual fuck you’re doing with your life, where you’re going, and how you plan to get there while also maintaining relationships, friendships, health, finances, and happiness along the way. In addition to like: what do I want out of life, who am I really, why does my back always hurt, is this mole okay, and will I die alone? You know, the simple stuff.

A natural consequence of thinking this way is to make comparisons. When we’re unsure about how our lives are going, we turn to others to help get a sense of where we are in comparison. Here’s the problem, comparison, while not inherently dangerous is EXCPETIONALLY FUCKING DANGEROUS when in the hands of a disabled anxious-depressive who has a propensity for dramatics - that’s me in case you weren’t sure.

Here’s the reality, we’ve turned comparison into a real dangerous tool. For me, it is a very quick way to determine all the things I’m not, all the things I don’t have, and all the things I haven’t done, but should be doing. In the age of social media, it’s even worse. We post the highlights of our day-to-day lives in a seemingly never-ending competition to determine who had the most fun on their cruise to the Bahamas and thus is the superior human. See what I meant about dramatics? Ugh.

So getting back to the point of things, I have been feeling kind of lost lately, and so I have started to make more and more comparisons. For the past few weeks, I’ve been attempting to limit my social media usage (to varying degrees of success) because all I do is look at all the great things everyone else seems to be doing and wonder why I’m not doing them.

I should say that at this point in time, my life is ostensibly great. I own a home, I own a car, I have great friends, I live in a beautiful city, I feel passionate about my work, I have been successful at work, I’m involved in my community, and so on. And yet, here I am feeling lost, anxious, and like my life is lacking or not [blank] enough.

The narrative of not [blank] enough is a common one in my life story, and one that I think is pretty ingrained in the human experience. It is the product of comparison gone awry. Whenever I start to see this narrative coming up in my life, I know I need to pause and get things in check otherwise it’ll get out of hand. And as you might have guessed, I have recently let this narrative get out of hand. Hence my obsessive focus on what I don’t have and what I’m not rather than what I do have and who I am.

The past few weeks I feel like my anxiety and comparison drawing have been coming to a head, and so at the suggestion of my new therapist, I started Brene Brown’s book “Rising Strong”. Brene’s work has been formative for me in so many ways, and if you haven’t heard of her I suggest you do some digging. This latest novel discusses what she calls “facedown moments” – moments when life has essentially knocked us on our ass – and how we can utilize vulnerability to see these moments for what they are and rise strong.

In revisiting Brene’s work, the quote about walking inside/outside of our stories came up again and for the first time in all the times I’ve heard it, it clicked. I started to really consider my past and present life through this lens. When I really genuinely consider my life through the lens of whether or not I am walking inside of my story and owning it, I can see many examples of ways in which I am walking (or have walked) outside my story, and I can subsequently see the fallout of that choice.

There is perhaps no greater example of walking outside my story and hustling for my worthiness than the 23 years I spent in the closet. Denying the truth about my identity and using my accomplishments to cover up the lie is pretty textbook. For so many queer people, we deny this integral part of our identity for so long, which serves to both build up a sense of shame about those identities as well as force us to find other ways to try and compensate for the perceived lack of worthiness that comes from that shame. For me, I chose to perform and perfect. I was ashamed of who I really was, and so I thought if I did well enough in school, was good enough at sports, volunteered enough, and worked hard enough that I could gain my worth that way instead of by simply being who I am and believing in my own inherent worth. This, of course, creates a warped and negative cycle that ultimately takes our worth out of our hands and places it in the hands of others, to be given back to us only if we meet certain conditions.

I have been out for about 4 years now, and I can confidently say that I no longer feel any shame about my identity as a queer person. I am beyond proud to be queer –I think it’s the greatest thing in the world! If anything, I feel like being queer makes me better than straight people! I no longer feel the need to perform and perfect in order to hide my queerness, and I no longer feel that my queerness takes away anything from my well of self-worth. I don’t need to barter for my worth anymore because I know my sexuality has nothing to do with my worth. These things are separate. My worth is inherent.

