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Tag Archives: Forgiveness

Confessions of a Facebook “Creeper”

04 Wednesday Jan 2017

Posted by Heather Irwin in Seeking Life Now

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Art, Childhood, Depression, Experience, Facebook, Forgiveness, Friends, Friendship, Growth, Healing, High sc, Invisible, Journey, life, Life Lessons, Memories, Memory, Nostalgia, Progress, Reflection, Reflections, Regret, School, Teachers

I admit it. I search for people all the time who aren’t my friends on Facebook. Usually, this happens during bouts of nostalgia when I find myself thinking about the people with whom I grew-up and wondering where they are, what they are doing, what they look like and how happy they appear.

I want to compare where I am, what I’m doing, what I look like and how happy I am with my childhood friends. I am always relieved and slightly joyous when I see that there has been weight gain, wrinkles, weariness…good. It’s not just me.

There are many people with whom I wish I had kept more regular contact. People with whom I am no longer “friends” – not even on Facebook. Sometimes I creep these people to see what life is like for them. I did this yesterday and spent a considerable amount of time looking at a few childhood friends and I was genuinely glad to see how happy they appeared. I was pleased that they had experienced adventures, travel, fun, love and beauty.

I considered sending a few friend requests, but got lost in thoughts of how it would be perceived by these people. I suffered from depression for most of my time in high school. This was before depression was really understood, talked about or treated. But, the biggest casualty of my depression was my social life. I withdrew from all of my friends and lost most of those relationships. One of the biggest hangers-on of this time period is embarrassment. I feel embarrassed all the time about how I was and I assume that people remember me in a negative light.

I was moody, judgmental, shy, confused, lonely and lost.

During these years my FB posts would have be the kind that you just get tired of seeing so you block the person so you don’t get the constant drone of negative status updates in your feed.

When I think about these years I am always overwhelmed with sadness for the many memories I have about stupid things I did as a result of my state of mind. I’ve been working on forgiving myself, and giving that girl a chance to heal and find acceptance; strangely, creeping on Facebook kind of helps with this. I’ve managed to ‘rekindle’ a few of these lost relationships and they have been extremely meaningful to me. Every time I send a request to a long, lost, friend and then we message back and forth a bit, and eventually just start to share life through the regular news feed, it helps normalize what feels like an extremely polarizing time for me.

I wish I could sit down with all of my old friends and have an open discussion about those years, explain what was going on in my world, express my regret for how I may have treated them, share my sorrow for all the lost time and then make-up for some of that time and move-forward as friends again.

My mind is full of many happy memories with them. I remember hours and hours of time spent together, laughing, talking about boys, playing stupid games, sleepovers, doing makeup, playing sports, passing notes in school…I see snapshots in my mind of us together on hammocks, acting cool at school dances, playing flag football, flirting and silly things like stuffing our shirts with balloons. The memories are full and rich.

But, then there are years where the memories are filled with pictures of school dances, football games, pep rallies and lunches filled with all these faces growing and enjoying life—but mine is not with them. These memories haunt me like shadows. Life was happening all around me, but I wasn’t in it.

So, I creep on facebook. I try to fill-in some of the gaps. I reach-out. I rekindle. I make progress.

I am so thankful for those friends with whom I’ve managed to reconnect because, the truth is, the folks with whom I grew-up really do mean a lot to me. They were the people that helped shape me into who I am today. They were my original cheerleaders, challengers and role-models. They were my squad, my family, my community. They exist in my memory as a deep and vast resource of life, joy, sorrow, lessons-learned, new experiences, comfort and friendship and I am so thankful for the ability to creep into their lives now and get a little piece of what once was.

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Two Hearts

29 Monday Feb 2016

Posted by Heather Irwin in All Posts, Seeking Life Now

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Depressed, Fear, Feelings, Forgiveness, Growth, High School, Highly Sensitive Person, HSP, life, Reflection

*

According to the article “16 Habits of Highly Sensitive People”:

1. They feel more deeply. One of the hallmark characteristics of highly sensitive people is the ability to feel more deeply than their less-sensitive peers. “They like to process things on a deep level,”… “They’re very intuitive, and go very deep inside to try to figure things out.”

I suppose this was always apparent in me.

When I was a kid I used to know, intuitively, that I was supposed to love and care for every person that crossed my path.

When I was 13, I went for a 2-hour walk giving a heated speech (to no one in particular-I lived in the country and there was no one around for miles) about how homosexuals should be welcomed into society freely and without judgement. It was 1993 and I had just seen “And The Band Played On”. It infuriated me-made my blood boil. I couldn’t rest.

As if middle school wasn’t difficult enough, when I entered high school it was as if I had entered a war zone. I was completely lost.

I took every comment, every glance, every shrug, every snide remark, personally-whether, or not, it was even directed towards me.

And, as my teachers were starting to expose us to more world issues and intense literature, I found myself spiraling into a deep, dark place.

My English teacher used to tell me that I needed to learn to have “two hearts”.
He would say: “Heather, you need to learn to have two hearts. One to care for yourself and one to place all the care for the world that is constantly weighing you down.”

For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to do with that advice.

I still don’t know.

me at mike and dans

I have one mind. It is me. For all its greatness and all its weakness. It is what it is.

I feel things deeply. Intensely.

I can’t really explain it. Try this: think of the deepest, most intense, moments of your life: childbirth, marriage, your most intimate sexual experience, a time you felt seething anger, moments of ecstasy, etc. and multiply it by 10.
That’s how I feel about 10-20 things every day.

A memory that rises from the recesses of my brain.
A car that cuts me off as I’m crossing the street.
A careless comment uttered by my husband.
A smile from my baby.
A scene in a tv show.
The feeling of the air as it hits my skin when I step outside.
The smell of toothpaste…

It doesn’t take much to bring me into a deep, introspective, place.