And so I thought the biggest battle was over. But then, I picked up with all my old habits of performing and perfecting. I started making comparisons. I started obsessing over what I’m not and what I should or could be doing with my life. I started viewing myself and my life through the lens of not [blank] enough. I started comparing my life to those of my peers and seeing mine as lesser. It was like I was back at square one.

And so as all of this has been coming up recently, I have been trying to really dig into what the fuck is going on and what is at the root of why I am doing these things and feeling this way.

And so here’s what came up. To start, I think that to some degree we all deal with the lie that we are in some way unworthy - that there is something about us that makes us un-lovable or unworthy or undeserving. It is a message we all internalize at some point in our lives and to varying degrees. We then seek out affirmation of this lie so that we can prove to ourselves that it’s true. Every failed relationship, every time you disappoint a friend, every time you fall short at work – these events all threaten to reinforce this dangerous idea we carry deep in our minds. Of course, for those of us who are well-adjusted and emotionally stable people, we can work through these things pretty quickly and maintain belief in our inherent worth while rejecting the lie of not enough. For those of you who can do this with ease, congrat-u-fucking-lations. For the rest of us, it’s a struggle.

For all the years I was in the closet, my sexuality and the shame I felt about it (reinforced by the anti-LGBTQ+ messaging I heard all around me) served as concrete proof of my inherent flaws and unlovable-ness. Coming out meant I had to challenge that. And as I said before, with the help of a great therapist and a supportive community, I was able to detach these ideas and free myself from that shame.

Unfortunately for me, right around the time that I started to process through my shame around my sexuality, I was developing my chronic pain condition. At the time, I thought my condition was just the product of an injury from my college athlete days that would soon be resolved. And so I chose to focus first on my sexual identity.

Over time, of course, it became clear that this was not just an injury. Here I am typing this almost a full six years later still battling debilitating chronic pain. And here’s the truth of the matter: for six years, I have walked outside of this story. I have refused this narrative. And I have been hustling for my worthiness the entire time. And I’m exhausted.

Having spent more than a decade as an athlete and going as far as competing at the Division I collegiate level, my identity has very much been wrapped up in my body and what my body can do. I think it’s easy for all of us to feel this way to a certain extent. Our health is important, it impacts every aspect of our day-to-day lives. And we live in a culture that is obsessed with a certain standard of health. It is almost impossible to turn on the TV without seeing an ad for a weight loss product or a plastic surgery office or being bombarded with images of what your body should look like. Hell, you can’t even check out at the grocery store without walking past a row of magazines designed to tell you how to lose your belly fat, how erase your cellulite, and how to please your man. We prescribe a single narrative for, physical appearance, sex, health, wellness, and everything in-between.

And for a long time, I fit that narrative. I was an athlete, I was in great shape, I exercised regularly, I ate clean – I could sprint down a runway with a 14 foot pole and hurl myself over 15 feet in the air for fuck’s sake. I was doing alright for myself. And so I never challenged the narrative. I didn’t need to – I fit the mold and I reaped the benefits of being someone who does.

When I first started therapy in an attempt to manage the impact my chronic pain has on my mental and emotional health, I would say things like “I just can’t wait till this is over and I can get my life back”. My therapist would gently remind me that this was my life and it was passing me by with each day that I held on to the past. And yet, I held this idea in the back of my mind that this was not my life. This was not the life I was meant to live. I was supposed to be running 5ks and joining crossfit gyms and playing in social kickball leagues and playing on the gay men’s rugby team and traveling and hiking and swimming and fucking and partying and doing all the things people my age are supposed to do as often as I could do them.

But that wasn’t my reality then, and it isn’t my reality now. Over the past six years I have learned a lot about my body and I have learned a lot of strategies to maintain my physical, mental, and emotional health. But after six years, I am still dealing with debilitating pain almost every day - pain that impacts every single part of my life.

And to this day, I reject this narrative for myself. I reject the limits imposed by my condition. For a long time, I also rejected the label of “disabled”. I would tell myself that my condition wasn’t “that bad” and that identifying as disabled would be insulting to others who “truly are”. I know, isn’t that some fucking ableist bullshit right there. A good friend finally called me out on that, thankfully, and challenged me to see that I was avoiding the label because of my own fear and ableist beliefs.

Over the past year or so I would say, I have started to dip my toes into the waters of identifying as disabled and owning that story. But if I’m being honest, I pulled that toe right back out and ran away from the water. And it has hurt me in so many ways.

When I think about the narrative of my disability and my insistence on walking outside of this story, I can see so many ways it has caused me pain. I can see the lengths I have to go to in order to hustle for my worthiness. I can see how I use my condition as proof that the long-held lie of being flawed and undeserving of love is true. Here are just a few examples of the ways in which I have stood outside my story and hustled and how that has hurt me:

• Refusing to accept my physical limits and overextending myself to the point that I hurt myself and get sick as a result

• Knowing I need someone else’s help to do something, but refusing to ask and either not accomplishing the task or hurting myself by overextending myself

• Pretending like my pain isn’t that bad when people ask which makes me feel isolated and causes people to not take my condition seriously

• Thinking about my past life as my “real” life or a life that was better than the one I am living and believing I’ll never be as happy as I was before I got sick

• Dating men who I knew could never be with someone who had chronic health problems, but minimizing my struggle to try and fit the mold of what they wanted

• Refusing to let other people attend medical appointments/procedures with me so I can keep my health a secret which is THE MOST isolating

And the list goes on and on. But here is what it all boils down to: I need to walk inside this story. For years, I have struggled with the rage and resentment and anger that come from wondering why this is happening to me and focusing on how unfair it is. The reality we all know is that life is not fair. Shit happens. We only have so much control over what happens to us, but we have all the control in terms of how we respond and react to what happens. I have no idea if I will feel this way for the rest of my life or if it will get better or if it will get worse, I have no idea. And so I need to learn to live inside the truth of the present moment and own my story.

The more time I spend outside this story, the more I buy into the idea that I am broken or flawed. That my condition makes me “less than”. I wish I could tell you how many times I’ve said things like, “Who is ever going to want to date someone who is sick as often as I am?” or “Who the fuck wants to be with someone that can’t (insert activity I struggle with – have sex whenever they want, go hiking, go on a road trip, etc). It’s easy to think this way given the society we live in. The world is not always a friendly or accessible place for disabled people. Those of us who fall outside the prescribed narrative of health and wellness are constantly being othered. Our bodies, our perceived or actual limits in functioning, and our difference is seen in so many ways as “less than”.

And so I know I need to step inside my story. I need to own my truth. I honestly don’t know what I’m so afraid of. I suppose it’s a lot of the same fear I had when I came out – fear of being othered, fear of losing opportunities, fear of isolation etc. And I guess perhaps it boils down to worth. If I truly believe my worth is inherent, then nothing about my health can change that. So perhaps I’m still clinging to the idea that I am unworthy. Trust me, I had to confront the idea that part of me feels like I deserve to be sick and to feel this pain, but that’s another conversation entirely.

Ultimately what I know is this, if I can’t step into this story, I will always be unhappy. I have been waiting to one day just magically wake up and be better so I wouldn’t have to own this story, but I think after six years, it’s safe to say things aren’t changing any time soon. I need to realize that my worth is inherent. I need to believe that asking for help or respecting my body’s limits or passing on something I’m not physically capable of doing doesn’t make me weak or “less than”. I need to see my life for what it is, not what it isn’t. I need to stop hustling because it’s exhausting.

Not entirely sure what all that looks like in action, but I’m moving in that direction. Send me your good vibes as I work my way onto my path of truth.

Peace and love,

Adam