High School is known for being a tough place for everyone. But, it really did almost kill me. And this is one of the reasons why.
I was being exposed to more of life and the world, but given little help in how to process and handle it all.
And so, I have spent every day since I left that hell-hole, trying to come to grips with it all.

I still have a long way to go.

*

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I’m Sorry. So Sorry.

26 Friday Feb 2016

Posted by Heather Irwin in All Posts, Seeking Life Now

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Acceptance, Emotion, Forgiveness, Guilt, Highly Sensitive Person, HSP, Love, Relationships, Sorry

*

Back during one of my previous attempts at blogging, I talked about being a “highly sensitive person”.

I had found this blog on Huffington Post and it resonated with me:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/26/highly-sensitive-people-signs-habits_n_4810794.html

I’ve been thinking about #6 quite a bit lately: An HSP (Highly Sensitive Person) is “more upset if they make a ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ decision.”

My husband will be able to attest to the fact that I do not say “I’m sorry” very easily. This can often be misunderstood as me not being sorry. But, the truth is exactly the opposite.

The problem, and I try to explain this to him (though, I don’t think he ever believes me), is that I feel so sorry and horrible for what I have done that it’s difficult for me to talk about it.

The Huff Po article says “You know that uncomfortable feeling you get after you realize you’ve made a bad decision? For highly sensitive people, ‘that emotion is amplified because the emotional reactivity is higher’”.

Here’s an example of how this works for us HSP’s from an experience I had just this morning.

When I was changing my son’s diaper I found that he had pooped at some point, most likely, during the night and it had started to squish out of his diaper. When I removed the diaper, I noticed that, because he had been sitting in it for so long, his skin was beat red. Here is what happened in my brain:

He probably did it right after we put him down last night when he was fussing.
Why did I ignore him?
If I had gone in and checked on him this wouldn’t have happened.
It’s my fault his bum is all red and sore.
I tortured my child all night long because I’m lazy.
I’m a horrible person.
I don’t deserve forgiveness.
I don’t deserve to be loved.
With all of that going on in our brains, can you really blame us for struggling to say “I’m sorry”?

The ability to move through these thoughts and say “I’m sorry” is further stymied if the person we have hurt has a strong reaction to what we have done.

For example: I drop a can of peaches on my husband’s foot and he instantly screams in pain and shoots me a dirty look. Here is what happens in my brain:

What’s wrong with me?
I’m a stupid klutz.
Now he hates you (judging by the look he just gave you).
Why are you so dumb?
You can’t do anything right.

I’m a horrible person.
I don’t deserve forgiveness.
I don’t deserve to be loved.

What’s the solution? Should we just be ‘off the hook’ and not have to say “I’m sorry” ever again?

I don’t think so.

I’ve been working on being able to apologize by first of all, trying to explain what is happening in my head at the time so there is an understanding of what I’m facing. I also practice self-talk in my head and try to formulate something to say that, may not be the words “I’m sorry” but mean the same thing, with the hopes that, one day, I will be able to actually just say the words.

Until then, if I’ve hurt you in any way, please accept my apology and know that I’m working on being able to say I’m sorry for the next time I (inevitably) hurt you.

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Prom

25 Thursday Feb 2016

Posted by Heather Irwin in All Posts, Seeking Life Now

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Confidence, Control, Embarrassment, Forgiveness, High School, Memories, Perspective, Prom, Ridiculous, Safety, Self-Disdain, Self-Loathing, Stability, Teachers

*

To this day I can’t remember what kind of reasoning or excuse I must have given to my  prom date (who also happened to be my brother) when I drove us to my teacher’s house before heading to the prom.

This action is something that plagued me with intense self-disdain and embarrassment for years.

‘How completely ridiculous am I that I did something like that?’

As an adult I can understand why I did it and I have been telling myself to cut the teenage me a break.

My home life was not stable and could be fairly volatile at times. This teacher was one of the few people in my life that made me feel safe.

I was attending prom despite the fact that I desperately did not want to go. I had never been interested in attending a prom. But, it seemed important to my mother that I attend, and then my brother offered to go with me and I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings or let anyone down (see my “People Pleaser” post).

Because I felt like I had zero control over anything and was about to walk into a world that I believed would chew me up and spit me out like I was yesterday’s gum, I needed to see a friendly face.

I went to his house to get some confidence.

If he said that everything was going to be great and that I looked lovely, then just maybe, I could survive the horror that lay-before me.

When I look-back on photos of my prom I’m always struck by how much I look like the ghost of an old grandma who died on the way to a wedding. Truthfully.

Our prom theme was, perhaps, the most disgusting theme ever used for a prom: “Truly, Madly, Deeply” based on that, ‘oh so amazing’ (makes me want to puke to this day), song by ‘Savage Garden’. We didn’t walk in the grand march, but I think we watched everyone else doing it as that horrible song played over and over and over again.

While at prom I did have some fun, despite myself. My brother and I danced a fair amount. He was incredible and kept saying things like: “Let’s show these assholes how to dance’.

I think I ditched him pretty unceremoniously at the end. I can’t really remember the chain of events, but I don’t think I stuck-around prom for that long. I remember going to a friend’s house afterwards and eating a crap load of junk food while watching a movie or something.

Most of me just wanted to forget that the whole, horrible, night had ever happened.

But, years later, after being able to forgive myself for the stupid things I did when I was a lost teenager, searching desperately for security, acceptance and self, I think back on my prom and the words that come to mind are not that it was lame, torturous, unimportant or stupid.

Now, when I think about that night, these are the words that float to the top: My brother is amazing. He loves me so much that he was willing to do that for me.

And, we really did show those assholes how to dance.

*

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